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I came back from my summer adventures in San Francisco all excited about renewing my commitment to my blog, and then I proceeded to not post for two months. My apologies. I have been busy, and scattered and confused, building up my life again back home in Colorado: finding work, finding more work than I expected and gratefully lapping up every opportunity, reconnecting, bouncing from house sit to house sit and remembering why that made me feel flustered and out of sorts … Mainly, though, I’ve been uncertain about the direction of this blog.
I’ve been reading some fantastic popular blogs of late, from The Comics Curmudgeon and Medium Large, to RedheadWriting and SEOmoz, to the Tim Ferriss’ blog and I Will Teach You to Be Rich. Each blog has a specific focus, an overall message and reason for being. Does mine? So far, I’ve felt unfocused, writing on whatever happens to spark my mind. I wonder whether I should stretch for a gimmick, find a way to promise my readers that I will make them rich (as soon as I figure out how to make myself so) …
But the fact is that I already have a focus for my blog. I have a very strange life. I don’t have a job. I don’t have a mortgage, and I don’t have a lease. More unusual: I don’t want any of these things. I make money, I sleep in safe and comfortable places, and I feel wealthy. I also feel creative, excited, and grateful about my life overall. While my lifestyle is far from unique—in fact, the “joyfully jobless” (as author Barbara Winter calls freelancers and entrepreneurs) are far more common than Americans tend to think. I expect that people in creative housing situations—house sitters, eternal travelers, and those who live in non-house, non-apartment homes like RVs, cabins, mini-houses, and such—are also far more common than we tend to think. Still, there’s far too little talk about the alternatives to the standard American dream of “get a job, work all day Monday through Friday for 50 years, then retire completely; while you’re at it, buy the biggest house you can mortgage, as soon as you can.” As the business world shifts, that dream is becoming increasingly impossible, and I’ll argue that it was always impractical. There are many other ways to live, and many that are not only safe, responsible, and relatively comfortable, but also fulfilling and joyful. Simply blogging about my own life experiments, and those of others I learn about, I’ll never run out of things to say.
There is another reason, though, why I’ve been unsure about this blog: It’s out there for anyone to see. I have a feeling all of the ideas that make me interesting and readable are the kinds of things any proper American should be keeping secret. We’re constantly being told to watch what we write on the interwebs, lest we be unemployable for life. Dates, too, can Google and judge, as can potential roommates, landlords, creditors, anybody. The more unorthodox opinions I share (meaning everything that differentiates me and makes me worth reading), the more I mark myself as a freak. Will I ruin my future chances by expressing myself too widely? Telling people about my odd lifestyle, how I turn down “good” “permanent” jobs, how I hop from home to home and work project to work project, has already started an argument that nearly lost me one of my best friends, and is obviously starting to worry another (more on him next post).
After careful consideration (two months of it!), though, I realize that any job, any business partners, any date or friend or roommate I’d ever really want to be with had best be willing to accept me as I am. I am a responsible, intelligent, hard working, sane, and happy person. I also happen to like exploring unusual ways of making a life. I’m willing to tell the world about that.
One of my favorite web comics put it better:
Special thanks to the glorious XKCD.com
Courtesy of Stockvault.com
As I settle into my new, rent-paid, call-it-mine, honest to goodness long-term home, I’m reveling in something that most non-nomadic Americans take for granted. In fact, most folks with homes have the opportunity to do this many times every day, and they actively avoid it. We spend thousands of dollars every year trying to avoid it. Advertisements abound, on TV, radio, billboards, and in magazines, promising to eliminate it from our lives. Still, I have to say it now: I love cooking! Cooking is how my favorite past boyfriends won my heart. Cooking is why I love Thanksgiving Day: Growing up, it was the one day of the year when my typical 80s suburban, both-parents-working family cooked a meal from scratch, beginning to end.
And now, after three years of fast food, frozen dinners, and canned soup, I’m cooking again! After two weeks of getting used to my new home (This is my home! Mine! I really live here!), last Friday I finally felt comfortable enough to make an epic trip to the grocery store. Now I have only to saunter down to the kitchen to find butter spread, milk, yoghurt (plain and flavored), cottage cheese, pita chips, bread, peanut butter, three kinds of cheese, and oh, the vegetables! I have fresh potatoes, asparagus (on sale this week!), avocado (ditto), a bag of salad, broccoli, cauliflower, carrots, and my favorite staple, cabbage. Then there are the veggies in the freezer, next to all of those beautiful chicken breasts. I have a full box of Cheerios and one of Wheat Chex, and enough baking ingredients to whip up a batch of Toll House cookies on a moment’s notice.
This is a luxury I couldn’t have in my pure-nomad, house sitting days. When I knew I’d be changing houses in two weeks or two days, it didn’t make sense to buy a full package of any ingredient. I couldn’t stock up when something was on sale. I simple carried a small box of canned vegetables and soups from house to house, and if I was really settling in, I bought just enough Lean Cuisines to serve as dinner for each night before the next move. The only fresh milk, eggs, or vegetables I had were those that my clients begged me to eat before they spoiled. And while I was saving money on rent, I was spending quite a bit on Noodles & Company and Chipotle.
So now I’m cooking. I love the tightwaddery of making things from scratch. I love the creative process of putting food together. What I love most, though, is the freedom it gives me to make my meals exactly the way I want them. Today I brunched on a fried egg, overcooked so that the whites are all crispy, and sunny side up, which no diner will do these days, for fear I’ll get salmonella poisoning and sue them. With it, I had nearly, but not quite burned whole wheat toast, and 1/3 pound of asparagus, steam/sauteed in the special way my friend Rachel taught me years ago, flavored with a little olive oil and a little lemon juice. All of this was topped off with my beloved, not-available-in-any-restaurant-I’ve-ever-seen, caffiene-free Pepsi. And I ate it all while still wearing my pajamas.
I expect this glorious pleasure at eating exactly what I want, this satisfaction at opening the fridge and cabinets and seeing a wide array of fresh, nutritious foods, this glee at saving vegetable steaming water for making soup later on, will wear off to a degree. On days when I’m rushing to get somewhere, I will just grab a shaker bottle full of water and artificial protein drink powder. Still, I don’t thing I’ll ever fully get over this joy of simply, directly feeding myself.
As I settle into my home, finally completely unpacking after years of dragging unexamined luggage from house to house, I’ve realized something: I have a lot of worn-out socks. There are the socks I’ve been wearing anyway, blissfully ignoring the holes in the heels, and there are many, many more socks that I’ve stored away because the holes were too big for comfort. Why didn’t I just throw them away? I was too busy moving around.
Now I’m pleased that I still have so many worn-through socks around. As I finally started to look at them, I was reminded of a former boyfriend who kept a bucket full of dead socks, cut down the back of the leg and through the sole to the toe, so they would lie flat. He used them as cleaning rags, and so saved money and landfill space, for he was an environmentalist as well as a cheapskate. (Ah, how I adored that boy!) He could dust, scrub, wipe down, and sop up any mess, then toss the rag into the washing machine to become clean and white and ready to use again. If a job was so gross that he couldn’t bear to wash the rag, (Toilet overflow, anyone?) it was no great tragedy to throw away a sock that otherwise would have been tossed months ago.
Remembering him, I was cutting open my holey old socks, dreaming of soft dusters and counter moppers, when I noticed how truly soft and cushy my socks are inside. I wear terry-lined, cotton-blend gym socks most of the time, so my new rag pile is fuzzy, luxuriously soft—just what I want on my face when I’m washing mascara off of my eyes at bedtime. Forget cleaning rags. I now have a stack of incredibly comfortable, though odd-looking, washcloths. I keep them under my kitchen sink (lest my roommate walk by the open bathroom door and decide I’m a freak with a sock fetish) and use one fresh, clean, soft sock every night.
You may be more squeamish than I about rubbing your face with something that once absorbed a workout’s worth of foot sweat. I, for one, trust my washing machine to completely de-gross my socks, so I now see only odd-shaped bits of fabric. Even if the washcloth plan is too much for you, I still recommend socks as household cleaning rags. Rags are beautiful things, things we have far too few of in today’s American culture. They’re even sturdier than Brawny towels and more absorbant, they won’t tear or dissolve mid-cleanup, and best of all, they’re free!
I’ve been a fan of the late, great newsletter-cum reference book The Tightwad Gazette since I was a subscriber in the early 90s. I loved the idea of people across the country sharing simple, creative little tricks for creating a quality, happy life, while spending less money and amassing less unnecessary stuff. In that wonderfully friendly, miserly tradition, I’d like to share any fun ideas I come across that help me use less money, less time, less space for stuff, or all of the above. I think it’s fitting here. My “nomad” lifestyle is all about staying as free as possible from the fetters of unnecessary bills and unnecessary stuff.
Here’s my latest discovery: Since I grew up enough to wash my own hair, I’ve always shampooed my hair every single day. I felt I had to. My genes have blessed me with the charming combination of an oily scalp and baby-fine hair, so that any oil in my hair sticks it flat to my head. To add to the ickiness, my hair is light in color as well as texture (shifting, through my teenage years, from pale blonde to my current light, reddish brown), and any extra oil covers the pale color, making the entire flat mess dull, dark—quite obviously an oil slick. I’ve always felt the need to do a full shampoo at least every 24 hours, and sometimes even more often.
Well, fellow oily folks, check this out: The beauty magazine in a web site, Total Beauty, gives targeted advice for all hair types. After I took a quiz on the site, my hair was diagnosed as “oily” (big surprise), and I was given this advice: “It may sound counterintuitive, but don’t wash your hair every day. Why? Because it dries out your scalp, causing it to produce more oil, which just makes the situation worse.” I’d, um, never thought of that. The site suggested that I wash no more than once every other day, but assured me that I could just rinse my hair with water on off days, for styling and anti-ick purposes. I’d never thought of that, either. It had never occurred to me to just rinse my hair without going through the whole shampoo-and-conditioner-and-styling products routine.
Well, I’ve been following the advice for about two weeks now, and I’m delighted with the results. The oil slick seems to come on a bit more slowly, and just rinsing my hair in the shower on the second day does wonders: My hair gets its color back, and it dries fluffier and cuter than it does on the days I shampoo. I don’t feel the need to add volumizing hairspray (which I do on shampoo days), because my hair already has just the right amount of residual stickiness. Better yet, I use only half as much shampoo and conditioner, and my non-shampoo showers are lightening fast, saving time, water, and heating costs. It’s sad to think how much shampoo, conditioner, time, and natural resources I’ve wasted over the years because I just didn’t know any better. I’m glad someone finally enlightened me.
This is a prime example of the fine example set by The Tightwad Gazette. From it, I learned the power of scientific experimentation in everyday life. Its author, the brilliant and entertaining Amy Dacyczyn, always encouraged her readers to find new uses for old things, new fixes for broken things, and to question how much laundry detergent they really needed, whether the dishwasher or the sink used more water, and so on. Now that I’ve realized that my lifelong hair-washing assumptions were wrong, my scientific tightwad mind has been reawakened. I’ll let you know how my future experiments turn out.
