Prom

next week is the prom and i decided not to use capital letters today. just today. when i was in high school i went to two proms. both were lousy. you spend a lot of money in order to be bored. i looked really stupid too. when i was a junior, i rented a red crushed velvet tux with black pants, a velvet cummerbund, there's a word you don't use much, and red bow tie and a pink frilly shirt. there were three styles of tuxes available to rent, blue, red and white. my senior year i went with the white. we were on our own for dinner, so that added to the expense. no one rented limos back then. i'm not sure when that became the rage. it was all quite anticlimactic, the build up, the hair styling, the expensive dresses and rentals of tuxes, and then it's over. i think our tux rentals cost $27.50 or that may have been what i paid for my class ring. anyway, things were much cheaper then. we also had a morp. morp is the prom spelled backwards. it was held at the high school and you dressed down, girls asked guys, like the anti prom. don't know if they still do that now.

so if people make more money now but things cost more, what's the point of making more money. for example, when i first started working, i was paid around 10k a year. the average car cost about 5k and you could get a pretty decent starter house for, say, 28k. now, people might make 30k a year, a pretty decent wage, a very basic new car is going to cost you half that, say 15k, and the average house costs well over 100k (i can't really say what a 'starter home' is any more because it's pretty subjective). so is there any real advancement or can we just agree that the dollar buys a lot less now than it did 30 years ago. it's fun to say when i first started teaching , we made 10k a year, it sound like so little, but really, my living expenses were minimal plus we didn't have a lot of accessories like cell phones, and internet, things that have added to the cost of living.

so my class ring cost $27.50 and my tux rental cost $27.50 and my class jacket cost $15. my first guitar cost $27, a harmony stella, but the first one i bought cost $120. my dad loaned me the money and i paid him back $10 a month for a year. it was a yamaha acoustic guitar. back then a martin d-28 would have cost $395 but would be worth two or three thousand now. my yahama would probably be worth $120 if it were in good condition. i sold it to a girl. stupid me. i did stupid things for girls. like rent red velvet tuxes. and sell guitars.