Well, thanks a lot. I will make a note!

I guess I must also look somewhat more upper crust than I am, because when this wisdom is revealed it is always in a sense of comradeliness that implies equal footing or membership in the same club, as if the prescribed course were ever an option for me. Like on my way back from the off-site meeting where I this morning got enwisdomed, I ran into the girl who replaced me at my old reception desk and we gossiped for a few minutes and she asked me if I thought R. was snotty and whether she should trust her. Oh no, I said, R. is a cupcake, but then I thought about it and remembered that I had in fact found her rather frosty when I first met her. I said so and advised her not to make too speedy a judgment. Then I thought of something else, the thing that for me had seemed to cause the eventual spring thaw with R. "Compliment her on her clothes and hair," I told her. "She puts some effort into looking stylish and finding cool things to wear, and if you recognize that she�ll really like you." (Yeah, I know it�s awful, but we�re girls and we�re low on the organizational totem pole, so we do what we can.) Now that was real comradeliness, that was the shit. But as soon as I hear someone say "trust fund," I�m out. And really that happened as soon as I hear someone�s light and amused reference to the phenomenon of kids in their twenties who work office jobs instead of hanging out in Prague or exploring coastal Belize for a few years. As if it is a subject that�s amusing, that�s puzzling, that�s not a simple fact and a given: most people in this country have to work for a living. As if it is a phenomenon! Most people don�t have trust funds, or mom and dad�s financial indulgence, to rely on; they have to support themselves and probably to pay back student loans, and no matter how much they might enjoy a few years writing poetry on the beach while learning Spanish from the natives � who wouldn�t? � what they can expect is more like a reception desk and office politics. And what makes me incredibly angry is the implication from these worldly advisers, who I must once again point out mean only the best, they like me and therefore want to steer me to the course of happiness, they�re overall decent people and that somehow, how?, makes their class-based myopia more cause for despair in me than it would otherwise be � what makes me angry is the implication that a post-collegiate life of self-sufficiency and willingness to take on personal responsibility is the life that is compromised, cheapened, less ultimately valuable than the one spent abroad spending checks from home.

I revised the last sentence of the previous paragraph a few times. One attempt had something about "hunched under a backpack" and another was grasping clumsily towards an idea of updates on one�s self-enlightenment written on foreign postcards. But that�s not necessarily appropriate � I mean, it�s not fair � and I have to be careful. I�ve ranted here before about people who come back from expat stints and won�t shut up about how *broadening* travel is, as though those of us who haven�t had the opportunity to do it are by comparison narrow. Are we to be ashamed of something we couldn�t help? Are we to become the sociological version of Catholics, forever a self-hating embodiment of Less? Not everyone with a trust fund and/or travelogues deserves to get slapped. I�m biased as hell, but I�m thinking for instance here of Steve, who spent a lot of his early adulthood dead broke and rootless, waiting tables in Germany or riding his bike around Spain, and didn�t settle down (ugh) and get a grown-up job until well into his thirties. He does not put on airs about this or use the word "broadened" (if he did I would smack him), he�s just got a pack of stories to tell and, he made the trade-off, an underfunded IRA. Based on his experience he also can�t comprehend why I�m so preoccupied with health insurance as holy grail since he never had any and never missed it, but that is another story.

(I think I have more to say and it would go right here, but I have work to do. By the way, that editorial meeting yesterday went not as well as I�d hoped, but if you factor in my ridiculously high standard of self-evaluation, I think objectively it was fine or better. Diary-wise, maybe I will return to the subject some other time and flesh out just this part.)

Here is the emotional context for all of the preceding: last night after class the 48 bus let me off on 23rd and I walked home through the ragged yet dignified � the civic planners� euphemism is "evolving" � neighborhood that�s north of 14th between about Union and Yesler, a neighborhood of which I am very fond. Along the way I saw a FOR SALE sign on a small, modest-looking bungalow that it occurred to me was about the size and ambitiousness of what Steve and I would be buying if we were looking for a house, the feasible if-I-ever-get-a-job-etc. price range of which hypothetical purchase I generally know, and really just to confirm my judgment � this is what still stuns me, that it didn�t occur to me that I could be wrong about this, I had watched my pal Mandy click through listings during the last Saturday class and I thought I�d downed the sobering truth about how much things cost � I looked at the photocopied flyer in the Plexiglas box on the realtor sign. You know where this was going: I was off, and not the good way, by almost 50%. I am not going to say the numbers because in addition to all of the preceding I am self conscious � and, argh, self conscious about being self conscious, I wish Edwards were still in the field and I wish I had more middle-class pride � about how little money I have compared to almost everyone I know and how little (n = 0) familial kick-in on the down payment I can expect ditto, but still, even if you look at something and it seems a solid value for a million dollars, you will be knocked backwards a bit by the knowledge that it costs a million five. So I got home and told Steve we were moving, and how did he feel about Miami? I looked at house listings there for a while (ugly architecture) and then in Omaha (surprisingly posh and country-clubbish) and then finally in Lincoln, where it would be no problem at all to find something livable-in with what we expect to have to spend so I decided was home sweet home. "But what would you do in Lincoln?" Steve asked. "Get some secretarial job at the university," I said, looking him in the eye and trying to sound defiant so of course my voice broke and I got teary before I made it through the third word. We both know that I don�t want to work a crap admin job in academia, though if I could afford to live in a nice place there would that be an OK trade-off? I know I�m supposed to say No way, but honestly? Hell yes. And the benefits, hubba hubba. Higher-education budget cuts, though: it�s a safe bet they�re not hiring anyway and I�d end up working at Costco or something or temping with no benefits, and at that point the trade-off becomes a lot less attractive. Goodbye, pretty house in downtown Lincoln. And then Steve said, You know what, I bet we could afford that house you saw, we could afford that much. Ha ha you are crazy, I said, and just so I could be right � criminy, about *something*, please � I went back online and found a mortgage calculator and lo and behold it was true, we could indeed afford a smallish bungalow in the evolving part of town, and all we�d have to do to make the monthly payments is stop eating out, give up new clothes and shoes permanently, forget about vacations, and keep our cars running for the next ten years. If I get a job, if we decide to stay here, then it looks like it�s either a crummy split-level ranch fifteen miles north or bourgeois month-to-month penury, and that�s that, there�s the real sobering truth right there. (And he works in software! And collectively we have already have d.p. money socked away! And I have decided to stop selling myself short and for the purpose of such calculations as these have ratcheted upward my conceptual future salary!) I know there are people whose parents aren�t well off, who missed the dot-com gold rush, who didn�t go to a private college and who may not have college degrees and yet manage to buy houses in this inflated market � even though making myself remember these things, in my social circles, often feels like a test of faith � and I can�t imagine how they are doing it. How are they doing it? That�s the only wisdom I�m interested in receiving these days.

I don�t want the money thing to be a subject to which I keep returning, because I think that over and over again my voice would break on the third word, and that is all raggedness and no dignity and like I said yesterday, I�m vain. I just wanted to record it, to balance vanity with self-accountability, and now I have. So there, I�m done. Want to know what I keep coming back to, what despite my resistance keeps looking like the only realistic course of action? Germany.

P.S. (later) Forgot to mention, here�s the only good part: if we want to be property owners and maintain anything approaching our current standard of living, Steve and I officially can�t afford to have kids too. So even if I do get all tick-tock cuckoo some years down the line, a look at the financials will nip that shit in the bud pronto.