It’s oddly pleasing to me to get by on what others might consider sub-standard fare, accommodations, etc, which is a very good thing, I guess, in light of the reductions I’ve mentioned I’ll soon be living with (this situation is still being resolved, but I expect some news within the month, if not the hour.) But it’s long been the case that I find it somewhat intriguing to apply the lowest practical standards to many examples of good taste.
One example came in college when I worked as a student bartender: my buddies/roommates/fellow bartenders would often receive tips of leftover booze as well as cash, and we had stocked a pretty fair bar-full ourselves of a great variety of booze, when we decided to stage a blind taste-test one night. I scored by far the lowest, expressing a clear preference for cheap booze of every type. I was delighted: all that meant to me was that I could get drunk for cheaper than anyone else without offending my sensibilities. A few years later, I again pleased myself by discovering that I was perfectly capable of digesting and enjoying the bark of pineapples, and came to think of them, not as garbage, but a tasty sort of roughage. I’ve often thought about coming up with ways to relinquish my apartment in NYC and living in a tricked-out van, and might still do it if ever leave NYC for a slightly warmer clime.) There’s almost no end to the extent I wonder about experiencing things that most people would regard as highly distasteful or even loony forms of deprivation. It’s fun to experiment in this way.
Sometimes I wonder how little money I actually need to spend to survive while continuing to hold down my job, and not being perceived as an objectionable eccentric by my colleagues or students. Since that job is in an urban university, I need to clean my suits now and then, and buy a pair of shoes every few years, keep myself well-showered, etc, plus I need to spend a little money on my computer and books, just to keep up with the research end of my work (though much can be accomplished though libraries, supplies at the office, etc.) Once, in a period when I couldn’t really afford an adequate apartment, I virtually lived at my office for over a year (I went home to sleep, but I was pretty well insomniac for that year so not so much or so often as you would think. I washed my clothing in the sink that year.) This was largely to rationalize not having any money (and being too proud to beg my brother to subsidize my living expenses in addition to subsidizing my legal bills) but I found it oddly invigorating. I would attend meetings with my comfortably middle-class colleagues and think “None of them has any idea how sparely I’m living. They all share details about maintaining a summer home in the mountains, or the problems of fine dining in Europe, as if had the slightest truck with such issues. They blithely ask me to contribute more $$$ to the fund for buying Christmas gifts for the student aides than I spend on food for all of December. Amazing.”
The truly amazing part, to me, is that even when I can make distinctions, they don’t seem to mean that much to me. I understand that making dinner by boiling some rice and sticking a bouillon cube in it is much plainer fare than broiling lobster tails, but difference in the cost isn’t nearly the difference in the taste, to me. I prefer the expensive food, but I can get by happily on the rice, and the beans, and the dented cans and day-old bread if I need to. Deprivation is fun.
Or maybe this is some sort of pathology involving money. Cheapness, in other words, and rationalizing it. I like to think of it as a kind of adventure, a thrilling game of seeing just how tight to the bone I could actually live, a kind of Thoreauvian experiment in placing my consciousness far above my material needs. Is it important that I eat “well,” dress “well,” travel “well,” etc. or will I be happier if I do none of those things, but pursue the life of the mind as best I can? Normally I would be too comfortably lazy to think of this as an option, but in my present circumstances, it seems an honorable option to me to focus on living the examined life, since that also seems to be the frugal life.
Of which, I also have been reconsidering my bourgeois comment in the pigeons!thread, wherein I informed Mangetout that I wouldn’t consider eating pigeons or their eggs because that’s so disgusting. He allayed my qualms about the healthfulness and I wandered through the large park just outside my apartment yesterday to wonder if I could actually trap the pigeons that cluster on my terrace, and slaughter a few. How often does nature send protein sources onto one’s terrace, after all, pecking at any bits of matter (I grow vegetables on my terrace) that they can? Protein-sources, mind you, that are considered pests? I’ve been fantasizing about devising some sort of trap, with a little corn-meal spread at the back end of it, with a guillotine device on a hair-trigger (and an alarm to notify me when my dinner has been decapitated). This is just an urban form of eating roadkill, with the added distinction of having very fresh roadkill-- or a lazy, rather unsporting way of hunting. Berries grow wild in the park, and chives, and I could grow more veggies (and could can some) on my terrace.
This seems like a childish fantasy, I know, to eke out a lifestyle independent of most middle-class standards, yet it’s very appealing to me. I either have no taste, or am contemptuous of others’ tastes, or don’t care about the concept as much as others do, or am pathologically cheap and rationalizing my miserliness so it seems acceptable to me, or am opting to live in an unusually self-depriving way for a middle-class person. Maybe I’ve just read too much Thoreau, or read it badly.