Saturday, September 22, 2000

 

1:24 p.m. Today we face the age-old question: stay in and keep on working as if nothing is out of the ordinary, or go wild and take advantage of the fact that it's Saturday? Self-employed means never having to say it's Saturday. One of the many undeniable joys of working independently. No bosses; raise a fist! Power to the little people.

Unfortunately, it also means no salary, no paycheck, no money, no savings, no moolah, no mad spending spree, no dinero, no hope, no future, no insurance, no security, no backlog, no nest egg, no safety cushion, no secret stash, no cash.

Which translates to: no going out shopping on Saturday, which is the American way. The dream. The script we were born with. You're supposed to fire up the family vehicle and do the errands. Go to the hardware store, the market, the cleaners, the repair places. Keep up appearances, stock the larder, batten the hatches, keep your bread buttered.

I know there are people out there doing just that. I know there are people who have enough money for small things. I see them through the windows, carrying packages, greeting the cute UPS man, unloading their car trunks, resodding their front lawns. The almighty Jones, up with whom we try to keep.

But on the plus side, I absolutely positively can *not* get downsized. I really can't quit, either, but that's a thought for another day. For today, I enjoy perfect job security, and with that thought in mind, I will tell you about some of the ways you can still spend a Saturday if you don't have any money.

You can clean up the outside of your property. You know: pull weeds, trim, rake stuff into piles and look up occasionally at the big, beautiful sky and thank the unseen stars that you have property, and you have a life, and you can still see the sky. There you go.

Or, you can scrub something inside the house -- something that has gotten disgusting with neglect. I recently did just that to the pan inside the ancient toaster oven. I made it so bright and shiny I could see myself, as if through a piece of bent metal, and then I secretly put the pan back inside the oven and didn't tell Igor. When he got up the next morning and started to make his toast, he jumped back in disarray when he saw the pan.

Then he covered it in aluminum foil, so as not to sully it. All in all, there was a fun moment, and it cost me nothing more than one Brillo pad.

Let's see what else. I can go through a pile of stuff in the bottom of the vegetable bin and think about soup. It's fall now, and that's the sort of thing I'm wont to do. Another harmless activity is to go through a catalog and pretend that you're ordering stuff. Circle it with a pen, muse on color, measure and think about sizes, get out a calculator and add it all up. Balance that total with the last figure in your checkbook.

Congratulations! You've just done the math -- and as an added bonus, there's no sluggish wait for the big brown box to arrive.

Ok, enough dreaming and fantasy shopping. Time to get back to work. Being self-employed means never have to say you're fired. Or tired.