My birthday

I don't want to write today. It's my birthday! I had a lovely birthday though, complete with pierogies and free ice cream.

Davey says I should write about free stuff. I did this once, after I went on a giant end-of-year freeboxing spree. (Each dorm at my school had such a freebox, and it was common for people to go collecting during the end of the semester.) When I wrote that time, I came to the conclusion that freeboxing caused me to get really greedy, because I almost never went end-of-semester freeboxing with a specific needed item in mind. In fact, the only time I've ever gone goal-oriented freeboxing was when I needed costume or drag material.

I often brag about things I find in the freebox, which is kind of a Jew thing and kind of a class thing. Actually, it's really a class thing that often gets mixed up with Jewishness. In my upper middle class family, we never bragged about great deals in that sitcom-Jewish way. Which is weird, because it was those upper middle class lessons of "don't talk about money in ANY way" that caused us to shut up - and yet most Jews on TV are portrayed as rich people who talk money all the time. WTF? I think it has to do with Jews being class outsiders (as well as religious and cultural and ethnic outsiders) in Central/Eastern Europe and carrying that to the US. Maybe.

Anyway, there are people I know who dress almost exclusively out of freeboxes and never talk about it. Furthermore, these folks almost never give anything to the freebox. Davey once wrote a great blog entry that I will link to later (promise) that talked about this.

And then there are those like me, who give and take freely from the box. Who will take a shirt, wear it for a day to see how they like it, and give it back. In my co-op, this sometimes looked funny in picture albums - it looked like we all shared each others' clothing. And in a way, we did. It was only the end of the year, when people were moving and frantically throwing stuff out, that I would get hoard-y and greedy, while simultaneously throwing out as much as I could. It was definitely a different mentality though.