I busted. Went over. Broke the bank. Blew the wad. I went away for the weekend and spent $177.89. But it was worth it.

Rhode Island is a bizarre place. I couldn't claim to understand it fully after only a weekend in Prahvidence, and particularly not when that weekend was the graduation for Brown University, and thus most of the people I saw were out-of-staters, and wealthy, and in a good mood, but there's a lingering sense of "what's the use" in the air, and it shows most symptomatically in the streets: lane lines appear and disappear at whim, leaving confused drivers to their own merging devices; green turn arrows are not employed consistently, leaving many people pulling into an intersection to turn left and staring blankly at the people who have a red light coming the opposite way; roads are too narrow for parallel parking and two-way traffic, as is common in older cities, but all the streets are still two-way, and drivers are curiously indisposed to scooting over, giving any cross-town trip the feel of an International Tournament of Chicken; major parking lots and garages ask you to estimate the time you'll be there and pay up front, which seems like the honor system at first glance, but (given that they enforce overages) really ends up being an unnecessarily complicated system of guessing and double checking; the main bridge, which is part of Interstate 195, apparently has some structural problems, but instead of closing it to fix the issue with federal dollars, the state has simply banned vehicles over a certain weight from using it, including all trucks and -- your tax dollars at work -- buses (although they are working on it ... slowly ); and simply getting on the freeway involves the use of so many backstreets and alleyways that my trusted local guides were unable to cleanly complete the task without scads of philosophizing about the nature of dead ends and a little bit of plain old Irish luck.

But I have to navigate visitors through the Morrissey / Water / Soquel interchange, so who am I to judge? And besides, Boston's worse.

My streak of spending money exclusively on food came to an ignominious end when I landed at Logan and purchased a $5 Charlie ticket for the MTA in order to get $4 worth of bus trips to and from the train station. The vending machines didn't take anything less than a $5 (and certainly weren't going to swallow a pair of $2 bills), but the fares are all $2 each way. Also, if you want a ticket, you must use the vending machine, in the airport. Think of it as a hidden, $1, I'm-not-sticking-around-in-Boston-for-the-weekend tax.

Tomorrow morning I leave for Rhode Island, where I will spend Memorial Day Weekend with my best friends. This has been weighing on me all month, because it seriously screws with the experiment. Dare I live on $2 a day while on vacation? No: one of my friends recently lost her job, and it feels chintzy enough to be mooching couch space. Okay, if I'm spending extra, how much?

Most of my friends have said it's a vacation, I should just take a break, but that seems too easy. There has to be some sort of ceiling, and it can't be too arbitrary ... something within keeping of the experiment's spirit.

Then I noticed my jar of loose change. 

Even though I pre-paid most of my monthly bills, there are some unavoidable ones that arrive in the first week of the month and are due before the end, so I spent my Saturday morning the way I usually do: balancing the old checkbook. I also dug out several credit card offers from the past month since I'm hyperventilating about that debt.

I'm an enthusiastic participant in the credit merry-go-round, and credit card companies love me for it. I have a decent credit score (I haven't looked it up since my last rent application, but I know it's high enough that there's no trouble getting car loans or apartments), and I obviously love to load up healthy balances for the companies to suckle at for years and years. For this reason, I'm the number one target of 0% interest offers.

These aren't good deals. Or, they are, in the same way that the old Columbia Music Warehouse Club was a good deal when they offered you 12 CDs for a penny, figuring you'd get lazy or stupid and forget to send back the free Hootie & the Blowfish "club choice" CD and be obligated to shell out $24.95 for it the next billing cycle. If you could stay on top of the "no obligation" discs mailed every month, then you could indeed garner a few dozen CDs for your collection at a few dollars apiece. But most people couldn't, and that's what they counted on. It's also what credit card companies hope for. Here are the three offers I'm mulling over anyway, because once you join the club, you have to keep rotating balances through the offers or the musical chairs music stops and you wind up trapped on a high-interest card: 

The good news is: I succeeded in purchasing enough groceries to feed myself for the week, under budget, and with all local food. The bad news is: I'm broke.

First, the tale of good news. After my kind of depressing experience of winging it with Safeway, I decided to tackle this week's groceries with a few recipes planned using overlapping ingredients, getting the bulk of the produce at farmer's markets, and picking up any remainder at Shoppers Corner or New Leaf or anywhere else that specializes in carrying California food.

Circumstances kept me from attending the markets downtown or the Westside, so I settled for Sunday's market in Live Oak, where I was only able to purchase some butter lettuce and a few herbs (basil and mint) for my back-to-back Thai nights (one with leftover chicken, one with leftover tofu). I spent $3.50 out of my wallet, which left grocery money intact, but left me feeling inadequately prepared for a week's worth of eating. I hope it's just an early season malaise, but the Live Oak markets are definitely the thinnest of any I've been to in the county. Live music and gyro stands don't make up for a paltry selection of produce.

After following the experience up with a day of art and chocolate (several Live Oak artists had opened their home studios for art viewing, and I took advantage of this fact to keep both my girlfriend and my taste buds occupied for the afternoon), I stumbled upon a place I'm ashamed to admit I've never visited before -- Capitola Produce. 

I knew it wouldn't take long before self-pity would kick in, and I would start to wonder: am I impoverished? But with a subject this serious, maybe it's better to ask a different question. Does my self-imposed situation ($310 to spend this month on everything that's not a monthly bill, including food) equate to the federal poverty level?

To answer that, I have to talk about my finances, a task that's more disagreeable than any other topic. We're trained from an early age in this culture to guard our statements about money. You never know when you might accidentally offend someone by flaunting financial "problems," and there's still a strong vestige of the British ideal that money, really, isn't worth talking about, and therefore not a topic suitable to polite conversation. This vestigal notion is so strong, you'll see two friends at a bar gladly discuss intimate sexual problems, but rarely see them settle into the fourth pint with a frank examination of their bills.

That said, here goes ... here's my monthly bills: 

I have $10.50 in my wallet, which means I've spent $7.50 so far this month. Throw in groceries, and I've lived on $67.50 since May 1.

All but 50 cents of that has been on food. In addition to the parking meters I spoke of earlier, I've missed packing my lunch a few days this week, and resorted to a slice of pizza at Pizza My Heart for lunch (with a cup of water) on two different occasions. Total cost: $7. Now, that's a bargain, but it's also 3.5 days of budget to me, so I'm kicking myself, especially since my refrigerator is still practically full, and I have another $62 of grocery budget kicking in this weekend.

Am I just not eating? That's what everyone asks, and on further reflection, the answer might be yes. My biggest concern going in was that I'd slip up and overspend. Now I'm worried that I'll coast through the rest of the month with ease, but hurt myself by undereating. That wasn't the point at all. 

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: 

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?