Like many people, I received my electronic deposit from the economic stimulus package this week. Not that it will do me any good. Nor should it.

I forgot, when I set up the terms for this challenge, that I had pre-planned a vacation to Boston and Rhode Island for Memorial Day weekend. The flight and lodging are already taken care of, but obviously it should cost more than $2 a day to sightsee in New England, right? My friends and family all assume that I'll either abandon the experiment for the duration of the trip ("It's a vacation, from everything!") or use the stimulus check of $300 as fun money for that purpose. No way. That's exactly what the feds want, and right now, I don't think they should get what they want. I figure if Santa Cruz, the second-most expensive place in America, can be done on $2 a day, so can New England.

Kind of. Here's the full explanation: 

Artist Ranjit Bhatnagar has proposed an art installation that takes the ambient noise from a room or a recorded piece of video and translates it into music with found objects. The demo video shows a simplified version learning the 'song' beneath a clip from Citizen Kane. The final project will loop each improvisation it learns and create compositions from it, and the artists promises that when he puts the installation in, he'll use found objects for the instruments from whatever location he's at.

So: Anyone in Santa Cruz want to make an offer on this, stat? 

{vimeo}960978{/vimeo}

I spent nothing yesterday, and it felt great. Of course, one day is easy to skate through without spreading around money. But first, you have to avoid parking tickets.

The most embarrassing financial confession I make during this project might just be how many parking tickets I've paid in the last year. The lot near the GT office is free for three hours, and most employees here make do with going outside and moving their cars twice a day. It's not exactly what the city intended when it set up this law, I don't think -- that's a lot of unnecessary pollution -- but there you go. My problem is I get into these absent-minded professor zones where I lose track of time, and then four hours pass, and then I go downstairs to find a friendly pink slip in the windshield.

It's all about the Jeffersons. I went to the bank yesterday and made the most fun request I could of the teller: "I'd like $62 in $2 bills, please." To their credit, they never asked why, even when digging up that amount required filling out mysterious forms and entering the actual vault. (I imagine bank robbers running out of there with a bag of $2 bills slung over their shoulder.)

But why, besides being quirky, insist on $2s? 

One of the nice things about setting your own challenge is getting to explore the loopholes and plug them (or not) at will. Today, I have the incredible urge to "stock up" on anything that will become unaffordable tomorrow. However, since I recognize that spending $500 today would essentially negate the point of the experiment, I'm setting a ceiling on spending of ... $62, my entire May budget.

That ought to be enough to fill my car with gas and set aside enough dues for hashing . I've been on and off the fence about the hash, which, since insinuating myself a year ago , has become more than a weekly routine, but a mandatory expense. On the one hand, it should fall under the "regular expenses" exemption, but on the other hand, I feel a bit cheesy about considering a social club that essentially revolves around beer as a monthly bill. So I'm compromising and considering the $25 part of today's preparatory spending. (And hey, $5 a week for all you can drink is certainly frugal enough to be within the spirit of the thing ... or am I just making justifications for alcohol? Disturbing trend ahoy.)

I also need a haircut, but I don't know if my budget will stretch that far. And I kind of like the idea of getting shaggy due to an inability to afford even a buzzcut. Although a co-worker has already helpfully offered to cut my hair for free if I want. "Drunk or sober, your choice."

Speaking of getting things for free, I've got another little rule I'm going to try to follow: no accepting gifts from people who know what I'm doing. I don't want this to become some sort of lame charity drive for my sorry mishandling of personal finances. Accepting an offer from a stranger can be dealt with on the same case-to-case basis as usual, but it wouldn't prove anything other than how fantastic my friends are if I were to coast on their generosity for a month.

That should cover it. Tonight: the first grocery trip. I'm going to start at Shoppers Corner, then try out different stores each week to compare the expense. The full bloody details will be right here, including pictures, if I can remember to bring my camera around. 

Starting May 1, I will be attempting to live on just $2 a day for an entire month.

Okay, actually, it's $10 a day, including food. But I have to set aside my grocery money in a separate budget of $248, leaving $62 in cash for my daily spending. Tomorrow afternoon, I will go to the bank and withdraw that $62 in $2 bills, and I will add a single bill to my wallet every day until June 1. It's simple: unless I'm at the grocery store, I can only spend the cash in my wallet.

Why am I doing this? There are a number of justifications.

First, to be candid, because I think it will make an interesting hook for a cover story about the economy which I'm working on for an issue in June.

Second, I've been wondering out loud to my friends if we are on the cusp of an economic depression, and I want to explore what it might feel like for someone of this coddled generation to experience that. (I believe the next depression will be not one of job shortages, but credit shortage, forcing people who have become entirely used to invisible money to revisit the notion of cash, but I'll explain my reasoning on that as I go.)

Third, almost everyone I know my age is broke, and they all want to do something about it. This experiment is a handy way to jumpstart conversations about that, since money is the last great taboo topic in America (more on that theory later as well).

Fourth, I'm in enough debt, personally, that I sometimes find myself uncontrollably crying. Talking about my personal finances will be gut-wrenching, akin to the first before-the-group speech at an AA meeting, or a long-postponed session in the confessional. I'm hoping that forcing myself to come clean about my situation will help me fix it, and maybe reveal something about what's normal and abnormal amongst my peers, and Americans in general.

Fifth (the reasons just keep coming), I want to rediscover just how expensive Santa Cruz really is. On a recent trip to San Francisco, I was shocked to discover that in many ways, the city, even with its notorious reputation for having a high cost of living, is cheaper than our fair hamlet. And there are some lists that place Santa Cruz as the second most-expensive place to live in America, period. What does this mean as the credit crunch deepens? There are enough desirable aspects to this place that people gladly skate the edges of poverty to live here (I know, I'm one of them), but when push comes to shove, will Santa Cruz, by necessity, instantly gentrify? What effect would that have on the city and its future?

At any rate, the scope of the experiment is wide, even if its execution is fairly simple. I'll try to post updates on my daily travails here, though some material is going to be withheld for the cover story (don't want to blow the whole wad).

My best friend -- who just lost her job in Rhode Island, speaking of economic downturns -- thinks I'll last a week, tops. After pre-paying all my bills for the month of May and closely examining my spending patterns so far in 2008, I think she's right to be doubtful. But where there's a blog, there's a way...

UPDATED TO ADD: Just talked to mom, and she thinks I'm absolutely insane. "Even 30 years ago, I was spending $5 a day just on lunch." Must have been before the 99-cent value menu was invented. 

Here's a 4-minute short film dedicated to anyone thinking about getting away and starting over in some other country. (It has one bad word in it, but otherwise SFW.)

 

Sportsracers! Ze Frank is back with Color Wars 2008 , a series of contests fought by Twitterpatted internet nerds to the virtual death. The battle that just finished is youngme/nowme , in which you post a picture of yourself as a kid, then recreate that photo as best you can now. The results are entertaining , hilarious , adorable , and sometimes just scary .

Up next: something to do with Google Maps and the street view feature. Futuristic scavenger hunt? Choose your color, choose your team, and prepare to get it on... 

Here's an interesting article on the position of the media in an internet-saturated society . (Hat tip, Peter Koht.) Its basic point is that the media no longer contains stories within its own sphere, but is a part of the information stream that occupies each individual's sphere. It also posits that the printing of a story is just one part of the story's lifespan, and no longer the final stage with the ability to link, comment, and propagate without media's so-called blessing.

Once again, I find the role of the internet to be greatly exaggerated in terms of its transformative value. I'm not sure the internet transformed anything, just exploded it. The first diagram of the world being filtered exclusively through the media before being digested by people is overly simplistic. For one, people don't have direct access to the world now without 'media' -- the internet is a medium, and if much of its content is generated by non-professionals, that doesn't change the fact that it's administered by large corporations and the government, and paid for by end users. Nobody argues that radio is not a medium, and that radio stations are part of this media sphere. The internet is sort of like radio, just with a much, much higher proportion of shortwave hobbyist broadcasters.

Secondly, stories have always lived on beyond their printing or broadcasting -- comments and links are just public and technological versions of backfence gossip and dinner conversation. When was the last time you saw a story's content genuinely advanced by the comments section? It happens, but the main purpose of that function is to append the public's editorial feelings about the topic to the actual source of information. Whereas before, reporters never really knew what people were saying about their story, now it's right there under the column, in all its splendor.

Thirdly, the struggle for traditional media organizations is not, as so many people have asserted, finding a way to corral "citizen journalism" and other brands of user-generated content. The whole point of user-generated content is that users just go ahead and generate it, without media's old-ass organization stepping in to facilitate. It turns out, media organizations still have a tremendous spotlight to shine on stories, and still, in a way, 'create' stories by using that spotlight. The dissemination that happens afterward doesn't fundamentally alter this role. What it alters is the ability to make money on this role.

And there's the rub. All this hand-wringing about a changing media landscape is really just a financial panic because internet revenues are not as money-grown-on-trees easy to come by as paper and broadcast revenues. I bet they will be, though, someday soon. In the meantime, any organization that makes enormous and expensive changes to its newsgathering room (unless those changes are geared toward efficiency) is missing the point. People aren't looking for a new kind of news. Almost every link to every story you see on the internet and Google comes from 'old' kinds of news. People are just spreading that news in a way that circumvents traditional modes of revenue. This is a business crisis much more than an editorial one.