This morning there were fewer buses than usual. Fewer buses means a longer commute time as well as being packed cheek-to-jowl during the ride — usually I don’t mind this, but in the winter the additional bulk of winter coats and sniffly noses makes things a bit awkward. At one point a little subscription card fluttered out of my New Yorker and landed on the muddy floor of the bus, and I was caught in a brief but heart-pounding ethical dilemma about the evils of littering vs. the evils of squeezing between my fellow passengers to pick up a muddy piece of trash which I would then have to clasp like a treasure for the remainder of the ride.
Which, I did. And then upon exiting the bus discovered that the municipal trash cans haven’t been emptied for quite a while so I had to balance my muddy piece of trash on top of an already overflowing pile. These small but consistent breakdowns in civil society meshed well with the fact that the New Yorker I was reading consisted almost exlusively of articles about financial collapse — the phrase that sticks with me is “The clothes in our closets today will be the ones we’re wearing when we’re old.”
Arriving at work, I’ve logged into ‘Mint.com’ in order to be reassured by the fact that I am not yet entirely broke. The top line in my financial report is one that I mentally classify as “Cash to buy food after I lose my job.” Today some sort of software error has resulted in that number appearing as a nice, round zero. (I’m hoping that it’s a software error and not a bank failure because later on in the report it describes my cash-flow situation as being positive which could not otherwise possibly be true.)
All this makes me question the wisdom of renting a $1000 room in Honolulu next month. Perhaps I will try just a little bit harder to find a subletter for my place here in Minneapolis.