The Clothes Problem Again

I was late to class today. Not by much (the university clocktower was striking 11:00 as I ran into the building) but late nonetheless.

I was late because I didn't have anything to wear.

I didn't buy spring/summer clothes last year. While I was still in the US, I survived temping by cycling through three pairs of polyester slacks alternated with about five work-appropriate blouses. There was no air-conditioning in my apartment, so I would come home and strip to a pair of gym shorts and a tank top.

In India, I bought seven blue salwars (and one purple one -- and received one orange salwar and one silver salwar as gifts).

Long story short, there's not much in my closet that's appropriate to wear -- especially to teach -- on a warm spring day. All the temp-clothes have long worn thin. I have tried to rock a kurta over jeans, but even that just looks faded and limp, a reminder that all of my India clothes (and, in fact, all of my jeans) spent three months being washed and wrung out in a five-gallon bucket.

When I did slip into the large lecture hall, late and miserably shabby, one of the other TAs leaned over and whispered to me "don't worry, I still think you look hot."

In preparation for the upcoming move, I have started selling off seven years' worth of accumulated textbooks; I went to the theatre building lounge with a few large (and heavy) boxes, set up a makeshift display, and within the first day made $139. If I sell them all I'll have around $220. I had hoped to save the money for the move, but some of it may have to go toward clothes.

We will see.

An Open Letter To Barack Obama

Dear Senator Obama,

When I received an email from you (yes, from you directly, not from "The Obama Campaign" or anything like that) inviting me to apply for an Obama Organizing Fellowship, I was thrilled.

First of all, I was thrilled that you had even thought to ask me to apply in the first place. Secondly, I was very excited about the opportunity to potentially work on your campaign, thanks to the generosity of your Fellowship Program.

I'll tell you; I seriously considered applying, even though I knew that fellowships didn't tend to pay much and that it would mean living in penury a while longer. I would continue eating cheese-and-mustard sandwiches if it meant I got to work for you.

Then I clicked on the link and discovered that your fellowships were, in fact, unpaid. They also required a minimum of 30 hours/week time commitment.

Senator Obama, you do realize that asking the young people of this country (as I assumed your fellowship was intended for students, since it was a summer program only) -- you do realize that asking the young people of this country to apply for unpaid, nearly full-time positions on your campaign will only appeal to a particular subset of applicants, don't you?

Your Organizing Fellows will be a collection of the well-heeled, with a few kids here or there who are practically going bankrupt doing this and trying to hide it.

The fact that you didn't at least offer minimum wage, that you didn't at all try to make this opportunity possible for the students who have to work through the summers, who can't make it on a full-time volunteer gig, breaks my heart.

The fact that you are offering "fellowships" that in truth must be paid out by either the parents of these students or by the students' own credit cards and loans, astounds me.

No doubt this kind of thing happens all the time; asking for campaign volunteers is no big deal, in fact, and I've got no problem with that.

But you called it a fellowship, and insisted it be a full-time commitment.

Next time, just call it an unpaid internship and have done with it. At least the poor students of America won't get their hopes up.

Yours sincerely,

Blue

Only One More Post About Money, I Promise

So Gaurav at Gauravonomics has decided to go "off consumption" for a year. (His chronicle of the events can be found here.)

Unlike his predecessors No Impact Man and the people at The Compact, he's not giving up consumption for environmental reasons. He's doing it to gain "insights into what drives us to consume, or not, into the nature of consumption, into human nature itself."

Oh, and he's crossing his fingers for a book deal. ^__^

I support his choice while at the same time part of me goes "What's so special about not buying stuff? Hundreds of thousands of people already know what it's like to pass by a restaurant or store window and not be able to go in, even though you really want to."

Part of me, truth be told, is jealous. I should have rewritten these past few months of enforced frugality as an "off-consumption" experiment and tried to net me a book deal.

But, as Gaurav notes, actual poverty is different from "giving up buying." Today he offered the interesting observation:

Actually, if I did have financial problems, I probably wouldn’t have been able to turn my frugality into a public performance. Only because I feel secure, in terms of both money and status, I can be confident enough to do it.

The moral seems to be: when you're poor, you do what you can to appear better-off, even if it negatively affects your cash flow (e.g. buying interview clothes on credit for a job that may or may not materialize).

When you're financially comfortable, as Gaurav and No Impact Man are (No Impact Man allowed his wife to spend $1,000 on two pairs of shoes before the experiment began, to make up for the lack of shopping to follow), then frugality becomes a statement which can be worn proudly.

Gaurav, I await the riposte. ^__^

Ascetics Invented Yoga 'Cause They Were Poor

I'm busy. I start teaching at 11 a.m. and end my theatre rehearsals at 10:30 p.m. The days seem to blur into one another; despite our progress both in class and in rehearsal, it feels like I am doing, over and over, the same thing.

Thus: the busier I get with school/work-related activity, the more important it seems to be that I have some kind of alternate creative outlet, something wildly different than what I am doing the rest of the overstuffed week.

Last year at this time, it was cooking. Up through about February, it was still cooking -- but around the beginning of the year, something started to change.

At first I thought I was imagining things, but then the WSJ confirmed it: grocery prices have skyrocketed.

Milk has gone up by 26% and eggs have gone up by 24%. Grocery stores have tried to entice shoppers by cutting prices in other areas, but, as the WSJ notes:

At a Wal-Mart Supercenter in a northern suburb of Chicago, the price of a box of Little Debbie Frosted Donuts was recently reduced to $1.50 from $1.63 while a box of Sunbelt Oats & Honey granola bars was cut to $1.66 from $1.80.

But even with the promotions, the price of a basket of goods selected by Credit Suisse researchers at a Chicago Wal-Mart was up 2.5% in February compared with January. The basket price of a Target Corp. store in Chicago was up 2% and that of a Kroger Co.'s Food4Less store in Chicago was down 0.1%.

Since January 2008, I have purchased milk once: a quarter-gallon to make the quiche, and it was an event. I've purchased eggs twice this year, I believe.

I eat a lot of lentils and spinach, and when there was a sale on vegetables at the Kroger, bought a bunch and made enough sabzi to stock my freezer for a while.

So what have I been doing instead? Yoga -- and I've become obsessed. Obsessed to the point where I kind of plan my meetings around ensuring I will get an hour-long yoga break at some point during the day.

I started out doing a session in the afternoons, before rehearsal; then switched to the mornings, then realized that on certain days I could do mornings and afternoons. I've gone online and drooled over videos of ashtanga, fantasizing about a day when I could take ashtanga classes because it's supposed to be the hardest yoga ever, and learning it would be a superchallenge.

Long story short, it finally hit me: the reason I've become so interested in yoga and exploring my physical endurance is because I, literally, have nothing else to explore. I have frugalized myself down to such an extent that the only thing left is my own body. Other forms of entertainment -- shopping, movies, going to bars, going to concerts, discovering new music, even cooking -- are all out, at least until I get a post-graduation job.

On the plus side, I've got back abs. I've never had back abs before. I suppose lack of income has its benefits. ^__^

So I Did My Taxes...

So I did my taxes.

I earned just over $7,000 in 2007.

And... um... lived on that.

It was interesting to find out that working full-time for four months at my temp job (three months in summer, one month after I got back from India) netted me $4,800. Had I kept that job year-round, I guess I would have made about $14,400. That's... depressing.

On the other hand, it would have essentially doubled my current salary (which, in addition to the temp job, includes my monthly graduate stipend). Considering my current lifestyle, I could have lived on $14,400 and managed to put money aside for savings. On $14,400, I could have had enough extra to buy a Wii. ^__^

On the plus side, I'm getting about $900 back from the government (not counting the "economic stimulus package"). That'll be just enough to pay my student fees for this semester.

I Want To Be A Consumer... But Not A Destroyer

Last week my graduate class had a special guest: one of the original founders of our theatre department.

Prior to his lecture, he wanted to get to know a bit about the current class of grad students, and went around to all of us asking about our backgrounds, what kind of theatre we liked, and where we hoped to direct after graduation.

I was the last to respond, hoping that he might skip me or something. After all, there were the other grad students saying things like "I'm going to start a theatre company in rural America and provide art to people who don't otherwise get that experience," or "I'm going to go to New York and take my chances in the big leagues!"

But he didn't skip me. "You're in your final semester? Congratulations! What do you plan to do after you graduate?"

I didn't let my voice waver for a minute. "I'm going to relocate to a major city, probably the DC area, and transfer my talents to a job in a private industry. I'd love something in PR or Events Management."

"Oh," he said. "Why not theatre?"

And then I got a little chicken. The truth is, I know enough about my skills to know that, while I am a competent director on my own merits, I am in no way set up for the competitive theatre world, nor do I want to spend my time working crap jobs and doing one of the "next step" options: assistant directing "for the experience," trying to start an unpaid theatre company, etc.

But I didn't say "I'm getting out of the theatre because I'm not good enough."

I said "I feel like I've become disconnected from the world, and I need to spend some time back in the world before I direct my next piece."

Which was probably an even dumber thing to say, because his next response was a very disappointed "Theatre... makes you feel disconnected?"

And as soon as he said it, I realized my response was truer than I realized. Theatre does make me feel disconnected from the world. It shouldn't, but it does. For three reasons:

1. The theatre artist's schedule is generally "work (or take/teach classes) all day, rehearse all night." The environment quickly becomes insular and restricting.

2. 90% of the plays performed in America, at both the educational and professional levels, are revivals of "classics." Often, directors attempt to spin these plays so that they have a contemporary relevance, but... putting Henry V in modern dress so people will be reminded of the Bush administration is barely groundbreaking. All of the productions of Henry V in the past eight years don't have the impact of a single showing of Fahrenheit 9/11.

3. Due to both schedule and monetary restrictions ('cause we don't make any money), the theatre artist cannot fully participate in the world around her.

And that's what I really want, and I didn't even realize it until I said it. I want to be a participant. I don't want to live like the former child Blue, reading her parents' copies of Newsweek to memorize details about film and literature (and yes, theatre) that she was thousands of miles too far away to ever see; nor do I want to live like starving artist Blue, in Minneapolis and surrounded by culture and opportunity but too underemployed to afford any of it.

I want to be a participant. More than that, I want to be a consumer. This isn't a popular statement to make, in lieu of environmental concerns, but I don't mean that I want to be wasteful, or consume beyond my needs.

I don't want a lot of shoes, but I want to be able to replace my shoes when there are holes in the soles. (While I had the foot cast on, I spent the entire six weeks wearing a shoe with a big hole in it because that was the only one which matched the sole height of the foot-cast boot.) I don't want to buy a lot of overpackaged, overprocessed food, but I do want to have money to socialize with friends in restaurants.

I want to take a yoga class. I want to find time to volunteer for something interesting and worthwhile (which I kind of did already -- just signed up for the American Democracy Project). If I make it to DC, I'm definitely finding some way of volunteering for Team Obama.

I also want to get a little closer to current technology. I have a secret fantasy of being able to become an early adopter, but I know it will take a few income-level jumps before I get to that stage. Right now I don't even have a phone that takes photographs. ^__^

Long story short, I want to be a participant in the world, not an observer. And theatre, as enjoyable as it is, makes me feel disconnected.

Which is strange, because historically theatre people are supposed to be the types who are engaged with the world and use their talents to spur social change. Did that stop happening, outside of theatre textbooks? Or... has it all been transferred to YouTube?

Notes from a DC Tour

Here are a few snapshots from my DC adventure:

* Going into an interview and hearing "You put on your resume that you type 100 wpm. Is that really the truth, or aren't you exaggerating a bit?" "I've been clocked at 100," I say with a smile. "Well," my interviewer tells me, "we'll give you a chance to prove it." After the test is over he comes back, astonished. "98 wpm and not a single mistake!"

* While I'm blitzing through the standard "prove you know Microsoft Office" tests, suddenly realizing that there are job interviews out there that don't require you to prove you can do a mail merge, and that later on this week, I'll be going on one of them. ^__^

* En route to the Apple Store, helping a group of very old, very giddy British ladies navigate the Metro -- from the turnstile to their eventual landing at Fashion Centre. No doubt they're here to take advantage of the falling dollar; one of them spends the entire Metro ride bursting out with little fits of happy "shopping, shopping, shopping!" Followed by "how many more stops?"

* Taking a breather at the Fashion Centre food court (to rest my foot) next to a group of young people involved somehow with our military (couldn't tell whether they had yet gone to Iraq, but they were clearly the troops in "Support our Troops"). They were talking about other young people in the military they knew who had committed suicide. They knew a lot of people who had committed suicide, mostly after returning from Iraq. "It's usually the really young ones who do it," one of them said. "The ones who haven't started families yet." It was a very sad conversation.

Job Search $$$: Shall We Start Keeping A Running Total?

Over on the hilarious A Philosophy Job Market Blog (tagline: "It'd be funny if it were happening to someone else"), the group bloggers keep a running total of how much money they are spending on the act of job searching.

From the most recent money post:

Holy shit, the APA was expensive. Three nights in the hotel, even at the reduced grad student rate and splitting a room with one of my office mates, came to a $180 plus taxes. Transportation was $288. Add in internet service in my room at $10 a night, a couple of burritos at Chipotle and a sandwich from Potbelly, and I'm looking at a Visa total of about $544.60 for the conference.

So I've spent $995.39 on the job market this year. That's more than 5% of my gross annual income.

To amuse you all, I thought I might start a similar tally. Today, I spent $84 on interview clothing, and $200 on a round-trip plane ticket to DC.

Which is... over a third of my monthly income. Woo-hoo!

A Note About The T-Shirt Thing

Don't worry.

I'm not planning to sell t-shirts on the blog. ^__^

Though it did provoke an interesting response.

The post was labeled "humor," after all. As was the implication that the only reason I was doing it was to get you to give me money, like the Girl Scouts do. Also the fact that I used the word "thong." ^__^

The slogans, for the benefit of new visitors, were not meant to be "desi-centric;" they were meant to be "Pretty Blue Salwar-centric," in that they're all things that have happened to me or that I've said, on the blog. I'm not trying to out-desh anyone.

Obviously, wearing one would be super-duper-meta, probably so meta that no one else would understand what you were referring to. I'm not that popular. Yet.

Which means that the only point of the thing was to "social guilt" my friends and family into giving me money, which I very openly stated was my purpose for creating the t-shirt campaign. ^__^ ("If you like me, you have to buy one!" That kind of thing.)

Anyway. Now that that business is over, I'm going to move on to Plan B:

The Pretty Blue Salwar Pledge Drive.

Just In Time For Some Of The Holidays (and very early for next year's Diwali!)

In my quest for ways to make a little more money (until Daniel teaches me how to break into the world of Mystery Shopping ^__^) I'm considering selling Pretty Blue Salwar merch.

It'll be like selling Girl Scout Cookies; my family will buy some because they're related to me, and the rest of you might buy because you like me. Or because you hate to turn away a Girl Scout.

Before I sign up with CafePress, I thought I would test the waters.

Would anyone reading this actually consider purchasing a t-shirt/sweatshirt/baby doll tee/hoodie emblazoned with any of the following slogans?

1. "What's in your tiffin-carrier?" (Image: Tiffin carrier.)

2. "Life is a continuous travelogue." (Image: None, but a really pretty font.)

3. "Nothing's wrong with eating weevils! Paharganj 2007" (Image: Cereal bowl with cartoon weevils poking their heads out. Also a spoon.)

4. "I Survived The Punjab" (Image: State of Punjab with Amritsar starred. If we want to go all double-entendre and Punjabi pride, I could put this one on a thong.)

If any of this interests you (interest does not mean "commitment to buy"), let me know and I'll get the designs up this weekend.

If none of this interests you, then... I may be putting ads up on the blog pretty soon. ^__^

In Which Blue Adds Up The Numbers, And Considers

Now that I have my temp job secured, I am able to sit down and write out exactly, to the penny, the amount of income I will be earning between today and graduation (in May).

This is, of course, assuming I have no sick days.

Total earnings for this five-month period? $5171.31, exactly.

Then I sat down and wrote out all of my fixed expenses. This includes rent (at $262.50/month), utilities (approx. $60/month, though possibly higher -- I haven't yet seen the first winter bills), food (around $100/month), car insurance payments ($74.00/month), gas (about 1.5 tanks or $35/month, assuming I do no extra travel), credit card payments (minimum is $15/month), and university student fees (a whopping $1500).

Total fixed expenses? $4779.00, approximated.

This leaves me with just about $392.31 to be spread over a five-month period and to include all necessary clothing, travel, textbooks, entertainment, restaurant food, doctor visits/prescriptions, car problems, gifts, what-have-you. (Or I could use it to pay more than the minimum monthly payment on my credit card.)

Or, if we divide it by five, $78.46.

Now, if I pay $30 on my credit card every month instead of $15 (thus making me feel like I'm actually doing something about the debt -- it's only $368.11 at this point, but it's still driving me crazy), then I will have $63.46 of "discretionary money" every month. (I'll also, at the end of the month, have about $250 left on the credit card assuming I make no additional purchases.)

I'll also probably get between $600-800 in tax refunds, although I'm not going to factor that into my budgeting until I see the numbers in hand.

So. Can I live on $63.46/month? On the one hand, it seems easy. Read books at Borders and watch movies in 10-minute chunks on YouTube. (It's a good thing I love cooking and hate fast food.)

On the other hand, one major expense (like my hard drive failure last year) and I'm $crewed.

And I haven't yet factored in the expense of the job hunt. Suze Orman tells the "young, fabulous and broke" to go ahead and put the entire job hunt on the credit card, and consider it a "loan for one's future." I may find myself taking her advice.

(I also haven't factored in paying back my family for the loan they gave me to help pay for the India trip; we've all assumed those payments will take place after I get the "real job.")

$63.46.

I wonder how close I can come to "living on" that number.

I dare myself to do it. ^__^

Is MTurk Really The Best Way to MAKE MONEY ONLINE?

So I promised you a story. And, quite anti-Murphy's Laws of Blogging, I'm providing it. ^__^

I wrote a few days ago about my "continuous, constant" thought process re: the post-graduation job search. This includes my trying to do one thing every day that will get me closer to a post-graduation job.

Yesterday, this "one thing" was going shopping and investing in some functional, professional-looking winter clothing. Not as cause-effect related as, say, updating my resume (that's on the list for next week), but a huge step up from my graduate-student wardrobe of thrift-store sweaters and tatty "theatre-person" scarves.

However, there's something else that I'm trying to do "one thing towards," every day. That'd be "finding ways to earn more money."

Now wait, you might ask. Aren't these the same goal? I mean, won't getting a good job get you more money?

Yes and no. Or, more accurately, "Yes, but in the future. I need money now."

Not to mention that landing a decent job is a cost-intensive process. There's the clothing budget, the travel budget, the transcript-printing budget, etc.

Oh, and rent-food-utilities.

So, in the name of "what's one thing I can do today that will help me earn more money," I joined Amazon's Mechanical Turk.

In case you're not familiar with MTurk, it's the sort of thing people do right before they start selling their bodily fluids. (Which I've thought about. There's a plasma bank two blocks from my apartment.) It's... well, click here for the details, but it's essentially a way for companies to outsource menial tasks to anonymous workers, while paying very, very low prices. Think "0.06 per task." That kind of low.

It's also about the only legitimate "make money online" thing I've found, so far. So I signed up.

I chose a task asking me to transcribe thirty minutes of an audio podcast, in exchange for $5.00. I've got over 100 wpm (sixteen years of piano lessons), and so thought it would take me about an hour. That's almost minimum wage!

Three hours and twenty typed pages of text later, I earned my $5.00. I don't think I've ever typed twenty pages in a single block before. 7,000 words.

Part of my problem was that I was a n00b; I didn't know, for example, that I could reconfigure WinAmp to play the dialogue at a slower rate (thus allowing me to type alongside it in real time instead of wasting time stopping and starting the audio). With a little practice I could probably half my transcribing time. This would put me at... well, less than minimum wage, but still something.

And yet I don't know if I can type 7,000 words night after night; an extra $25 or $30 at the end of the week would be great, though, and the incentive is enough to make me want to give this transcribing business another shot.

What about the rest of the offerings on MTurk? Dismal. And mostly related to spamming people. One pays $0.06 if you send them the name and phone number of a local gym owner (for telemarketing purposes, no doubt); another pays $0.10 for you to post advertisements in the comments of people's MySpace pages. One, which I almost did, pays $1.00 for you to call a number and give your opinion about "your college experience;" then I wondered if they were just after my name and phone number (for telemarketing purposes) and decided not to bother.

I suppose today's "one thing towards," then, is turning over the question to all of you (my own crowdsourcing, as it were). Is there a better legit place to make a little cash via the internet, or is Turking, sad as it is, the best way to go?

The Money Paradox, Part Two: Books

In the “Indian Writers in English” class, the professor was asking the question “For whom do these writers write? Is it for an Indian audience, or a Western audience?”

He laid out some statistics on how many books by particular Indian authors had been purchased in India in the past few years. The numbers were pretty small. Only in the thousands.

“And if Indian readers aren’t reading these English books,” he proposed, “then why do Indian writers keep writing them?”

We’ll leave the second half of the question alone for the moment, because I want to focus on the first half; his conclusion that Indian readers aren’t reading English books.

When my students saw me carrying a recently-purchased book under my arm one afternoon, they were amazed. I’m the sort of person who, like Tereza in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, always has a book on me somewhere; but I’m starting to feel a little strange about it, because carrying a new book on this campus attracts attention, even if I’m just sitting and reading at the dhaba. No one has new books here. No one can afford them, and my students told me I was very “posh” for being able to carry one.

(Never mind explaining that, with paperbacks at around Rs 300, purchasing here is really the smarter idea, and that “in my own country” I would not be able to afford any of the books I’ve been carrying.)

Even the students in the “Indian Writers” class aren’t reading books by these writers. The books aren’t available. The English department has a small library, but it’s fairly limited and doesn’t have many authors more recent than Narayan. Our professor mentions Kiran Desai in every lecture, and Vikram Seth, but we’re not actually going to read Inheritance of Loss or Suitable Boy. The written word, in this class, is limited to the blurry photocopied page; an interview or an essay found somewhere online, and even that can only be photocopied once or twice and passed around the room during the lecture.

This reminds me so much of growing up in the backwoods of nowhere that my heart aches for it. I’m thinking of a young Blue, sitting at her parents’ Macintosh computer (pre-internet) looking at “the complete Time Magazine archives” on CD-ROM and memorizing details about play and film reviews, because the plays have long closed and the films aren’t available at the locally owned Video Castle, but she understands it’s important somehow to know about them.

These students are learning about literature in the same way; around the edges, with the assumption even at the outset that they’ll never read any of these books. Because – as it was for me – the books are both too expensive and too far away.

To quote Tom Stoppard: “How can you sleep for grief?”

The Money Paradox

The friends with whom I went to dinner (and the temple) last night are all visiting faculty of some nature, spending a semester or a year teaching at U-Hyd. I’ve heard them all comparing salaries (guess that’s not a taboo in India), and so have figured out about how much they take home each month... if I did the math correctly. ^__^

But the number is small enough that when they try to bargain auto drivers down, they are serious. A five-rupee difference “means something,” and not just the satisfaction of having bested the driver.

It also means that they think I am wealthy, or at least comparatively so. And, perhaps, I am.

But the irony (the “paradox” of the title) is that, of all of us, I am actually the least wealthy. They have saved assets and I have debits. I am, to wit, broke. This entire trip is being financed through a loan.*

I’ve explained to a few people about the typical American debtor lifestyle and they are astonished. Even I, if I truly think about it, am astonished, because mathematically it doesn’t add up. If one considers the national debt as well as the hundreds of thousands of dollars of individual debt… exactly how is America getting by, anyway? And what exactly is it using to keep the economy going?

Because a lakh or so stored in a bank account isn’t much, but it’s something each of these visiting faculty have, and something very few Americans can claim.

* Editor’s Note: She hates the fact that she couldn’t set enough money aside to pay for this trip, particularly after working all summer. She would like to refer you to this recent NY Times article on the rise in “student fees.” Her tuition is paid by the university, but paying these fees eats up forty percent of her teaching stipend. Thus much of what she earned this summer went towards paying debts incurred during the school year, and working over winter break will begin to pay for this designated “internship semester” (in which she receives no teaching stipend or other income, but still must pay the same amount of fees), etc.