broke

I'm doing some translation work for money and getting ready to move to Asia for the year so I am not blogging very much these days, but I had this thought for you all about my Minneapolis years. I'm sorting through my stay in the heartland and I remembered how oppressed I was by the ostentatious frugality of the good people of that state. The more money they had, the more they flaunted their penny-pinching ways. Each one of them was a wannabe Benjamin Franklin. They were keeping their Franklin close and their benjamins closer.

In Minneapolis I overheard some one giving a detailed inventory of how little money she had spent on vacation while on the checkout line of the yuppie grocery store. "And then we found this incredible hotel overlooking the Mediterranean for $15.00 a night. I told the owner that she had to include breakfast and she agreed! I spent two hundred dollars in two weeks!" Skinflint.

Here in New York, we are way more into the ghetto gold. Those anxious women at suburban train stations are clutching their LV spring collection bags as if their lives depended on it. They vacation at "Sandals" in Jamaica. The faces here bear the anxious mark of the shtetl, the overcrowded steamer leaving Naples harbor seventy years ago, the fetid Lower East Side, teeming Flushing, Queens, the Grand Concourse in the Bronx. They look nothing like the good people of Minnesota.