California, 2007

It’s Labor Day weekend, and it’s the first rest I’ve had in a long, long while. Mostly catching up on sleep. Catching up on paperwork. Doing my quarterly taxes.

Trying to diet. Trying to stay away from dairy. Cut down on my intake. And then some days you just have to give in and fix yourself a nice baked potato with real sweet cream butter (not margarine or butter spread) and real bacon (and not that soy bacon-flavored stuff from a plastic bottle) and revel in the wrongness of thirty to fifty grams of saturated fat.

Which is why despite eating less than I have ever been in my life, I am still not losing weight. Or rather, I did lose a couple of inches last month, but I’ve gotten them back.

I should be buying low-fat, diet stuff, but the unhealthy food is just so much cheaper. Plus diet soda has aspartame or splenda, which always gives me a headache. Unfortunately, most sodas here have switched over to high fructose corn syrup (and not the nice cane sugar we have back home) so I have found it prudent to cut down on my soda intake to one can a day.

Of course, without my normal sugar high, I keep falling asleep at the computer. I’m not much of a caffeine addict. Maybe I should learn to drink coffee. Or maybe I should switch from Sprite to Mountain Dew.

Ah, well. Tax time reminds me once again that I am spending far, far too much on far, far too little.
But then, some people tell me, it’s no use working hard if you don’t enjoy your money. They tell me life is too short, that I should loosen up.

Of course, I know better than to take financial advice from people who say things like that.

My fiscal policy used to be simple. Spend less than you make. Invest the difference.

That worked way back when I wasn’t making much. Now it’s a bit more complicated.

Oh, well. Bills and groceries and insurance and rent and service charges and taxes, and at the end of the day it all leaves you with a pathetic little number that sums up how much of a life you’re going to have this month.

So you scrimp and save and put everything aside, hoping one day to get enough time off from work to fly off to distant beaches, trying to squeeze two years’ worth of enjoyment into two weeks before flying back to the work pits to slave away yet again.

And this, this is what depresses me. The thought of doing this for the next five, ten, twenty years. The matter-of-fact way people here accept this as normal, accept this as how responsible, mature adults live their lives.

And I am not mature. I am very irresponsible, and I may not live long enough to reach adulthood.

It’s the way of the world, I guess. Oh, well. Nothing to do but hang on for the ride. Wherever it takes me.

Maybe someday it’ll finally take me home.