Cheap Whine

I hate the word “budget.” I even hate it when I hear the Dutch guy at work say it and it comes out like boödjut. My husband makes it worse by throwing the word “austerity” in front of it. But, not liking it doesn’t make it go away. It is what it is, and that’s where the whine comes in.

When I was driving an older, less stylish car a few years ago, an acquaintance let me know that she thought I “deserved a nice car.”

Well, duh. But a new car was not what I could afford, so I decided to develop an irrational lust for something I could afford. I decided on a mug. The search began for the Cadillac of mugs — sleek, tailored, insulating yet aesthetic, with both the visceral pleasure of pottery and the snooty daintiness of porcelain, and I fancied a kind of fluting out at the top, and of course a gorgeous color and design. I found one in a second hand store and I fawned over it for a long time, loving the way that I was continuously surprised at the volume its broad bottom, the mug butt, could hold, and by how delicate it was at the lip. Oh, how I loved my special mug.

Then we taught my 13-year-old to empty the dishwasher and he promptly broke it.

I am now in the market again for the next special mug. I have to admit that half the fun is looking, and knowing that — no matter what — the sky’s the limit when I find it, whether it shows up at Goodwill or Pottery Barn or Spiegel’s.

What kind of cheap dumb thing do you deserve the best of? Go look for that one great cheap thing. Let it take weeks or months if necessary. Shop for it every time you go out. Take notes. Make your decision based entirely on aesthetic, primal, sublime, and personal pleasure in the object. Let it complete you, make a big hairy deal out of it, fetishize it, build it a freaking shrine. Once you’ve found it, don’t even let other people touch it. Be crazy in this one little area and know that when it finally gets wrecked, you get to do it all over again. Go on, you deserve it.

And tell Ruby ^[1] all about it when you do.