Monday, June 02, 2008

Financial Tyrant

The downside of managing our finances: 

*I see exactly how much we spend on punching the hole in the ozone layer wider with my commutes. 

*I get to see all the ridiculous names of the bars Pants frequents on his hanging-out-with-my-coworkers nights on detachments.  The Tilted Kilt.  Paddy O-Reilly's.  The Monkey Wrench?  Please.  The goofier the name, the more pissed off I get at not having been there.

*Monthly evidence of human fallibility.  Those scraps I'm picking out of the lint trap in the dryer?  Receipts, evidently, from both of us, which went unrecorded in the checkbook register.

The upside of it:

*The maniacal pleasure I get from slowly hacking the body out from under our debt.  Barring unforeseen disaster, by this time next month I should be on the last big hunk, which I'm envisioning as its gorgon-like head.  I might nail the zero-balance statement to our wall as a trophy, or a warning to future debt as it gathers its strength to rise, zombi-like, and haunt us again.  Die, bastard!

*The Special Olympics Champ feeling I get from balancing the checkbook when it evens out to the penny.  Yay, me!  Arithmetic and check marks!

*The sweeping financial edicts I get to lay out when I am holding down the fort alone: this month, I deem we (the royal we) shall eat Indian food from Trader Joe's and drink as much lemon-flavored Perrier as we can hold.  And garlic parmesan toast bites!  And way too much broccoli!  Also, we shall have two new pairs of jeans which magically diminish the size of our ass and lengthen our legs.  And, best of all, I deem that we shall order our entire MFA reading list from the used books on Amazon.com so that we might whittle away our lonely hours doing something productive.  All hail unilateralism!

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