blog the recession

A few weeks ago, we visited a friend in Connecticut and had a lovely day swimming in her pool and picking wild raspberries (and then spending the next three days worrying about whether we might have contracted Lyme from deer ticks… we are not a country people, you know).

As I do not enjoy raspberries (or any fruit, for that matter) and as I do not enjoy exposing my baby to deer ticks, I spent the berry-picking hour in the house while Beck napped. And I was chatting with our friend’s husband who is more than a decade older than I am. And he said something that has stuck with me – that this is the first time in his adult life that he has been truly scared of the economic situation in our country.

This is certainly true. If I am totally honest, I hate politics. Or, I don’t even hate them. I just don’t care. I am ambivalent about it. I don’t believe in politicians or that anyone will ever be able to come along and NOT be a politician and change things. I did once. I was very emotional when Clinton was elected president. I still get sort of weepy when I hear "Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow." It seemed like things were going to change. They did, somewhat. But not that much. Not that fast. And then someone else got elected and everything went to shit anyway. It’s hard for me to believe anything can fix things in a permanent way. Someone is always going to come along and fuck it up again.

So I usually just ignore it. I pretend that our president isn’t actually MY president – I didn’t vote for him, for heaven’s sake, so I will just pretend he doesn’t exist. But that gets hard sometimes. Sometimes he pops up doing truly un-ignorable asinine things. Sometimes he comes to my attention and makes me mad. And sometimes, more and more and more, I am FORCED to think about him and his politics when they encroach on my daily life. Like lately. Like NOW.

Has anyone noticed the price of groceries?

Holy. Shit.

The teenager eats like crazy. It’s true. But I have fed the teenager every summer and all school breaks. And I have never spent more than $150 on groceries.

Now? I quite literally cannot leave the store having spent less than $200. EVERY TIME. I think, oh surely this time it will be less. I skipped the berries. I didn’t buy baby food. I didn’t buy the good dog food, allowing byproducts into our chihuahua for the first time in her five years living with us. I bought the cheapass store brand chocolate chips. I didn’t buy even one treat for myself. And still. $207. Without fail. Always over $200.

The fuel thing is obvious. Gas prices are being blogged about all over. I think about it as I fill the tank… once a month or so. More lately since we went to Connecticut and had two airport runs. Gas prices are annoying for us but if you have a big commute every day, like, say, my mother did… that’s a significant bite out of your salary. How do people do it? How are people expected to live? And yes, I do believe it’s fine for the price of gas to serve as a deterrent to driving. I do think we need to get people out of their cars and CERTAINLY out of their ridiculous SUV’s. But what are people supposed to do RIGHT NOW? It’s all well and good to say people shouldn’t be driving so much when you are sitting in a place like NYC with good public transportation. But what do people in other places do? How do we expect the suburb people to get around? Not only do we need to develop more cars that use less expensive and less polluting energy resources, but we also need public transport alternatives.

But none of that really matters to MY daily life. I drive to the grocery store. That’s about it. I drive once a week, about five miles, maybe. The fuel issue for me is HEAT. Last year, heating oil cost me 50% more than I budgeted. This year, it’s expected to go up another 36%. And this year, our budget is a gazillion times tighter than last. This year we have private school tuition on top of baby stuff on top of a monster mortgage and a few unexpected repairs. This year, I honestly don’t know how we will do it.

I think we will just all be getting sweaters for Christmas. To wear in the house.

I added ads to my blog out of laziness. I use typepad, which costs me $15 a month. As things got tight, this became a clearly unnecessary expense and I considered migrating to wordpress. I even moved the blog over at one point. But the pictures of the last four years of my life all looked funky and I was overwhelmed by the amount of work that would be required to make it mine. I am used to this blog host. I like this place. And I don’t even know if I remember how to do the little trick that makes it so that my domain name goes to a particular site while showing just my domain name. So I decided to try ads before deciding to move my blog. I had a mysterious issue with googleads cutting me out suddenly. And I was flummoxed until I got an invite to BlogHer ads. And they are truly awesome. BlogHer, the whole damn thing, is just awesome. I am PROUD to have their ads there.

But they require page loads. So in order to maximize my page loads, I did something that I know some people might find annoying. I changed my blog to give excerpts on feeds. So you probably won’t see this whole post in your Bloglines or Google Reader. Yeah. Sorry. I need you to click through. I need your page load.

This person has the same idea. The right idea. Click on over and load some pages. Help some people out. Help someone in some suburb get themselves to another day of fuel-guzzling work. Or help someone heat their house. And even though I don’t believe in politics, let’s do something in November to bring about even a modicum of change around here, OK? Thank you.