Aaaaaand, we’re back.

Took a brief (but longer than I’d imagined) hiatus from SansLux, as I had some traveling to do. Once back, I had a strange epiphany (somewhat related to SansLux) that has kept me more in my head than in the world for the last couple of weeks.  I’ve been wondering, all along, what called me to start this project. Activism aside, my reasons for doing this felt bigger than I even understood. For months I’ve been going through heavy RID cycles — giving things away, donating items I don’t use, cleaning out the garage and shed, tying up loose ends that I’ve been procrastinating on for years.  I’ve felt this need to minimize the amount of ’stuff’ and stress I have in my life. I have turned down holiday and birthday presents with a polite but stubborn vehemence, I have borrowed vs. bought where possible, and I have been, while not downright frugal, at least much more conscious and aware of my spending.  All of this for some unknown reason, even to me. Just an instinct or an urge without an obvious root cause.

But two weeks ago my heart made a decision that my mind and body are still trying to catch up with, and it will mean taking a huge step backwards in comfort (of all kinds).  Sometime in the next year, I will be going back to school to study Visual Anthropology.  I have absolutely no idea how I will afford it, and it may very well, if I am able to get into the program I want, take me to another country away from nearly everyone and everything I know and love.  It will render me completely broke and I will have to give up most of my possessions and more luxurious comforts.  It’s exhilarating and terrifying and it is shedding a bit more light onto what brought this on for me.  While it is, absolutely, an activist exploration — it is also a very personal one.  And many of my future adventures will be further explorations on this theme.

That said — onto “No Car Week.”

I’ve mentioned before that there’s no direct public transit from my house to my job, nor a walking route that doesn’t either take me about a half-mile out of my way or require that I walk through a trail that is creepy, secluded and walked by some fairly sketchy dudes with regularity enough to warrant weekly bulletin board postings at work reminding folks not to walk it alone (especially women).  In addition to taking your chances with assault there are also, more often than not, trains parked along the tracks at the end of the trail — which means you have to clamber over them, not knowing if or when they’ll begin to move. So — it’s either fear/potential dismemberment or taking the long way round in the heavier-than-usual rain. Neither of them are on my top 10 list of ways to spend my day but, as I’ve been reminding myself all week, not everyone has a choice. And what am I whining about anyway — as even the long way to work is just under a mile and a half, even if it is walking in the shoulder of 4-lane roads all the way.

That said, I am actually having a pretty hard time with this week.  I’m pretty out of shape, and I’m pretty overwhelmed/stressed in general – and I admit to a ton of grumbling this week.  I’ve kind of been an epic failure at it, really.  Mostly I’ve chosen to either stay home or get rides from friends.  I’ve yet to set foot on public transit and I’ve only walked to work once.  And, most disappointingly, I actually drove to work and back this morning.

To be fair, the only reason I did that was because my alarm clock failed to wake me and I was half an hour late to work, even with driving.  But I made the choice to sacrifice the project to save face at work because I could.  If I was being true to the project, I would have just been that much later and faced the consequences since that is what someone who didn’t have a car would have had to do.  But in this economy, it’s a little scarier than usual to take chances at the day job.

Tonight I’m going to a concert with a friend, and she’s driving.  We’d planned a bus adventure together, but I got my first ocular migraine at work today and it absolutely sapped me of my energy.  Truth is, I’m being pretty soft on myself this week in terms of SansLux.  But this is part of the process, too.  I’m not going to be amazing at every challenge. If I was, it wouldn’t be a challenge. I’ll have to either extend the week or do some kind of penance for being so lax. Especially as I have decided to make another car exception tomorrow so I can make a doctor’s appointment and not have to take a full 3 hours off of work.

Yep, I’m definitely going to have to extend this week…and make some tougher choices to make up for it. I may have to give someone my keys.

After a week without sugar, the Portland ReDirect Guide staff decided to continue our inspired-by-SansLux experience by avoiding acquiring any plastic. In staff meeting Monday morning it seemed easy enough. We already compost food scraps on site in our own office composter and reduce and reuse whenever possible. We take computers to e-cyclers and other hard-to-recycle items to the appropriate recycling centers. Surely we were fairly eco-conscious folks, we reasoned. Avoiding purchasing plastic should be second nature by day two of the challenge.

Our first attempt lasted precisely until lunch time, when two of us unwittingly came back from New Seasons with plastic – the first item was a carton with a tiny cap, and the second a soup container with a plastic lid. Neither one of our coworkers had realized what they were purchasing and were mildly surprised at how unconsciously they acquired it. Later in the day, Heather realized she was out of shampoo but couldn’t purchase a new bottle until the end of our challenge, and other coworkers commented on how avoiding acquiring plastic would impact their takeout plans. The challenge was shaping up to be a lot trickier than we first thought.

We knuckled down with renewed commitment, double-checking every purchase, bringing glass jars to buy bulk food at the grocery store and requesting compostable containers when available. At a Thai restaurant later in the week, Heather requested that the waiter avoid putting her leftovers in plastic and was thrilled when he reappeared with cardboard takeout boxes in a paper bag. However, upon arriving home and inspecting the contents of the sack, she was dismayed to find the restaurant had included condiments in small plastic containers.

“People concerned about the environment rightly point out the problem of plastic water bottles, but that’s only one small piece of everything plastic that we consume,” Heather mused toward the end of the week as we discussed how many things we had put off purchasing because of plastic.

At the end of the week, many of us were relieved to have the burden of avoiding acquiring plastics lift from our shoulders, but it was replaced by increased awareness about just how difficult it is to avoid the substance. However, by examining our acquisition patterns during the week, we agreed we had developed some new habits that would allow us to continue to reduce our overall consumption of plastic.

Giving up Dining Out was both more and less complicated than I’d imagined.

After not really cooking for, oh, 35 years — 3 weeks without break of cooking every night was a bit rough.  It takes a great deal more mental energy for me to prepare a meal than it does for folks who have been doing it for ages. Admittedly, I was pining for a drive-thru by week’s end as I stared at the Spaghetti Squash on my counter and wondered what, in the name of all that is vaguely food-like, to do with it.  Seriously. Total bachelor moment. I must have stood there staring at it with a deeply furrowed brow for a good twenty minutes. And what the @#($*& is up with THESE?

It made for some awkwardness around business as well. I had two client meetings last week who, normally, I’d have met out for lunch.  Thankfully both were with really lovely people with a global-consciousness who didn’t laugh when I explained. One, in fact, invited me to her home and made me a meal, which was cozy and sweet and much more personal and enjoyable. Plus the food was delicious!

Truthfully, despite feeling a little whiny about it after work when I was exhausted and didn’t feel like cooking, last week continued to be refreshing.  And given I “celebrated” my success today by allowing myself a cheeseburger at a drive-thru, and was rewarded with an upset stomach and a desire to wash my face repeatedly, I’m thinking this is another challenge that will result in some ongoing changes in my life.

In Summation –

What I Learned: Dining out has become too commonplace for me, overall.  Cooking, for both myself and those I love, or joyfully allowing myself to be cooked FOR, is another way to show/share love and appreciation to myself and others. It also allows me to be more mindful about what I’m eating, where it comes from (shopping local!) and encourages me to interact with my food in a more creative way. I’ve also felt more of an urge to learn gardening, now that I understand how to cook with vegetables. I can feel the burgeoning awe of planting a seed and then feeding myself and others with food I helped to grow.  It’s amazing the disconnect that comes with packaged/processed/pre-prepared food. I had no idea how far out of touch I was until I started cooking.

Let Go Completely, Moderation or Change Nothing: I’ll be bringing restaurants back in moderation.  It will be a last resort.  Where possible, I will defer to cooking together or socializing over things other than food. I will continue to cook with regularity.

This Week’s Challenge: I am giving myself a break from SansLux this week, as I am traveling to New York and won’t be entirely in charge of my surroundings.  Back soon with more!

Last week I mentioned that I’d received word from the fabulous folks at the ReDirect Guide that their office was inspired by SansLux and that they’d decided, as a team, to join in by giving up sugar and all sweeteners for the week.  That’s an intense thing to give up, and I asked them if they’d be willing to write up a guest post to tell us all about it. Here it is!  I’ll be back tomorrow with more from “No Restaurant Week.”  I’ve already had to thwart a client meeting or two.

“Inspired by the SansLux blog and the idea of living without in order to appreciate the privileges we daily ignore, the Portland staff of the ReDirect Guide decided to do away with sugar and sweeteners for an entire week. In staff meeting Monday morning, we carefully drew up the rules.

“No honey, xylitol, agave nectar or anything of the kind,” Heather said. Our regional manager and area advocate, she is not often spotted eating anything sweetened, but when she gets the rare craving for a doughnut, it’s the fierce wild-eyed kind that signals woe to anyone between her and the pastry case at New Seasons.

Heads nodded gravely. It wouldn’t be easy: eliminating all sweeteners meant most of the sauces and half the prepared salad dressings on grocery store shelves had to go, as well as copious amounts of deli foods, most beverages and of course almost all traditional desserts.

We wished each other luck and the challenge began. That afternoon, we suddenly realized a coworker was starting to get ill. The entire staff sprinted for the refrigerator and liberally chugged Good Belly, a probiotic drink we hoped would ward off wayward germs. We congratulated ourselves on being proactive about our health until somebody thought to check the ingredient label and there it was in malignant little letters: SUGAR. There were groans all around. “We knew it wouldn’t be easy,” Heather said as we gazed at the offending juice container. “Now let’s get back on the wagon and keep going!”

The rest of the week was an eye-opening and community building experience. We shared unsweetened fruit dessert ideas (baked pears with cinnamon, yum!), talked about how different life would have been before refined sugars, and generally commiserated with each other about the lack of prepared foods we could consume. By the end of the week, most of us reported feeling a little more clearheaded, a bit more energy, and a lot more thankfulness for the abundance of food that we could eat despite our self-imposed sugar restrictions.”

I struggled a bit about what to give up this week.

In some ways, giving up spending extra money at all was pretty encompassing.  So many things are represented in that overarching category that giving up anything smaller felt redundant.  I thought about giving up drinking anything but water this week, and had actually decided to do so, and then I woke up this morning and downed a Diet Coke before I even thought about it. Caffeine-addiction is a powerful agent of denial. That will be a good challenge for another week, but setting out on a fail note was too depressing.

After much consideration, I decided to give up dining out.  Even during the no-spend challenge, I ended up in restaurants twice. Once, a friend took me out for Sushi (for her birthday! Incredibly generous.) and once, an awkward (but fun) brunch where I was the only non-eating attendee.

The reason I’ve chosen this is three-fold:

1) I feel that a lot of my socializing happens around food.  That’s all well-and-good, but it’s not the most creative use of social time.

2) I have had a block about cooking for a long time, and I’m just starting to get the hang of it.  I’ve been restaurants, drive-thrus and pre-prepared foodstuffs for ages.  I’d like to nurture this newfound skillset and help solidify it as a habit.

3) I went through my bank statements for the last few months and, overwhelmingly, my largest non-bill expenditures were on food. It’s a huge waste of money. Huge.

SO:  No food that I didn’t prepare myself will pass my lips this week. If I’m invited out for a meal I will propose alternatives.  If folks really just want to go out to eat, I can join them to be social, but I can’t order. Nor will I accept invitations to purchase meals for me (as I will feel inclined to return the favor at a later date, which is sort of like passively spending money in advance.)

If we eat together, we cook together. And ideally as a smaller part of a more encompassing evening.

The last week of the No-Spend challenge was not much more eventful than the first. However, I did find myself having to make a few compromises.

First – Transportation.   On Wednesday, I had a commitment to go to a conference. This conference was nowhere near walking-distance from my home, so my choices were to drive (and pay for parking) or take the bus (and pay for the bus ticket.)  Alternately, I could have hitchhiked or begged for a ride from a friend.  But being it was during work hours and I enjoy not being sexually assaulted, neither option seemed feasible.

An insightful friend asked me last week if SansLux challenges always had to be about NOT doing something — or if sometimes they could be about doing something I don’t normally do.  So I decided to put that into practice as a way to offset the money for parking on Wednesday and I walked to work on Tuesday instead of driving.  Granted, I didn’t walk as far as I drove on Wednesday, but considering the risky nature of the walk to work (down a path lovingly deemed by my female co-workers as the “rape trail” due to a couple awkward run-ins with naked masturbating men — the end of said trail sometimes being blocked by large trains that one must literally climb up and over to get through) I figured it evened out on some cosmic level.  My walk was uneventful, but it did find me wondering what I’m going to do on “No Car” week, as that’s not an experience I care to repeat with any regularity.

Next – Community Support.   As someone of some means — by no means affluent, but at least comfortable — I am used to being able to reach out in financial support of my community.  One of my dear friends runs a queer open mic at our local feminist bookstore on the second Friday of each month.  The event is sliding scale and all proceeds go to benefit the bookstore, which has been suffering under the weight of the current financial crisis.  Walking in to the event and having to tell the door person that I didn’t have anything to give was rough.  It was rough because

a) I *do* have money to give, but I’m not giving it because of this project – and

b) it’s really, really hard to have to say that. It hit my old class stuff right square in the kisser.

I was nervous about walking in that door all the way there, and it took me a bit to shake it off once I was through it.

On Saturday, a friend was in from out of town and there was a group brunch.  Because I didn’t want to miss spending time with this friend, and I was also her ride to the brunch, I struggled with myself all morning about whether or not I was going to give in and have breakfast, or if I was going to stick to it and not spend.  I didn’t want to make other people uncomfortable by hovering there at the end of the table as the only one not eating, but I didn’t want to break the challenge either.  Ultimately, I decided to stay true to SansLux.  I drank so much water at breakfast that I had to pee 4 times in 2 hours.  A friend offered to buy me breakfast and I was so hasty to talk her down from it that I was actually rude, albeit well-intentioned.  I caught myself and apologized for not saying thank you for the offer, but it pointed out to me how awkward that can be.

By the end of the meal, I was starving (I’d eaten something small before I’d gone, thinking I’d get to go home for lunch after, but it took 2 hours before we were actually served and there was no time.) and another friend took pity on me and handed me their plate of leftover pancake.  As I watched all the food on other patron’s tables get sent back to the kitchen as waste, I realized how often I, too, am wasteful — and how what I leave on my plate would be enough to fill up another person – and I vowed to never leave my leftovers at a restaurant again if I could help it.

Saturday afternoon, I buckled.  My friend gave an amazing reading at the same feminist bookstore I mentioned before, and I couldn’t help myself from supporting her art.  I bought one of her chapbooks.  Here was someone who, in her own way, was living the SansLux challenge every day — struggling from dollar to dollar to live and breathe her art, sacrificing so much to do it.  It moved me tremendously and it felt like the right thing to do to support her, so I ended the challenge a few hours early.

I celebrated my two weeks of no-spending by going through the change on my coffee table in the living room and scrounging out enough money to support another local performance group that evening. Four soggy dollar bills and 4 quarters.  I felt good about spending them, too.

So — in summation, not spending money has taught me:

– that cooking for and with friends is a lot more fun and interactive than going out to eat.
– that cooking for myself is actually a joy and not a hardship.
– that you can have a hell of a lot of fun without spending a single penny.
– that it’s terrifying to think about life without a cushion – where any little financial misfortune that might befall you is a huge stressor.
– that throwing money at your life without thinking is akin to a delegation of self-care that is both unhealthy and unrewarding.
– that friends and community are paramount to happiness, with or without money.
– that not realizing the value of money and what it offers you leads to being wasteful in huge ways.

My decision about what to do in the aftermath of No-Spend Week(s) is this:

I plan to continue to live as if I do not have the means to afford many of life’s extras.  I will make exceptions here and there in support of community events and occasional entertainment, but I am going to be frugal. I will put the money I would normally squander in savings in order to invest it more wisely in the future. In my future.  And I suspect “wisely” may mean different things to me at the end of SansLux than it did before I started.

It’s taken me a while to write this update as I’ve been busy, but it’s certainly not for lack of things to say.

First, I’ve been overjoyed at the response to the blog.  Today I received an email from the good folks at RedirectGuide saying that their staff was inspired by SansLux and they’ve decided to join in by doing the challenge at their office as well.  This week their entire staff is giving up sugar and all sweeteners save for fruit juice. They’ll be writing up a guest blog about their experience which I will post next week. Fun!

I also received a sweet card in the mail from my mortgage broker who read about the challenge on Facebook and wanted to drop me a note of encouragement, and a sweet series of text messages from friends.  My roommate has also decided to join in on some of the challenges.  He’s sort of involuntarily had to (re: giving up cable) and has taken it supportively in stride.

It’s exciting to me that this challenge is encouraging others to think about things differently and to join in.  I hope others will follow suit and let me know as well.  I’ll be happy to provide a link to anyone else who decides to blog about similar challenges. Just let me know!

As for me and my horse, last week proved interesting in a number of ways.

First — I actually had a great deal of fun, and I’m not entirely sure how I feel about that.  The truth of the matter is, fortuitously, I am not broke right now.  And while I’ve spent far more of my life broke than not,  it’s still genuinely impossible to recreate the actual stress of being strapped for cash when you know that it’s temporary.  I am choosing not to spend right now, and because of that, it’s easier not to.  I know if I need something, I just have to wait a bit and then I can get it. The fun of that stops when you remove the choice from the equation.  So I can’t authentically experience the genuine level of stress that not having the option to have what I need would create.  But I can make it hurt a little more than it did.

So I’ve decided that, instead of taking on a new challenge this week, I am going to extend my no-spend period for another week.  I stocked up on basic provisions and I will pay household bills – but no frills. Nothing extra.

What I have learned so far is that I have a great many spending impulses that, on an average day, I don’t generally fight.  I find that it’s not all that difficult to fight them if I stop and think about it, and that doing so is often more rewarding.

Last week, instead of going out to eat, I cooked for friends.  Instead of going to movies, I had a craft night that was fun and creative.  Instead of spending money in clubs, I had a game night and got my ass trounced at Scrabble.  Instead of going shopping, I went to a clothing exchange with friends where we all traded clothes we didn’t wear anymore and everyone came away with something new without spending a dime.  I spent quality time with friends and family and I didn’t spend a single penny.  It was fulfilling and joyful and connective and I actually liked it a great deal more than usual.   Again, the removal of the choice to do anything else for an extended period of time would make that less fun.  But it’s a good reminder to me not to be lazy and throw money at entertainment instead of making my own as a general rule.

This week will pose some interesting challenges.  It already has, to some degree, and I’ve already committed to breaking my no-spend rule as an exception where it’s impacting someone else negatively.

As someone who works two full-time jobs and has myriad marketing duties on top to help grow her fledgling start-up, I don’t have a lot of time to spend on the mundane details of my life, like deep-cleaning my house.  I have a friend who is forging her own path as a house cleaner and we’ve had a standing date for her to do a deep-clean on my house once a month.  Her original date fell last week and I asked her to push it off another week. That was fine, but when I asked again this week, it became clear that it would be a hardship on her financially.

I’ve struggled for a long time with classism issues around having someone else clean my house and it’s taken me ages to be comfortable with it.  The only way I really find myself able to not be ashamed of this is by understanding that paying her for this help is allowing her to live her life the way she wants to, outside the corporate structure and working her own schedule.  To me, that’s important to support, and it helps me do the same.  But it is definitely a luxury for me.  However, having the work is not as expendable for her.  It’s an interesting position to be in — realizing how interdependent we all are, and how one of us in a community not having money can cause a ripple effect in the lives of those around us.  I am going to keep our date this week so my project doesn’t hurt her, but thinking about what would happen if I genuinely couldn’t support her that way is rough.

As well, this week there are birthday parties and client meetings and conferences, all of which would normally find me spending money.  I will have to be creative in my gift-giving, and am not entirely sure how I’m going to manage transportation to the conference.  I would either have to pay to park my car, or take public transit, which is not free either.  It’s a conundrum. Granted, since this is a work gig, I can fudge it a bit because I will be reimbursed — but it’s a gray area that I have to think about a little.

So – this week’s theme is: Making it Hurt.  We can survive anything for a week.  So I’m pushing myself a little harder on this one.

I went to see a therapist for a while to try to get a handle on emotional eating. As part of the process, she had me write down everything I was eating for a week, how hungry I was on a scale of 1 to 10, and how I was feeling emotionally when I ate. As she read over my results the following week, she shook her head and said “You never list your hunger as anything over a five, even though I see on most days you don’t eat anything until around one or two in the afternoon. I’d imagine you’re pretty hungry by then, aren’t you?”

“Sure!” I said “My stomach is growling and I feel a little light-headed by the time I eat, but I’m just so busy at work it’s hard to take the time.”

“Why’d you mark it down as a 5 then, if you were actually light-headed? That’d be a 10 wouldn’t it?”

I laughed.  Ten?!?  Visions of bloated bellies and schmaltzy music and flies landing on the lashes of cow-eyed children who know way too much about suffering way too young, and are wondering why these do-good douchebags are pointing cameras at them instead of giving them a goddamn sandwich, some dignity and a pair of shoes floated through my head.  “If I’m going to mark down TEN, I had best be inches from death.  I am never close to starving. I have never in my entire life been close to starving. It’s pushing it to say five when I know I can grab something and put it in my mouth whenever I want to.”

My therapist looked a bit taken aback, and then softened.  I think I gave her a little insight there into my inner workings and over-active guilt complex.  But this is the way I think when I remember to think about more than myself. And this is the way I’ve been thinking all week — well, intermittently.

I spent the day at home today. The remnants of a chest cold and the chance to work at home equated to an easier no-spend day than yesterday.  Still, there were challenges. But the challenges were parodies of themselves, really. I couldn’t have exactly what I wanted, exactly when I wanted it, and it frustrated me.  And then it frustrated me that it frustrated me.  The realization of how spoiled I am on a daily basis has really set in.

The documentary I watched last week on the “Lost Boys” of Sudan is really sticking with me.  These men and boys walked for FIVE YEARS, only to end up at refugee camps that may or may not have water and food on a daily basis.  In Darfur, getting water for your family means possibly getting kidnapped, killed or raped.  And I am upset because I can’t spend 25 cents to buy AIR to fill up my low tires. Or because I’m addicted to “True Blood” and I can’t pay the $9.99 to stream it on megavideo without interruption, which means I have to wait 54 minutes between episodes.  This is enough to frustrate me?

I don’t want to be shameful about who I am in the world, because we’re born into what we’re born into, and rather than having guilt for having what we have, the best thing to do is to use what we have to help others.  But the realizations about how much I take for granted are coming hard and fast.  I have to admit, I’m a little angry — I don’t know if it’s with myself, or with the world. And I don’t believe that anger is going to be the most productive emotion here.  Because, truthfully, we’re all doing the best we can and it’s HARD to wake up to ourselves in this way.  Once we’re aware, we have to consciously make the choice to change, or to ignore it. So not being aware is a bit of self-protection, which is understandable.

I have a lot to think about.

A shorter entry tonight, as I’m tired and wanting to curl up with my book — but I couldn’t let the day go without acknowledging the ways in which the Universe is enjoying toying with me around this week.

First, I got up today and tossed my breakfast and lunch into my backpack, put the ingredients for a lovely beef stroganoff in the crock pot and scooted off to work, patting myself on the back for being well-prepared for a no-spend day. However, as I opened up my little microwave meal at lunch, a hideous stench vaguely reminiscent of dog food came wafting from the container.  The smell alone was enough to make me nauseous, nevermind actually contemplating eating it.  Yet, I struggled with my conscience — the food wasn’t spoiled, it was just gross. And on my budget for the week, it was what I could afford. Who was I to turn my nose up at perfectly valid food-type-stuff?  But gawd help me if I could put a forkful of that mess anywhere near my face.  I was nibbling a plum and trying to ignore my grumbling stomach when it was announced that it was Free Lunch day at work.  Saved!

The funny part is, I usually avoid Free Lunch like the plague.  I work in a warehouse full of underpaid indpendent musicians and on Free Lunch Day our little lunch room feels like a cross between Lord of the Flies and the opening scene of 2001.  The whole scene is vaguely traumatic, (albeit kindof amusing providing you’re able to dodge the plastic cutlery) and I usually skip it in favor of a less eventful sandwich from the deli down the street.  But today, as I queued up for my turn in the culinary thunderdome, I began to grasp the underlying struggle that makes Free Lunch Day what it is: Desperation.  Maybe not acute, and most likely not even conscious, but that’s what it is.  It’s hungry people with a chance to save a few bucks by stocking up on free food from work, and the extra slices of greasy pizza that are hoarded onto plates and slipped under desks, the grabby hands and the jabby elbows — that’s what it’s about; not having another option.  Suddenly, instead of feeling frustrated at the behavior of my greedy co-workers, I felt pissed at the inequity of pay at my workplace that set folks up to have to function in survival mode. I slapped a third slice of pizza onto my plate in solidarity and skulked back to my desk.

In trial two of the day, the Universe saw fit to scare the bejeezus out of me by making my car refuse to turn over as I was leaving work.  Click, Click – nothing.  Click, Click – NOTHING.  *panic*  No money for the bus. Can’t call a cab. Can’t take my car in to the shop. Suddenly putting off that oil change seemed like the dumbest crap EVER.  C’mon, baby. Not this week. Click, Click — and the engine roared to life.  Oh thank gawd.  Very funny, Universe. Now you’re just messing with me.

Trial three came about 15 minutes later when I got home to find that the little red ‘reset’ button on my power outlet had been popped out, which meant that my responsibly prepared crockpot dinner had been sitting cold and uncooked in my kitchen for 8 hours. On top of my own disappointment, I’d offered to bring dinner with me to my friend’s house tonight and I was embarrassed to have to text my apologies on such late notice and ask if we could fend for ourselves.  My friend was gracious, thankfully.  And I was starving, but with every other main course in the house unthawed and no time before our plans to throw together something from scratch, I was SOL on the healthy dinner front.  As I munched my deeply unsatisfying cold sandwich, I had to laugh.  I wanted a challenge.  Careful what you ask for!

Money anxiety is an interesting thing.  As a single-income 30-something, I don’t think it’s possible to live in this world without some degree of it in general, but today I had the first of what I can only assume will be several realizations about the ways in which I am more free of it than I’d realized.

The first modification to my lifestyle came this afternoon, when, instead of going out to eat as I normally would have with a friend, it was decided that she would come over and I would cook us a brunch. This, actually, was quite nice.  I’ve not traditionally been much of a cook. Most of my forays into the culinary world have resulted in comic disasters involving fire alarms, melted spatulas and even, in one instance, the loss of my eyelashes. This is a fact of my life that I’ve been trying to change for the last several months, and it was a sweet satisfaction to cook an uneventful and even vaguely edible meal for a friend and serve it up. She brought over a ridiculously delicious fruit salad and I prepared a scramble with roasted fall veggies and cheese.  It was nice, also, to not be around the din of other diners and to be able to sit in the sun on my patio and talk intimately without interruption.

I found, though, as the afternoon progressed and I got closer to my one expenditure for the week (a trip to the grocery store) I began to feel a vague unease.  The combination of my lack of cooking skills, general confusion about grocery stores and fears of not buying enough of the right things to see me through the week without incident began weighing on me.  As I made my shopping list, I began a mental checklist:  What would it be HORRIBLE to run out of?  Tampons? Check. Bar soap? Check. Diet Coke? Check. (see: caffeine addiction, which is likely something I’ll give up another week. *shudder*) Toilet paper? What was I missing?

In addition to nixing expenditure for the week, I also gave myself a budget for the shopping trip.  I didn’t want to cheat myself on this experience by splurging wildly at the grocery store to cover all my whims in advance.  This challenge is not just about being more mindful of how I’m spending money, it’s also about challenging my addiction to instant gratification and encouraging me to think creatively about comfort and security.  So while I tossed a few items in my cart that don’t necessarily qualify as NEEDS (cookies, diet coke, a bag of potato chips) I didn’t once stray from my list — and while I often buy store-brands, I made a point of doing so intentionally on this trip with greater frequency.

As I drove home from the store, I was reminded of the first time I went grocery shopping as a 20-something after getting an above-minimum-wage job.  My girlfriend at the time and I had just moved in together, and it was our first joint shopping trip. As the cash register rang up $150, my face went white and my palms started to sweat.  I felt nauseous and instantly began sorting through the bags to put things back. Since I’d left home at 18, I’d never spent more than $60 at the grocery store — frequently much less — and that for a week of groceries.  My girlfriend chuckled at me and told me it was alright, that I had a good job now and I could afford things like fresh vegetables and organic meat — but something inside me was horrified.  I felt guilty, like a traitor to my class. Living off Top Ramen and saltines and scrounging together change for the laundromat was my way of life, and it was a commonality I had with my friends.  As I surveyed the most well-stocked cupboards I had ever had, I set my jaw and made a promise to myself not to take it for granted.

But then I did. Over time, dropping that much at the grocery store became habit.  I stopped thinking about it.  But today, as I filled my cart, I remembered that old feeling of “This is all there is. There is no more.” I remembered the feeling of spending the last of my check and realizing that whatever I bought would have to see me through until the next one.  I remembered agonizing over each purchase, having to choose between deodorant and protein, having to walk past the fresh fruit and veggies in favor of tinned peaches in sugar syrup and frozen peas.

I have no shame about having a good job and not having to struggle in the same way.  Like anything in life, the fact that I’m able to indulge myself more frequently has come from a mix of hard work and good luck.  But I am reminded today, and I expect to be reminded over and over again this week, about just how much about my lifestyle I am taking for granted, and about how many unconscious decisions I am making about the ways in which I spend money.  This is going to be an interesting week.