Current location:	Work
Current mood:	cranky
Current music:	Battles - Prismism

Standards and Means: Entertainment

I have a standing personal rule regarding my entertainment dollar. Wanna hear it? Here it goes:

"If I spend any money on entertainment, I need to spend at least as much time enjoying the product of my entertainment as it took me to generate the money necessary to purchase it."
- Me

This is very similar to the standing rule of Goth Clubs. Wanna hear it? Here it goes:

"You need to spend at least as much time at the club reading dark poetry/looking sad/dancing with a mirror as it took to put on all of your makeup and angst-gear."
-NPR Goth

The quotes are so you can copy and paste that wherever you want. Go ahead. It's not copyrighted.

It's usually pretty easy to make this work. Events like Coachella, or trips to Disneyland can sometimes stretch this standard to the limits, but for the most part it's a fairly good rule.
Video games, depending on how close to release they are purchased, range between $15-$60.
Movies take a few hours to watch, so a $15 price tag isn't bad. Even if drinks and choc-tacos bring the price into the mid $20s that's still a good deal. (Dates and friends pay for themselves, so don't even bring that up.)
Concerts in LA are extremely reasonable when audited under this standard. From the Hotel Cafe in the low end, which rarely breaks $10, to the Orpheum in the high end, where I've only spent $30, the price of admission was reasonable when the duration of the show was taken into consideration.
Video game systems end up costing fractions of cents when the purchase price is amortized throughout the life of the system for all of it's uses. (Playing video games, watching streaming content from the internet on a gigantic TV, playing DVDs, etc.) The same theory above applies to computers.

Looking through my budget, though, I have found one item that does not abide by this standard in any shape or form. My car. Between my Car-mortgage, insurance costs and the price of gasoline, my vehicle actually costs me more to upkeep than the use I get out of it. And since I purchased this monstrosity, rather than leasing it like I would have in the past, I am locked into the purchase for a few more years. At least I can console myself with knowing that by keeping the car longer I am contributing less of a carbon footprint than if I bought another car. (That just adds the production of the new car onto a pre-existing carbon footprint, essentially doubling, tripling, or (multiply the number of new cars I've owned times the basic carbon footprint value) my mark on the world.

I guess I could use more CFCs to make up the difference. Those are still available, though from the look of it, cans of spraypaint will not meet my standard for entertainment spending.

Damn.