Trouble in Weeklyville

Thanks to a recent jury decision, the San Francisco Bay Guardian may seize some Village Voice Media assets, possibly including my old employer, Seattle Weekly. VVM and SFBG have already begun sniping at each other. It's serious media news, but the back-and-forth attacks are pretty good entertainment, too. Thanks to Michael for the link.

Cash on coins

One of my favorite Marketplace Money stories of the year aired yesterday. It's a report on the state of coin collecting in an increasingly cash-free society, delivered by a correspondent named... wait for it... Cash Peters. Seriously. I've rarely heard such a fast-paced, witty piece on something so potentially dull.

Class guilt

Today, for the first time in my life, I visited a food bank. I showed a recent piece of mail to prove my current address, presented my driver's license to prove that I'm me, and filled out a brief form. Then I got a laminated card that told me how many cans of fruit, dairy products, grain products, proteins (beans, in my case), and cans of vegetables I could claim. (Fresh veggies were apparently just up for grabs.) While I was shopping, a volunteer started shouting at a tall, skinny woman whom he accused of stealing. She and her boyfriend were running some kind of scam wherein one of them exited out the back door rather than the front one. They were trying to make off with more than their share, the volunteer alleged. The woman was ejected from the food bank and told not to come back. Outside, people in line shook their heads, and another volunteer expressed amazement. Stealing from a food bank!

From my perspective, it's just a sign of the times, like the nervous-looking crowd today at WorkSource, the state-run employment support agency that provides workshops and other resources free of charge to the un- and underemployed. I took a three-hour class today on writing effective résumés and cover letters, and I enjoyed it thoroughly, thanks to the humor and enthusiasm of the teacher. I plan to go back later this month for the workshop on interviewing. I didn't feel particularly guilty taking advantage of WorkSource's free class, since I am unemployed, and my unemployment isn't voluntary. Being at the food bank, on the other hand, made me a little uneasy. Was I taking food from the mouths of people who needed it more? The form I filled out included the question: Are you homeless?

I'm the furthest thing from homeless, and I think my risk of becoming homeless in the immediate future in extremely low. My mother owns a house outside Detroit; worse-case scenario, I'd move back there. I'm also not poor in terms of my upbringing, or my family's current standing. We have money; I have an inheritance fund that I still receive monthly installments of $1,000 from. I just don't have any work-based income right now. Maybe visiting the food bank every week as a way to supplement purchases from Rising Sun, the cheap grocery stand eight blocks from our house, and the occasional PCC or Whole Foods splurge (though I'm trying to avoid those now), isn't causing some truly impoverished local family to go hungry.

Still, texting a friend outside the food bank, I felt like a tourist. Hell, I felt like one when I reached the checkout and the guy bagging my food asked: "No meat?" I didn't want to confess to being a vegetarian; it seemed privileged and precious and not in the spirit of taking as much food as you're allowed, because hey, maybe that's the only food you can afford this week. I didn't feel like figuring out which produce was worth taking home. I didn't want to take an unlabeled can of corn. Some kind of bourgeois instinct kicked in: Unlabeled stuff is sketchy. Don't do it!

As a friend pointed out, I had a day that exposed me to the lives of the poor and unemployed. I may be the latter, but I'm not really the former, and while I'll definitely revisit WorkSource, I'm not sure about the food bank. I'll have to give that some thought.

Vote for Joel!

Joel Rothschild, co-founder and unofficial leader of the Ravenna Kibbutz, has been nominated for a "Jewish Community Heroes" award that would mean a bunch of funding for the very entity he's poured so much of his heart into during the past two years.

Please vote early and often -- you can do it every 12 hours, according to the rules, so bookmark the page and vote daily, if not twice daily. Apart from the financial incentive, Joel certainly deserves the recognition, and it would be great additional publicity for the Kibbutz as well.

This is also a good opportunity for me to thank everyone who has passionately supported the Kibbutz since its inception in October of 2007. Without you, we wouldn't be the thriving, exciting, unique community hub we are today. Toda raba!

My chemical romance, part two

At the beginning of this month, I switched from Basic Health to Group Health Cooperative thanks to my job at Childhaven. I hoped that the Lexapro I'd been taking since late October would be covered, but alas, GHC only covers it if you've tried a variety of other SSRIs and they've all failed you. So I, like my friend Elana, agreed to make the switch from Lexapro to Celexa. This is likely old news to those of you who've been on Lexapro and tried to get it covered by health insurance, but it made an impression on me.

Specifically, it reminded me that people on prescription medication are at the mercy of a system that's looking out as much for its own good as theirs. (In other words, Sicko was right.) I was reluctant at first to give up the medication that had helped me so much, but my doctor quickly assured me that Celexa is simply a less concentrated formulation of the same stuff that makes up Lexapro. (Hence, 20 milligrams of Celexa is a suitable dose for someone who, like me, was on just 10 milligrams of Lexapro.) The fun part is that Celexa, with insurance, costs me $13 or so per month, versus nearly $100 per month for Lexapro.

I've been on Celexa for a couple of days now, and I haven't noticed anything out of the ordinary. The pharmacist told me that some people have side effects when they switch, but those tend to be the people who are more prone to SSRI side effects in the first place. Since I experienced only mild side effects when I started Lexapro, and those went away quickly, I decided to do what the pharmacist said works for many people: take my last Lexapro one day and my first Celexa the next. So far, so good.

Of course, there's something slightly troubling about the fact that insurance rules prompted me to switch medications, rather than any kind of problem with the Lexapro itself, but if they really are virtually the same, and I don't notice a difference, I'm not sure it's worth getting too worked up about. I've been thinking about my previous (non-Group Health) psychiatrist's statement that if a medicine works -- that is, if it makes you feel better -- it must be a good idea to take it. This, I'm finding, is also a very popular view among people who aren't psychiatrists. When I mentioned the Lexapro to my dental hygienist, she regarded it the way insulin is seen vis-à-vis diabetics, or heart medication for cardiac patients -- a targeted drug for someone with a diagnosed problem.

While this view might not apply to SSRIs, whose exact way of working scientists remain notoriously unsure of, it's hard not to value the experiential over the theoretical. Theory suggests that SSRIs might merely mask whatever problems led the troubled soul to seek them out in the first place; the moment he or she goes off them, back come the various problems, and has any progress really been made? In practice, I think, there are rough patches in life, and antidepressants can help us out of them and onto higher, more stable ground.

I have no idea what happens when I quit an SSRI, but I've heard accounts from other people who have weaned themselves off antidepressants, and they're mostly positive. My meditation teacher in Brooklyn emphasized that we, his students, shouldn't take his word for things; instead, we should try out his suggestions and see where they lead us. Experience can be deceptive, but at certain points in our lives we lean harder on experience than on theory, and I think that's okay.

Update, 10:09 p.m.: Just looked at Philip Dawdy's latest post about the maker of Lexapro and Celexa. Troubling.

Back in the saddle

Or, rather, the driver's seat. A miscommunication between me and my mechanic at Hilltop (on 15th Avenue East, a block from where I used to live) led me to believe that after $840 of repairs, my beloved '95 Subaru Impreza, Gracie, was still unsafe to drive. As it turns out, she isn't, so I'm going to pick her up Monday evening and learn a few things about checking fluids while I'm at the service station. I still plan to bus to work three times a week to save gas money and reduce wear and tear on the car, but mainly I'm glad that if someone's having a party in SoDo, I don't need to rely on buses, friends, and taxis to get me there and back. To say nothing of future open houses at Bastyr. Gracie, you're like the earliest Christmas present ever. I'm glad you're coming back to me, because I just didn't know how to quit you.

Money management and me

Now that I'm thirty, it seems as good a time as any to improve my money-management skills. I'm not great at saving or even scrimping, and my past budgeting efforts have generally lasted about a day. I kept track of my spending for a while in the fall of 2006, primarily because I was making less than $10 an hour at University Book Store (which, by the way, is good pay for a bookseller -- I don't mean to make UBS seem stingy).

Anyway, I've decided that since 2010 is the last year I'll get a check from the inheritance fund my father left me, it would behoove me to commit myself with unprecedented vigor to the fine art of making and following a budget. I wrote a note on Facebook asking for people's advice, and as usual my friends came to my aid, recommending not only the zine pictured above, Punk Rock Finances, but also Mint.com and Quicken Online, both of which seemingly aspire to be the Facebook of Money Management. (That is: Each boasts an easy-to-use, visually pleasing interface, both are free, and both aim to turn something most people would rather die than do into something kinda fun.)

I've given Mint a quick whirl, and I like it so far, but Reed says Quicken is better. As for Punk Rock Finances, kudos to any publication whose goal is "understanding our relationship to money and how we can survive in a capitalist system while making deliberate choices to involve ourselves in it as little as possible."