Make 'em laugh make 'em laugh make 'em laugh

I like to laugh. Ask anyone who's ever worked with me. Bailey and I had the reputation of being the twin guffaws at the U-M News Service, and I once had an editor at my college paper give me a stern talking to because I laughed too much on the job. (I responded that I was sorry she didn't enjoy her job as much as I did, but I didn't think productivity necessarily equated to an absense of fun.)

In case you like to laugh, too, here are some things that have made me laugh out loud recently:
-- Joe Cocker at Woodstock, with closed captioning
-- Lara's blog posting about one of her earliest books (her posting about the worst rejection letter ever is pretty hilarious, too. well, a whole lotta Lara's blog, really)
--The Facebook statuses of our friend Jeff, waiting impatiently for his first child to arrive:
Jeffrey and Rachel are still waiting!!! It's officially a "Hoomaian" baby - LATE!!! (you'd have to know Jeff, but this is proof positive of the baby's paternity)
Jeffrey is waiting for "special package" to arrive - no tracking number, but now "overdue."

What I love about each of these is that they aren't episodes of SNL or professional content. They're people making each other laugh using the Internet. That might not be what the government nerds who thunk up the Internet intended, but I think it's a pretty fine use of technology. (Sure, all new technology is actually funded by porn, but laughter is a pretty benign benefit.)

Not that I'm opposed to professionals making us laugh.
-- Venture Brothers rules
-- David Sedaris is genius, especially when you hear his stories in his own voice
-- Family Guy's absurdity, like in this five-minute sequence of Peter fighting a six-foot chicken

A friend recently said on Facebook she was having a bad day, and she asked for friends to tell her jokes. I offered my favorite.

Knock knock
Who's there?
Interrupting cow
Interrupting co ... MOO!

(It's better when you see it. Like this.)

Hey, the stock market went up 1,000 points today. Don't you think we all deserve a laugh?

Doing the math

There's a lot about American consumer behavior that baffles me. Their reaction to the economy this year is a perfect example.

Back in the late 1990s, at the height of the dot-com boom, I remember writing a story as a business journalist saying that the average American not only had no money in savings but was several thousand in debt. This wasn't a case that economy had soured so people were using their credit cards to make ends meet. It was a time of incredible prosperity and people were making the lifestyle choice to spend more than they made.

This always confused me. If you can't afford the new TV or tennis shoes or video game now, how will it be different when you charge it, adding the high interest costs to the price of the toy? It won't, but the good news for retailers and banks was that Americans are so gifted at denial that they could pretend the day of reckoning would never come.

Add a decade of increasingly easy credit and you really fuel the fire. No longer did second mortgages carry the stink of economic failure -- they were home equity loans, so much more palatable. Commercials showed happy middle class families using home equity loans to not only pay off their debt but to even have enough money for a swimming pool or a vacation.
Never to save, that I recall. Always to keep on spending.

Maybe because I grew up with working class parents who constantly extolled the value of money, it gives me a knot in my stomach to be in debt. John and I share this priority, and in spite of our ridiculously high rent, we pay off our credit cards every month and have a nice nest egg in savings.

That's part of what makes it hard for me to understand the American ethos of moving into ever bigger houses, ever farther away from work, driving increasingly gigantic cars -- then complaining when the cost of gas and heat go up.

Let's do the math just to make my point. I loved story problems as a kid.

Let's say you live 50 miles from work, so your commute is 100 miles a day five days a week.
That's 500 miles.
Because you're your kids' chauffeur, shuttling them to soccer practice and all the other requisite activities I didn't do, and my parents would have made me ride my bike to if I had done them, let's say you drive 20 extra miles of errands every day.
That's another 140 miles, for a total of 640 miles a week.
You drive a Navigator because an SUV is so much cooler than a minivan, so you get 18 miles to the gallon on the highway, 13 in the city.
We'll split the difference and call it 15 miles per gallon.
To do your 640 miles each week, you must buy about 42 gallons of gas.

At $1.50 a gallon, 42 gallons of gas costs $63.
At $4 a gallon, it's $168.
All this screaming about the high price of gas causing people to cancel vacations or finally consider a hybrid car is about $100 a week?

I'm not saying it's fun to give an extra $100 of your income to the oil companies so they can post record profits. But really, if your home budget can't absorb an extra $100 a week without drastic measures, that might be a sign you want to re-evaluate some of your choices so you have more of a buffer.

A friend asked for my help in making a budget to get out of debt. The first thing I advised was that she had to pay for everything in cash for a month and write down every expense. We then reviewed her spending to look at the difference between necessities and extras, and to look for ways to do the necessities cheaper.

Some things are easy -- no, you don't need another expensive purse, you can do without the mani-pedi. But I think part of our problem is that we've lost the ability to tell the difference between necessities and luxuries. Our parents got along fine without DVD players, answering machines (well, now voice mail), garage door openers and the other gizmos we now simply cannot live without. Look around your house right now and mentally list everything you didn't have 20 years ago, and consider for a second whether you really need it.

Yes, food is a necessity. However, going out to eat is typically a lot more expensive than cooking for yourself, and processed, prepared foods at the grocery store are typically more expensive than simpler foods. Trimming one or two lunches out during the week can save money. For some families, one more dinner in a week might equal the difference in gas.

I would call coffee a necessity. I do not call a $3-4 a day latte habit a necessity. Make your coffee at home, put it in a travel mug, and ta-da, you might have just found a good chunk of your gas budget.

Clothes are a necessity. But one woman I know who seemed always to be complaining about being broke also always seemed to have new outfits. Take care of what you have and stay out of the stores if you don't have the cash. Oh, and I just read that about 65 percent of the clothes women dry clean could actually be machine washed, so if you hate spending on dry cleaning like I do, try out your gentle cycle or give those Dryel bags a whirl.

My personal favorite -- the car payment. In most places, yes, you need a car to get around. But I still can't wrap my head around leasing cars. You build no equity and you never get yourself to a point of not having a car payment. Here's an idea: buy a two-year-old car, pay it off, and enjoy the pleasure of driving it a few years without a car payment. Then when you finally do sell it, put that money down on your next two-year-old car. My '93 Escort had I think 140,000 miles on it when I sold it to leave for New York, and it had been paid off since John and I started dating.

Cut out one car payment a month and you've probably covered the price of the gas increase. Do it for two family cars and you might find some money for a savings account. No, Andy Jacobs, do not spend that money on a pool or a vacation.

I think unfortunately our typical middle class lifestyle becomes a vicious cycle of spending. If you live so far from work, your commute is so long, you might feel you have no time to cook so you get trapped into convenience foods and restaurant food.

Here's something I'd love to see happen from the economic downturn -- people re-assess their lifestyle choices and make some different decisions. Live closer to work so you have more time to cook and spend more time with your family. Live in a smaller house and drive a smaller car so you're a little more immune to fuel costs, and as a bonus, maybe you're better to the environment. Skip the $200 jeans, buy a no-name purse, and generally scale back a bit so you can put some money into a nice, safe savings account. (yes, I know, your 401k is painful right now. me, too.)

Next time you're tempted to grouse about the rising price of food, heat or gas, try this experiment. Spend the next month writing down every single item you spend money on. Honestly assess whether it's a necessity, and if it is, if there's a way you could do it more affordably.

Our culture has been drunk on spending for a so long that you might find the real issue isn't the price of gas.

Wall Street *is* our Main Street

I suppose living in the financial capital of the U.S., I'm obligated to blog something about this financial meltdown.

Sidestepping any commentary on the massive bailout/rescue package and instead focusing on the heart of the issue, I think the anonymity of corporate America has relieved us all of guilt in our business dealings.

Yes, I grew up Catholic so I'm well acquainted with community-inflicted guilt. But here, I think there actually is something positive to be said.

My dad likes to tell a story of two big burly guys coming to his parents' home when he was a kid. The men were there to repossess a washing machine my grandfather had missed some payments on. My dad, of course, was mortified that all the neighbors were going to see this washing machine getting bounced down the front steps and into a collection truck.

Think about how much has changed.

John and I recently bought a nice bedroom set from Pottery Barn. Like many Americans, we put it on our credit card. We did not put it on an account with a locally owned department store, where we know the people who work there.

So if we decide to stop paying on our new bedroom furniture, the people at our Pottery Barn store don't care. Not only are they hourly employees of a massive, faceless corporation -- so it doesn't affect their paycheck one way or another whether we pay -- but Pottery Barn gets its money regardless.

Our credit card has already paid Pottery Barn so our obligation is to Chase. Not that we know the people we deal with at a local Chase branch or anything. If we stopped paying on our credit card, we'd likely get a phone call from some hard working guy in India, calling himself Dave or Rick or some other middle America name, urging us to pay.

If we don't, though, what are the real consequences?

Do we have to worry that burly men are going to come take our dressers away? Do we have to hang our heads in shame next time we go to the bank to deposit a paycheck, because we know everyone who works there and they all know we're behind?

No. It's all pretty detached, and I suppose at worst, we'd just screen our calls and let everything go to voice mail so we didn't have to talk to the collections folks. Then we'd go on enjoying our new bedroom set.

I think most people, in their hearts, want to be good. And I think most people don't feel much guilt taking a little extra when they don't think there's a real victim.

So if overextending myself means I know I'm going to have to face the appliance store owner in church on Sunday, I might rein it in. I don't want to hurt someone I know. I'd probably know that his mother's been really sick or he's saving up to send his kid to college -- I'd know how my actions affected another human being.

However, if some amorphous entity, some ginormous bank wants to give me the power to spend myself silly, maybe I don't feel it's actually hurting anyone. On the flip side, if I'm the mortgage officer approving a loan I know full well the people have no hope of keeping up on, but I'm in some far-flung location where I won't have to see those people after they've sat at their kitchen table wondering how to stave off foreclosure, maybe it's not about hurting anyone, it's just making my quota for the month so I get my bonus.

I think back when we all lived in smaller, interconnected ecosystems, our actions probably felt more like we had accountability for them. Like back in the days when lots of people still paid by check, you really didn't want to bounce a check to your local grocery store if you knew they'd do what lots of retailers did -- taping copies of the bounced checks to the register, for all your busy-body neighbors to see.

The more I read and hear about the mortgage meltdown, the more I wonder if anyone felt any accountability: the people taking out the loans, the people making the loans, the Wall Street guys buying and selling the loans.

Maybe if we all worried about how our neighbors would think of us when we got our latest toy repossessed, rather than trying to show off to our neighbors with cars and homes we can't pay for, we wouldn't need a reminder like this -- "Don't Buy Stuff You Can't Afford."