I keep meaning to explain the depth and origins of my most apparent trait, cheapness, but my second most apparent trait, laziness, always gets in the way. I usually boil it down the following: if I was schizophrenic I probably wouldn't even share with myself. If I've used that line before, I apologize. Repetitiveness is my number 3.
Anyway, I was talking to some parents the other day, something I've decided I should probably stop doing, and they were filling me in on the cost of childcare. Apparently it costs around 15 bucks an hour to get someone to look after one of you, more for two. That means it would cost your mom and I 30 bucks minimum to leave the house for two hours. Assuming that we could somehow walk out of our front door and into a theater, by the time you added tickets and so forth, it would cost more than 50 dollars just to see a movie. I wouldn't pay 50 dollars to see a movie if I was starring in it and Angelina Jolie was playing my sexually precocious maid.
When my good friends had kids they always seemed to disappear. The rest of us would get together and wonder about them, remember them, pour beer on the sidewalk in memory of them. They seemed like prisoners. You can't come out for one drink? we'd say. You can't get away for one party? If they'd have said, 'look I like you, but you're not worth 15 dollars and hour' I would have totally understood. It's no wonder most of them haven't seen a movie since Titanic.
After I heard this I started looking at ads on craigslist for nannies and babysitters. One ad caught my eye as reasonable, 60 dollars a week for 12 hours a day. Sadly, it was someone offering to pay that amount, not someone offering to work for it. Presumably the people who would work for it had done the math and seen that it works out to 45 cents an hour. Now, that's in my price range.
The thing about me is that you never want me weighing things in dollar terms. I can spend twenty minutes in front of a value meal menu trying to figure out how to save a dime. If I have to start putting a price on GOING OUTSIDE then I'm going to go all hermit in no time. I will shun the light and grow a beard and stop communicating with the outside world just to avoid hearing about things that might cost 15 dollars to go do. If you knew how bad my beard looks you'd be as worried about this as I am.
I used to think that stage parents were some of the lowest forms of life, putting their kids in front of cameras in the hopes of vicariously living out their own failed dreams of stardom and vaguely hoping to get a cookbook deal out of the whole thing. Now I'm not so sure they're not just looking for a way to get some extra scratch so they can see a movie and grab a burger once in a while. Maybe this is why you see so many young kids dragged into R rated films. How many slasher films seem worth 50 bucks? Economically speaking, it makes way more sense to just scar your children for life. If you end up looking anything like me you probably won't have faces for the big screen, but given the numbers I'm afraid that we're going to have to seriously consider putting you to work somehow. Consider yourselves lucky we don't have any salt mines nearby.
Novel - Update after the break
Dunking - 29 inches. New program after the break
French - Saw and ad for a french nanny. Will let you know how she feels about 45 cents an hour.
2 comments:
Amen brother, I think you've finally discovered what fork in the road I came to.
Except I've seen at least 50 movies since Titanic, it's just that 47 were made by Disney. And once I snuck out of work for a couple hours to watch Signs... by myself! It really didn't matter at the time... just whatever was playing at that specific moment at that specific theater and wasn't a cartoon.
Now I just stay up late to watch a west coast NBA game and that's pretty much as good as sex (didn't improve my vertical though).
this is hilarious. We just went to see our first post-baby H movie this weekend, and I was thinking that *exact* same thing ($50 movie - who can afford the popcorn?)
Post a Comment