Cheapness -- why?

It's interesting that I've become such a cheapskate. When I was a child, my attitude was spend-spend-spend. Make some money, buy some records, buy some weed, buy some t-shirts, buy anything. Money was there to be spent. But somehow, once I got to New York, I became a cheapskate.

I've been thinking lately of what causes this cheapness. Part of it is just plain old lack of confidence. I think I found New York very threatening economically -- it was the first time I was away from home or college, and the big crazy city was so expensive. I didn't know where I was going career-wise, so it just seemed smart to start to economize.

And this impulse is still in effect today. I still don't know where I'm going career-wise, and new york is even more crazy expensive. But it's not the expense that's the problem -- and here's where confidence plays a factor. The bigger motivator is uncertainty about the future, about my own economic future. Lack of confidence in my own economic future, is another way of looking at it.

When I think this way, it certainly gets me down. Lack of confidence is not an attractive feature, certainly not in the male of the species. But I don't think it's entirely a lack of confidence that drives my cheapness.

Another contributor is my desire to be as thoughtful and clear-headed (if not just plain rational) about as many things in my life as I can. And this includes my economic decision-making process. So I try to approach every purchasing decision as rationally as I can, and when it comes down to it, rationally we don't need all that much. All the finer things in life, at least those available for purchase, like the good wine, the fancy clothes, the big apartment, etc., the motivating desires for these are not rational. One certainly doesn't need the 20 dollar bottle of wine, or the hundred dollar pair of pants. One can try to look at it rationally, and I do, with thinking along these lines: if I spend this money, how much pleasure will it bring me? Is this pleasure worth the money? How does it compare with the pleasure I could get spending the money in some other fashion. Is a twenty dollar bottle of wine likely to bring me more pleasure than four five dollar bars of Michel Cluizot chocolate? (This question is too easy -- No!)

So one gets all wrapped up in thinking about opportunity costs, the things foregone by spending your money in a particular fashion. And generally, when you're really looking at opportunity costs, fancy things, expensive things, only make sense when it's something that you really care about. So for me, I'm not cheap about my bikes, my espresso maker, my kitchen supplies. (All of which, when you think about it, are tools -- straight guy alert!)

The last explanation I like to ponder for my cheapness is that it's inherited. And I think this actually makes a lot of sense. My mother was cheap, and a hoarder. Her brother is still cheap, and he's a hoarder, and their father was cheap, and a hoarder. It might be a genetic thing -- grandpa was lithuanian, he came from a cold climate where people had to stock things away for the long cold winter. Don't Scandinavians have a reputation for parsimony? Not only is there the long cold winter, next year's growing season might not be so good, so you better have some canned or dried goods stored somewhere.

Or it might be cultural -- one never knows on this genetic v. cultural question. My mother learned cheapness from her (admittedly pretty poor) parents, and I learned cheapness from my cheap mother.

Of course cheapness is a complex behavioral pattern, and you can't come up with a single explanation for a complex behavior. No doubt all of the above contribute. I just hate to think that the first reason, lack of confidence, could be a major contributor. But honestly, it probably is.

We must face our demons down, right? For the most part we cannot vanquish them, but if we can learn to live with them, maybe that's enough.

Now that's a sentence!

I've got this unfortunate habit of writing really long sentences, and really long paragraphs. Hemingway I am not. People stop emailing me because when they send me a three line email I send them three quarters of a page. It just floods out.

I've been thinking that this is due to the literature I cut my teeth on, the first serious books I read as a teenager. My high school girlfriend's father was an anthropology professor, and so she was surrounded with serious books and serious ideas. I was a smart kid, but not exactly surrounded with serious books. So the summer after we started going out, between 11th and 12th grades, I let Denise pick my reading list. And I swear, it was one Doestoyevsky book after another. The Idiot. Crime and Punishment. The motherfucking Brothers Karamatzov. I'm not sure, but I think I read these back to back. And that was that, and my friends today must suffer my 100-word sentences, though I really do try to at least cut the sentences down.

This memory of reading Doestoyevsky was triggered by a book I'm reading, which I read for about eight hours on the plane down here. It's fantastic, really the highest of literary art, but the first part at least is definitely written in the style of those wordy 19th century russians.

So, without further ado, from "The Sleepwalkers" by Hermann Broch, here is quite the sentence:

"Driven by that extraordinary oppression which falls on every human being when, childhood over, he begins to divine tht he is fated to go on in isolation and unaided towards his own death; driven by this extraordinary oppression, which may with justice be called a fear of God, man looks round him for a companion hand in hand with whom he may tread the road to the dark portal, and if he has learned by experience how pleasurable it undoubtedly is to lie with another fellow-creature in bed, then he is ready to believe that this extremely intimate association of two bodies may last until these bodies are coffined: and even if at the same time it has its disgusting aspects, because it takes place under coarse and badly aired sheets, or because he is convinced that all a girl cares for is to get a husband who will support her in later life, yet it must not be forgotten that every fellow-creature, even if she has a sallow complexion, sharp, thin features and an obviously missing tooth in her left upper jaw, yearns, in spite of her missing tooth, for that love which she thinks will for ever shield her from death, from that fear of death which sinks with the falling of every night upon the human being who sleeps alone, a fear that already licks her as with a tongue of flame when she begins to take off her clothes, as Fraulein Erna was doing now; she laid aside her faded red-velvet blouse and took off her dark-green skirt and her petticoat."