unsolicited economic advice from Jenisfamous

May 29, 2007

The post below (asking the question “How many hours per month do you have to work to pay your rent?”) has generated a healthy discussion in the comments.

I happen to know the commenter who answered “14″ (most other answers are in the forties and fifties), and know that he commands a high hourly rate for his services, which leads me to a new topic:

I am convinced that most of what we consider sound financial values about budgeting and saving are illogical Depression-era holdovers.

In our brave new world in which jobs are ephemeral and we are advised to “be your own brand”, it is — for able people — a better use of resources to worry about maximizing income, rather than minimizing expenses, as income is far more fluid than expenses. (It is easier for me to find a way to make twice as much money than it is for me to find a grocery store that charges half-price). This was not true for salarymen in, say, 1935.

Put another way, in an average American city/suburb (I’ll work off my knowledge of Virginia Beach five years ago), rents (excluding public housing and a few crazy luxury apartments) range from about $500 to $1200. Hourly wages range from $5.15 per hour for minimum wage workers to about $300 per hour for top attorneys. Let’s do the math: the top rent is 240% of the bottom rent. The top wage is 5,825% of the bottom wage. Wages clearly have a lot more wiggle room.

If you are an old lady on Social Security (with no wiggle room at all), clipping coupons may be a good use of your time. But who wants to live like an old lady on Social Security? If you are twenty-five and college-educated, I’m not sure that making a budget and carefully living within it is the optimal use of your mojo (”mojo” here meaning time, money, motivation, and ingenuity), unless you are mired in irresponsibly-acquired credit card debt and need remedial financial help.

If you are twenty-five and college-educated, I think your mojo is better expended developing a skill that can be offered on a freelance basis in addition to your 9-to-5 job (and which will provide a backup plan in times of unemployment), or obtaining additional training or participating in networking opportunities such as to accelerate advancement and allow greater job portability in the 9-to-5 job world.

I know how compound interest works, of course, but I think that before an able 25-year-old dumps money into a retirement fund, he should think: is there something I can do with this money that will contribute to making me the kind of person whom others will pay twice as much as I make now? That might be something as simple as taking a class to learn a new skill, and it might be something as un-obvious as flying halfway around the world to meet a mentor in your field. But I think, at 25, that’s a sound investment.

Why on earth didn’t I major in economics? I could do this all day.

Posted by jen | Categories: Jen says, economics  | 4 Comments | | Email This Post Email This Post

Moving!

May 27, 2007

I am moving to a new apartment. I am also reading The Four-Hour Workweek.

Together, these things prompt me to ask for this blog poll: How many hours per month do you have to work to pay your rent? (For example, if you make $80,000 a year and pay $2,000 a month, that’s about $38/hour, so you work about 53 hours to pay your rent. If you work a $10/hr job and pay $450, you work 45 hours to pay your rent, which makes you, in a way, a little bit richer).

So please answer this (anonymously) in the comments: How many hours do you work to pay your rent, and what city do you live in?

Posted by jen | Categories: Jen says  | 13 Comments | | Email This Post Email This Post

closed-caption colloquialisms

May 24, 2007

While doing cardio at the gym, I end up watching a lot of those judge shows in closed-captioning.

On one of them, I think the one with the Hispanic woman judge — regarding a dispute about a Louis Vuitton purse that happened to be counterfeit anyway — I heard uttered the best phrase ever uttered in a courtroom:

“You’re liable, boo!”

Addendum: In trying to figure out the name of that Hispanic woman judge (it’s not Judge Lopez — there are apparently multiple judge shows headed by Hispanic women judges, which is progress of a sort), I came across this article in Cracked magazine by a gentleman who has fulfilled my lifelong (well, six-month-long) dream of infiltrating a judge show. Wow.

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Street Harassment of the Day: Burned-Out Car Edition

May 24, 2007

I’ve blogged before about unwanted male attention on the street, which is particularly bad in Bushwick.

In the first week after I moved here, I was walking to the subway in a business suit; it was hot, so I stopped to take off my suit jacket, exposing the long-sleeved shirt I was wearing underneath. A car slowed down and someone stuck his head out and made that obnoxious come-on hissing sound. This, for an outfit provocative only in certain Germanic counties in Pennsylvania.

Today I was annoyed in a new way.

I was walking to the subway and there was a burned out car — a windowless carcass of a car, with only a stump where the steering wheel had been — sitting on the sidewalk. I mean, it looked like this thing had been set on fire for an hour. And why was it on the sidewalk? How did it get there?

When you see something crazy, you know how you want to look up and make eye contact with someone and make the “Isn’t that crazy?” expression, and then move on and go about your day? If you saw something crazy, you want to make sure someone else saw it too, by damn it.

So I looked up from the crazy car corpse, and sure enough, there was a guy approaching the car from the other direction, and I made the “Oh my god, isn’t that insane?” expression. The guy, who clearly had also seen the burned-out car, immediately contorted his face into a sleazy, squinty-eyed expression, and replied, “Oh, yeah, baby … you like?”

Sometimes street harassment is just gross and/or intimidating, but it reaches a new level when it prevents us from engaging one another as human beings with universal predilections, like occasionally making communicative eye contact with fellow humans in acknowledgment of events taking place in our common environment.

As author Janice Erlbaum quipped, “My feminist demands aren’t that extreme; I just want the simple things — like to be able to eat a banana in public without feeling self-conscious.”

Posted by jen | Categories: New York, dudes  | 3 Comments | | Email This Post Email This Post

this energy drink ad is a little rapey

May 22, 2007

I would like to suggest some alternate text for this ad:

“Do you feel bad about your rape skills? Check out this dude — at least you’ve figured out that your penis needs to point downward! Hahahahaha! Women belong on their backs under people who drink our energy drink, hahahahaha!”

Posted by jen | Categories: advertising, feminism  | Leave a Comment | | Email This Post Email This Post

there is no more anonymity

May 22, 2007

An addendum to my last egg post (The “Egg Donors Are People Too” Story), another topic of discussion in the panel was the fact that anonymity cannot be promised; the child you produce with donor eggs or sperm is going to become a teenager with internet access, and very possibly find not only the donor, but genetic half-brothers and half-sisters. This Broadsheet post says much the same thing. Here’s the money quote, from a woman born of sperm donation:

“We didn’t ask to be born into this situation, with its limitations and confusion. It’s hypocritical of parents and medical professionals to assume that biological roots won’t matter to the ‘products’ of the cryobanks’ service, when the longing for a biological relationship is what brings customers to the banks in the first place.”

Posted by jen | Categories: egg donation  | Leave a Comment | | Email This Post Email This Post

The "Egg Donors Are People Too" Story

May 21, 2007

A couple weeks ago, I participated in a panel discussion entitled “Egg Donors Are People Too,” which was part of a fertility conference at the Grand Central Hyatt (a quite nice hotel). The woman moderating the panel was a psychiatrist (maybe a psychologist, I forget) specializing in fertility issues. She was beautifully dressed and coiffed and had a sort of blue-blooded air about her, as though, despite having an enviable job, she didn’t actually need to work. She was the one who named the panel.

Things got off to, in my view, a hilarious start when Dr. Upper Class began with a poignant paean to egg donors, women who really care about other people’s infertility and are so giving of their time and of themselves. Because, of course, no one would go through all that just for the money!

And then the floor was turned over to me, to introduce myself and talk — in a teary, estrogen-fueled sort of way, I imagine — about what it meant to donate eggs.

“Of course,” I began, “when we say ‘donating,’ we’re not really donating at all. That’s why all the ads in the Village Voice prominently list how many thousands of dollars the gig pays.” Some egg professionals in the audience looked stricken.

I then spent the next ten minutes metaphorically pointing at the white elephant in the room and jumping up and down, saying the same thing I always say: women are adults who can make their own decisions in a market economy. If our bodies are our own, then we can make economic decisions about them as well. Men can choose to endanger their health working in coal mines; women can choose to inject themselves with hormones for cash. (Imagine a blue-blooded society woman claiming “No one would go underground in those dirty pits and mine coal and risk black lung disease just for $25,000 a year! Surely these kind souls must really care that rich people need to burn fuel for energy!)

Egg donors aren’t heartless people who don’t care about infertility, I pointed out, but seriously, but I think a lot more broke twenty-year old women apply their altruistic instincts towards, say, Darfur, or global warming, or AIDS in Africa, than towards the inability of American couples to conceive. And rightly so. What kind of arrogance does it take to think that, when typically lower-middle-class women donate eggs to upper-middle-class buyers, it’s not about the money?

On the question of whether $8,000 is enough to go through all the hormones, I said that, towards the end when it was two injections a day and lots of PMS-type side effects, I simply took the amount of money I was still owed, divided it by the number of injections remaining, and told myself that figure every time I had an injection to do. The number was over $100. Was I, and had I always been, in an economic position such that I felt that a worthwhile exchange? Obviously. That’s why I signed up to do it.

Of course, it’s not entirely about the money. It’s also about a desire to spread my genes anywhere I can, just as men have always done, and male hip-hop artists regularly rap about. That (”I’d like to knock you all up, quite frankly”) didn’t go over so well at the panel either, at least among the organizers. However, a number of people-trying-to-be-parents came up to me afterwards and thanked me for making them laugh. (If only “comedian on call” could be my title! Of course, it’s easy to make people laugh when you’re the only comedian in the room and no one is expecting a comedian).


On a related note, a Melbourne IVF clinic is
offering a children’s book explaining egg donor conception.
The title sounds just a bit dirty though, doesn’t it?

(I donated eggs to a gay man in 2005. For my previous egg donation posts, go here).

Posted by jen | Categories: egg donation  | Leave a Comment | | Email This Post Email This Post

great gams!

May 19, 2007

Celebrity magazines apparently feel that, in a single-page feature about stars and their great legs, it would be inappropriate to use the word “legs” more than, say, twice.

Hence:

  • stems
  • gams
  • sticks

Really? Mary-Kate is “displaying her sticks”? Is she playing drums?

It is not necessary to thesaurize your prose to keep from ever repeating a noun. For instance, if the New York Times runs an article about poverty, the writer might use the word “poverty” thirty or forty times. It’s not a big deal. It is fine to mention the topic of an article repeatedly throughout the article.

If I write a blog post, on my comedy blog, about comedy, I might refer to “comedy” at really any time I am talking about, well, comedy. I do not feel the need to mix it up with references to “comicalness, “buffoonery,” “jesting,” “drollery,” “schtick,” or “cracking wise.”

Dear celebrity magazines — Dita Von Teese has “gams.” Everyone else has legs. Thank you.

Posted by jen | Categories: celebrities, grammar  | Leave a Comment | | Email This Post Email This Post

I have never been a professional dishwasher

May 18, 2007

This may sound familiar to those of you who’ve seen my one-woman show, but I have a piece up on RagingFace.com:

Proof of the Qualities That We, as a Culture, Value in Standup Comedians — by Jennifer Dziura

Posted by jen | Categories: humor  | Leave a Comment | | Email This Post Email This Post

on the benefits of living in NY

May 12, 2007

Yesterday I was walking down the street in Soho and six or more male models in white suits came walking towards me. One of them handed me a free Maybelline lip gloss. Now that’s a promotion! Way better than the homeless people handing out flyers for sample sales. The lip gloss was even a good shade for me.

New Yorkers are really jaded. If I’m going to take something from someone on the street, it needs to have a cash value of, like, $7.

Posted by jen | Categories: advertising  | Leave a Comment | | Email This Post Email This Post

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