The 100 by 30 project

What he said!

See, somebody agrees with me. And he has a PhD in econ and everything...

"Deep down, they believe they should be like the Native Americans and use every part of the product or beast they have consumed."

Sure, I'm probably late to the party, but I love "Stuff White People Like" as much as everyone else. A few of my favorites are:

1. "Gifted" Children.
   

   White people love “gifted” children, do you know why? Because an astounding 100% of their kids are gifted!  Isn’t that amazing?

   I’m pretty sure the last non-gifted white child was born in 1962 in Reseda, CA.  Since then, it’s been a pretty sweet run.

   The way it works is that white kids that are actually smart are quickly identified as “gifted” and take special classes and eventually end up in college and then law school or med school.

   But wait, aren’t there white people who aren’t doctors or lawyers, or even all that smart?

   Well, here is another one of those awesome white person win-win situations.

   Because if a white kid gets crappy grades and can’t seem to ever do anything right in school, they are still gifted! How you ask? They are just TOO smart for school. They are too creative, too advanced to care about the trivial minutiae of the day to day operations of school.

2. Japan.
   
   Though there is full white consensus on a number of white things, there is perhaps nothing that draws more universal white acclaim than the island nation of Japan.  It should be noted, that some white people harbor SOME ill will toward Japan because of whaling, killing dolphins or Nanking.  But those are generally considered isolated incidents that do not indict the entire nation.
   ....
   It is a dream for them to go over seas and actually live in Japan. This helps them not only because it fills their need to travel, it will enable them to gain important leverage over other white people at Sushi restaurants where they can say “this place is pretty good, but living in Japan really spoiled me.  I’ve had such a hard time finding a really authentic place.”   
   
   
3. Plays.
   

   It is not known if white people actually enjoy plays or if they are just victims of massive peer pressure from the 45% of white people who have acted in a play at some point in their life.

   The only real advice around this subject is to never accept an invitation from a white person to go see a play.  Often times you will be supporting their friend or cousin and then get stuck with a $45 ticket (at least) and three hours of trying to figure how close you are to the end.

4. Bicycles.
   
   But there is a special category of bicycles that appeal far more to white women, the European city bike (pictured). White women have a lot of fantasies about idealized lives, and one of them is living in Europe and riding around an old city on one of these bikes. They dream about waking up and riding to a little cafe, then visiting bakeries and cheese shops and finally riding home to prepare a fancy meal for their friends who will all eat under a canopy with white Christmas lights. This information can be used to help gain the trust/admiration of a white woman, especially if you can pull off a lie about how your mother told you about how she used to do all of these things when she was younger.

Most of these had me dissolving in giggles, often because of self-recognition (for one, I love plays, or as we're supposed to say, "live theater"); the only really "ouch, truth hurts" moment was the comment about the unused KitchenAid mixer. Why did we let ourselves register for that stupid contraption?

“I Need This Class to Stay on My Parents' Health Insurance”

One of my favorite non-pf blogs is Confessions of a Community College Dean. Dean Dad always provides such caring and thoughtful insights into academia, especially the underfunded, non-sexy world of community college. The topic of his most recent post is especially interesting: students who register for classes they have no intention of taking so that they can stay on their parents' health insurance.

But there's something fundamentally wrong with a system that rewards people taking that extra class just to get the insurance. I don't entirely blame them for doing it – they've found a loophole in a ridiculously unfair system – but it certainly distorts what we're trying to do. These folks show up in our attrition numbers, our outcomes assessments, and our (non)-graduation rates, all of which get blamed on us. And they get lower GPA's than they probably ought, simply from spreading themselves unrealistically thin.

Go read it.

Unsponsored company recommendations

I doubt many speed swimmers stumble across this blog, but just in case someone is Googling them, I'd really like to recommend Swim Outlet (http://www.swimoutlet.com/).

• First of all, they carry long competitive swim suits, for which I am very grateful because, in contrast to the general trend of improved tall clothing selections, those seem to be much harder to find than they were 10 years ago when I was a year-round competitive swimmer. So great selection.
• Secondly, they really earned the name outlet: the suit was $52, versus speedo.com's $62.
• Lastly, delivery was quick. They shipped the day after I placed the order, and it arrived two days later. Now I'm really glad I didn't settle for the juuust-a-bit-too-short suit I tried on at Dick's Sporting Goods because it wouldn't need to be shipped.

As they say on ebay, HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!!!!! A+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

I'd also like to recommend 1800contacts.com, which I've been buying contacts from for years. Recently they really came through: it had been far too long since my last eye appointment, so when I placed a refill order and they called to confirm my prescription with the doctor, the doctor -- quite reasonably -- said the script was too old to approve.

1800contacts.com called me immediately to let me know that the doctor had rejected the order, and told me that they'd hold the order for a week (meaning I wouldn't have to fill out everything online again, just tell them to check again with the doctor once I'd had my appointment). Also, if I didn't reactivate the order within a week but did replace the order within 30 days, they'd give me a $10 gift certificate.

In the end, I just ordered the contacts from the doctor, as I always do when my prescription changes because I feel guilty not doing so. But given that I was really low on contacts (I wear disposables), I really appreciated 1800contacts.com calling me quickly instead of waiting for me to call in a panic a week later, after my last pair had ripped, to see where the heck my order was. Yes, it's in their best interest to call, but I'm always surprised when companies seem happy to let troubled orders fall into a black hole anyway!

Strong finances, strong marriage

I really like this post by Brooke of dollarfrugal.com on how to build your net worth and your marriage simultaneously. Some of her points that I strongly agree with are:

1. Open Lines of Communication. My husband and I talk often about our money. This started formally as "financial summits" (because my first two years of grad school were so insane we had to schedule time to comb over Visa statements) but has morphed into more of an understanding that we can always talk comfortably about our finances. I'm sure this open communication style will translate to other areas of our lives.
2. Even Thinking About the “D” Word Is Bad for Finances. A's maternal grandmother has a tendency to strange things, among them "I hope you and S. aren't going to get a divorce!" A's favorite reply is, "Nah -- divorce is too expensive." (In her defense, three of her four children are divorced, so I can understand why it occupies her thoughts and we just laugh off the rude questions.)
3. Find Cheap Hobbies. We love taking nightly walks together and while at my parents' house this past Christmas we rediscovered the joy of Racko, which played a big role in family togetherness time when I was a kid. (We already love board games, but they tend to be long, German-style games that only work with 3+ people; Racko is a nice change of pace.)

I'd forgotten how awesome libraries are

(Note: I wrote this post over the summer during my summer internship and never published it for some reason.)

I'm living in a city -- downtown -- without a lot of residential amenities. No grocery store, no book store (I'm rudely discounting the Catholic bookstore and the nudie bookstore). I have no car. Also working a strict 40-hour week means I have a lot of free time, so in between visits from my husband where he brings backlogs of my magazines (I read an Economist truly cover to cover for the first time ever last month), I was desperate for reading material.

So I was spending a lot of money on books. It had to stop. Yes, I want to support authors (and, erm, publishers... Hi, English Major!), but my budget cannot absorb $100/month on books.

And then I realized that Summer City library might give me a library card even though I'm not a permanent resident -- and it turns out they did! All I needed to show them was my paystub with my temporary local address.

Personally, I think the librarians there have excellent taste, because sitting right there on the new releases shelve -- all I had time to browse with the remainder of my lunch break -- were three books on the top of my Amazon wishlist: the new Jane Smiley novel; "Everything Conceivable", which is about the swift rise of the now massive artificial reproduction technology industry; and "One Perfect Day", about the wedding industry.

You know the marriage is more important than the wedding, right?

I've spent the past few weeks playing with a post about how being in a great marriage is changing my feelings on the institution and how it relates to personal finance. Specifically, I've become more conservative -- not in an anti-gay marriage way, and I'll certainly never be arguing for covenant marriage, but I do feel like we should either throw out the institution all together (which I'd actually be fine with) or have it mean something. Why bother going halvsies, leaving us with something that mostly means people enjoy a few legal benefits for a few years until the divorce (and then do it over again)?

But it just keeps sounding like a moralizing screed against pre-nups and women who obsess about engagement rings, which isn't quite what I feel. (Quite.) I don't know if I'll ever get it to a point where I feel comfortable publishing it, so for now I leave you with this great review from The Economist of a book that's getting a lot of press, Rebecca Mead's "One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding":

Ms Mead takes special pleasure in “traditionalesque”; commerce disguised as tradition. An example of the traditionalesque would be the “Apache wedding prayer”, read by a freelance multi-faith wedding minister called Joyce Gioia, when neither the bride nor the groom nor the prayer itself has anything to do with Apache culture (the prayer was invented for a Hollywood movie called “Broken Arrow”).

The book sounds like a more journalistic approach to Caitlin Flanagan's excellent essay "The Wedding Merchants". (Although I generally find Flanagan intolerable; talk about your moralizing screeds!)

Tax diversification and retirement

A. and I have been talking about putting less into his 403(b) and opening a Roth IRA, for two main reasons:

1. the main argument for a 403(b) (I mean, beyond "saving for retirement is good"; specifically in contrast to a Roth) is that you'll be living on less in retirement than you are now and therefore would rather be taxed on that smaller sum. Even if we assume that rates are the same forty years from now, we hope that we are actually living on more in retirement than we are now. So optimism (not just blind -- our forecasts bear this out) is one reason for opening a Roth.
2. It's kind of foolish to assume that tax rates will be the same in forty years. They may be higher, they may be lower, but we don't want to gamble our retirement savings too much in either direction.  A guest post at Money, Matter, and More Musings sums up this sort of reasoning as "Tax Diversification".

It will probably have to wait until after the summer, both because we'll know how much we cleared from my summer job and because there's already going to be enough long-distance paperwork to deal with.

The tastiest $2.50 I've spent in awhile

Even my small city has jumped on the cupcake bandwagon -- we've had two cupcake-only bakeries for a few years now. I've never been too impressed, though. The cake itself was always fine, but the icing wasn't to my taste, generally not stiff enough and a little too light and greasy in texture.

But a new one just opened and oh my goodness. The icing is heaven. The cupcakes are gorgeous. I really wish I disclosed my city so I could link to their website, but I'll just leave you with some pictures of the wonderful treats that sell for $2.50 a pop.

The last one is my favorite: it's plain vanilla, and the lighting in the pic doesn't reveal the enormous amount of vanilla bean in the frosting.

When politicians surprise you.

My city is a one-party Democratic city. As a result, the Democratic machine here isn't really Democratic so much as it's a group of old, myopic, self-serving men who feel entitled to office.

Anyway, one of our great young city councilors -- call him P -- was running in the Dem primary for mayor. (Again, because it's a one-party town, primaries are the real elections. The general's just for show...) We like him, like his policies, and poured a lot of money into his campaign.

However, due to certain characteristics of our current mayor, which I won't get into because they easily out my location, it's would be impossible right now to challenge or criticize the current mayor. So, understandably, rather than ruin his reputation and be branded a mudslinger for wanting to have an honest conversation about our current mayor's failings, he decided to withdraw from the race and save his political capital for a later campaign. I was disappointed in the result, but completely understood his reasoning.

Anyway, a few days ago in the mail we received a partial refund check for our contributions to his campaign! I was completely astounded. Is this common?