My Last Hundred Bucks: Spending Money to Make Money
$100! It is a lot of money, and yet, it is also not a lot of money at all. Where did your last hundred bucks go, Aurora Almendral?
$30 Built By Wendy. They had a sale, and I needed a work-like blouse to wear in the summer. I’d gotten rid of a lot of my office clothes when I left my only fancy job a few years ago to freelance, but it turns out you still need to look like a trustworthy adult every once in awhile. The blouse is very refreshing, but when I got home, I realized that what it adds in professionalism, it loses in see-through-ness, so we’ll see how it works out.
$7.99 Hardware store. 8-pack of batteries. My audio recorder goes through batteries way too quickly.
$20 BP in Bed-Stuy for a quarter tank of gas. Just enough to drive to Jersey for work.
$26 Fried chicken, purple yam shakes, spaghetti, shrimp paste noodles. I spent two hours under the hot sun reporting a story, and I treated the two people I was working with to a meal at a crazy ethnic fast food restaurant. They needed to taste the spaghetti with hot dogs and cheddar cheese.
$6.99 Fancy grocery store. A small tub of smoked whitefish salad. This will feed me for four lunches, as long as it goes with:
$7 Met Supermarket. A dozen eggs and Wasa crispbread. One boiled egg for breakfast and one for lunch. The crispbread is to spread the whitefish on. All together they take about five minutes to prepare, so I can keep working through lunch. (Sigh.)
TOTAL: $97.98 over two and a half days. All on more or less work-related expenses, which are the most justifiable kind in my book. Ask me tomorrow though, and I likely will have spent $50 on face lotion.
Previously: Kevin Nguyen on Expectations vs. Reality
Aurora Almendral is a freelance writer in New York. She loves economics and has a coral named after her. Photo: Shutterstock/Piotr Zajc
Just pair the blouse with a cheap, lightweight, form-fitting camisole/tank. I have to do that with a couple of my fancy shirts (which irritates me, but the shirts were nice enough on me that I didn’t want to return them).
@Jenn@twitter Late comment, but I have to rant: what is up with tops these days?? I went shopping recently for some nicer-ish tops for work, and nearly all of them were see-through or required layering for some reason or another. And I just… why?? I like layering, sure. But I would really like to be able to buy a shirt that I can simply put on and wear. I hate the idea of needing to buy MORE THINGS just to make my garment wearable. Especially for what I was buying–they’re (kind of, for me) expensive shirts, made for work. They should be good enough on their own, not require creativity and extra purchases and all that.
@OneTooManySpoons As someone who works (worked! today was my last day!) in fast fashion retail, sheer is all the fucking rage these days.
@OneTooManySpoons I feel like you’ve hit it right on the head… you have to buy more things to make anything wearable! So the tops look kind of cheap at $5-10 each, but you have to buy two or three of them to make them wearable. Oh yeah, and often they’re so “cheap” per piece NOT because the material is sheer but because they’re made in places where they don’t have to provide a living wage or a humane work environment. Drives me nuts.
On that note, does anyone know of a place where I can get sustainably made, economically responsible, long-lasting plus-sized clothing that is appropriate to wear in a professional office (i.e. NOT SHEER and not a bunch of hippie skirts, which I love but don’t go over well in Southern U.S. corporate culture)? :(
Filipino food! Jollibee?
@Annie@twitter That’s what I thought. And now I would like an ube milkshake.
Purple yam shakes, eh?! I’m intrigued.
@Spinach Party I love yams so I definitely want one.
Perhaps I’m calling myself out as déclassé, but who didn’t eat spaghetti with hot dogs in it and cheddar cheese melted on top as a kid? Actually, retracted, that was probably Velveeta. Sign me up for yam shakes and shrimp paste pasta, though.
@probs I stand with Velveeta.
@redheaded&crazy oh, absolutely. You can keep it in the pantry! Best thing ever. Artisanal herb-studded goat cheese or whatever from the farmer’s market may have my mind, but Velveeta will always have my heart.
@probs ahhh, Velveeta melted with a can of Rotel, truly the processed cheese food of the gods and Texas.