I am writing the title to this post after the rest of it and I feel an extreme amount of self-distaste right now.

This is probably going to be a really lame post but whatever, I believe in honesty and over-sharing on the Internet.
It's funny that Ellen posted about this book "Frugal Indulgents: How to Cultivate Decadence when your Age and Salary are under 30" on her blog this morning, because last night Justin and Elizabeth were talking about living decadently/extravagantly. I remarked that I was certainly living decadently because our house cleaner was coming this morning and I was planning to take my laundry to the wash and fold (which I totally did). This morning, while I waited at the counter for the wash and fold woman (who was late) to be dropped off by her husband for work, I felt totally sick of myself for being such a goddamn yuppie. I swore to myself that the only reason I pay for others to clean my laundry and house (the latter rarely, the former increasingly more frequently) is because it's better for my mental health and also because sometimes it's just like paying for time rather than service (like, for my own time). I also swore that my next apartment would have a washer/dryer so I could avoid this kind of self-hate before 8am. Then I heard my dad's voice in my head, telling me that everyone has 24 hours in every day (this might be blended with Liv Tyler's dad's voice in Empire Records, except I am not on speed), and saying that you don't have time is not really an excuse because you have a lot of time. Only not really, I tell myself, so I paid my $22.50 for my laundry and marched back home.

Anyway, all this is sort of part of this recent realization I had which is that (surprise) I don't have it that bad. Please bear with me during this awful, terrible, white upper-middle class professional city-dweller moment while I realize that while I want things I can't afford, I can actually afford most things I want. Plus, I can afford to pay for my laundry, buy the occasional episode of "Gossip Girl" on iTunes, purchase organic vegetables in the middle of a global food crisis, not to mention get $65 haircuts and $12 manicures. This is all very terrible of me but I feel like I've been living under the impression that I wasn't well off, and suddenly I realized that I actually kind of am, comparatively speaking. It is sort of a strange experience to come to terms with the fact that maybe you are one of those privileged people you've spent a majority of your life judging.

I can't believe I just wrote this entry. It's so much worse in print. Ack.

Oh yeah, and also, we got HDTV last week.