Best Friends, Occasional Enemies: The Lighter Side of Life as a Mother and Daughter (Reading Group Gold) (20 page)

You really want to help me, online banking? Don’t alert me to my alerts in such an alarming font size. It overdrafts my blood pressure.

Whatever competency I have achieved with online banking has only crippled me with paper banking. In the rare instance when I have to write out an actual check, I must double check every step to make sure I did it right, which makes me feel like a complete idiot.

Some people can forge checks; I aim to get my own signature in the right place.

But kidding aside, is the Memo part important?

I save every piece of literature from my bank, and I organize all mailings in an OCD folder system. I get anxious right before I open my account statements, even when I know I haven’t overspent. I feel like some terrible revelation lies behind the envelope.

Maybe I don’t like envelopes after all.

I’m terrified of identity theft, so I’ve thought of the most convoluted passwords—letters, numbers, words, acronyms, palindromes. No one is guessing my password.

Least of all me.

The flaw in my strategy was clear when I was studying abroad in Italy. I needed to get cash from an ATM there, only to find that their number keypads do not have letters like American ones do. I remember my PIN number in part by remembering a word. I had no idea what the numbers alone were.

Aha! I pulled out my cell phone to use its number pad as a guide, only to be reminded that the BlackBerry has a QWERTY keyboard, not the old phone one.

Stupida.

So there I was, sitting in a Roman café, trying to re-create the old phone keypad on a napkin.

The number 1 has no letters on it, does it? 2 has ABC …

Finally, it occurred to me to Google image search “American ATM keypad” on my BlackBerry’s mobile web. I felt like some sort of foreign criminal, but it worked.

And they say technology makes our lives more efficient.

But I guess my anxiety about money is a normal part of starting out on my own. Everything gets easier with practice.

Now if I could just make a bit more to practice with.

Tempus Fugit

By Lisa

Time flies.

Some of you will say it’s a cliché, and others will say it’s a proverb, but it doesn’t matter which to me. I’m not too cool for school, and have no complaint with clichés. A great thing about getting older is that you come to see the profound truth in even the simplest of ideas. And I’m finally beginning to understand that Time Flies.

There are too many reminders for me to ignore, especially around tax time. I’m self-employed, so I pay taxes each quarter, and on this past April 15, I thought, didn’t I just pay my taxes? Was it really a few months ago, when it seems like a few minutes ago? Every time I turn around, I’m writing checks to the government, supporting all manner of astronomically expensive God-knows-whats, so that the time of my life has stretched like taffy into one continuous check written to the government.

I know I shouldn’t complain about paying my taxes when there are so many Wall Street bankers who need the bonuses, Maseratis, and Manhattan brownstones that I’m buying them. And now the government is suing them for all the bad things they’ve done, which means that I can keep writing checks to the government to cover the costs of the litigation. This is great news, because I was afraid I would have extra money on my hands and nothing to do with it but buy dumb stuff like food, or maybe stick it in the bank, where it would help the bankers fund their defense of the litigation brought by the government on my behalf, thus maintaining my continuous stream of check-writing.

It’s financial recycling.

All the money the government gets, it turns into compost.

I have the same feeling about the state, federal, and local tax bills that come in the mail more often than a Valupak, which is saying something. They break up the monotony by coming in colors, and they even have a little chart that shows how I can save money by paying today, instead of three months from now. I always pay right away, not only to save money but to avoid collisions with the other checks I’ll be writing to the government. This way, I can alternate by writing checks to the state government every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and writing checks to the federal government every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday.

Of my life.

Every Sunday, I’ll order more checks.

Time flies when it comes to other things, too. I have an old truck that I use sometimes, and it broke down the other day, so I had it towed to the shop, where they informed me that the last time it was inspected was January 2009.

“2009?” I was confused. “Did that come yet?”

“Sure did,” answered the mechanic.

Sheesh! It doesn’t even sound right. What sounds right is 1955.

The mechanic added, “Your registration expired, too.”

“But I just renewed it. Did you see the sticker?”

“The last sticker on your license plate is from 2008.”

“That’s not possible,” I said, reeling.

“I’d check, but there’s no registration card in the truck.”

Of course there isn’t. Silly man. It’s the first thing I lose. Still, I said, “Maybe the registration sticker fell off?”

“Unlikely,” he said, and I knew he was right. They put Krazy Glue on those registration stickers. You could mend the space shuttle with a registration sticker.

So I had to go to the auto tag place to renew the registration, but not until I had stopped by the ATM to take out the extortionate $104 it costs, which must be paid in cash, so it can be more easily composted by the government.

And the ATM machine charged me a $3.00 fee, which will undoubtedly be sent to the bankers at their houses in the Hamptons, where they can use it to light their cigars.

So you know where this is going.

Time flies.

And so does money.

History Lesson

By Lisa

Once again, everybody’s cranky about something, and I’m not.

Not that I don’t get cranky, we all know that I do. For example, don’t get me started on politics, taxes, or how hard it is to find jeans that fit.

But this time, everybody’s cranky that a local history museum sold two thousand artifacts. Among them, a horse weathervane went for $20,000 and a cigar-store Indian sold for a million bucks.

Wow.

I’m not angry at the museum. On the contrary, I admire the museum. I wish the museum had negotiated my book contract and my last trip to the mall.

What kind of historian is financially savvy enough to sell an old weathervane for twenty grand? This would be the Donald Trump of historians. In school, I used to think history was boring, but if I had known it was worth cash money, I would have paid better attention.

And how about that cigar-store Indian?

First, did you even know a cigar-store Indian existed, outside of a cowboy movie? And second, are you allowed to say cigar-store Indian anymore, much less pay a million bucks for one? Since when are stereotypes for sale?

The only thing that bugs me is that the museum didn’t try to sell me anything. My cash is as good as anybody else’s. Why wasn’t I offered some top quality, grade A history? And who are the new buyers?

I mean, er, historians.

We need to know their names and addresses, so we know where to go to see the history. I wonder when they’ll have us over. I’m free Tuesday, but not Wednesday. How about you? I’m sure they’d be happy to show us. After all, it’s our history.

Or at least it used to be.

The museum said that it sold the history to improve the museum building, which makes sense to me. What good is history without a nice building to stick it in? I think the best plan would be to sell
all
the history, then build a really gorgeous museum.

With microsuede sectionals and a plasma TV.

And the museum also said that it needed the money to provide dehumidification and air-conditioning, which is crucial to history.

Who knew?

I always thought that history got along fine without AC, but maybe not. That must be why George Washington wore a wig. His hair was a mess, in that humidity.

I can relate.

Later, after our museum gets the new air-conditioning, we can go visit anytime. The next hot day, let’s all go to the museum and enjoy the cool air. We may have lost the weathervane, but we got the weather.

Another reason I think it’s okay that the history museum sold the history is that I’m jealous.

Jealous, jealous, jealous.

After all, I have history. Lots of it. And most of it isn’t even as pretty as a weathervane. I really wish I could sell some of my history.

Which?

My second marriage comes immediately to mind. But nobody’s dumb enough to buy that.

Except me.

Also the sixth grade. I would sell you the entire sixth grade for a song. That was not a good year in my history. I had moved to a new school and nobody liked me. And I had just gotten glasses and a bra.

I only needed one of those things.

Guess which.

iLisa

By Lisa

I need a smartphone, but I’m not smart enough to know which one.

First off, I’m not even sure what a smartphone is. For example, I don’t know how it’s different from a cellphone. I assume that a smartphone is a cellphone that does things other than make and receive phone calls, but how many things do you have to do to qualify as smart?

It’s a lot to ask from an inanimate object.

Or, for that matter, from a human being.

I do only a few things, myself. Right off the top of my head, here’s what I do: write things, eat things, and pet things.

I know I’m like a lot of other humans in this regard, somewhat limited in my functionality, which means that if people were cellphones, we wouldn’t get into Harvard.

I own a BlackBerry, which makes and receives phone calls and emails, cruises the web, and takes pictures. It may do other things, but I don’t need the other things it does.

Maybe I need a dumbphone.

Let’s assume my BlackBerry is a smartphone, which makes sense. It remembers the phone numbers and email addresses of my friends, which is more than I do. And it saves all my photos in chronological order, which is also more than I do. And finally, it finds a way to cost me three hundred dollars a month, which is very smart.

In fact, it’s Einstein.

But its glass has a huge crack, and it’s time to replace it, especially since I got a flyer in the mail that tells me I’m eligible to upgrade my phone for less than $3 million.

Please.

Tell me I’m not the only one who’s been caught in the upgrade scam, where they charge you a normal price for your phone, but if you want to upgrade within two years, you hand over your firstborn.

You can get a fairer deal from the Mafia. Organized crime takes many forms. I’m talking to you, AT&T.

The funny thing is, I’m old enough to remember all the way back in time, before portable phones and car phones, then before that to pushbutton phones and rotary phones, to the time when AT&T was the only phone company. The government said that AT&T was a monopoly that had to be broken up, supposedly to give consumers more choices, and you can judge for yourself how well that turned out, because now there are plenty of phone companies, and all of them charge you $3 million to upgrade your cellphone.

Yay!

Now, you can choose which phone company gets to raise your firstborn, which makes them a godfather. Or, er, The Godfather.

And this is when you know your government is working for you, at upgrade time.

Me, I’m thinking that we should upgrade our government.

I need to replace my smartphone, but I want to make the right choice, now that I have so many choices. So I did some research and looked at some ads, and as best I can tell, there are three basic choices in smartphones: BlackBerry, iPhone, and Android.

Sorry, I mean two choices.

Android is not a choice, for me. In any movie I’ve ever seen, the androids are killer robots. I won’t even go to the android store.

I’m scared.

If Android, Inc. wants me to buy one of their phones, they need to change their name to one that girls like. Chocolate. Puppy. Or George Clooney.

You knew that was coming.

So I went to the Apple store, an experience you have had if you’ve seen the color white. And I picked up the iPhone and played with it, noticing its functions, of which there are several hundred.

Definitely, smart.

And it had a function that lets you see the person you’re talking to on the phone, and vice versa. I got excited. It would be nice to see Daughter Francesca while we yapped away. And it would be fun if she could see me.

But then I thought about other people who could see me on the phone. In my bathrobe. In my glasses.

My plumber.

My electrician.

My blind date.

And then I remembered that when I’m on the phone, I sometimes write, eat, and pet things.

So I didn’t buy the iPhone.

I’m too smart.

Oh, You Don’t Know

By Francesca

I look to my mom for advice about everything. I call her to ask how long to cook a chicken breast, and at what temperature to set the oven. I send her cellphone pictures of clothes I’m trying on in the dressing room. I call her when there’s a mouse in my kitchen, even though she is roughly 130 miles away.

I also ask my mom for advice about men.

I just never take it.

This is not to say her advice is bad. Two marriages teach you a thing or two—at least two.

So no, her advice is far from bad. It’s just Mom Advice. Nine times out of ten, I want, need, and crave Mom Advice. But modern romance is not one of those times.

So why do I keep asking?

I admit when I’m wrong, and in this case, I am. Why do I solicit my mother’s opinion when I know I’ll disregard it? Is this some last vestige of adolescence? Must I wean myself off my past addiction to eye-rolling and the general dismissal of all things motherly?

Oh, Mom.

It does have a nice ring to it.

And I confess, it is funny sometimes, to hear her wacky logic. A while back, I was introduced to a cute guy at a party—I wasn’t sure if I wanted to pursue him, but I didn’t want to lose track of him.