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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.
Several aspects the weekend were scaled down to accommodate both my insane quest and my friend's temporarily joblessness. Things that disappeared from the itinerary: a trip to Fenway, a night in Boston, and an outing to Providence's famous strip clubs (apparently, prostitution is only illegal when it's indoors in Rhode Island, and she and I were both curious about the atmosphere that engendered in the gentleman's establishments). The other alteration was a singular reliance on Rhode Island's famous Narragansset beer , which is purportedly "the local PBR," but comes exclusively in tall boy cans and tastes pretty much just like motor oil, as I discovered only after 10 or 12 or 14 samples. We were also going to take in a PawSox game (the Boston AAA affiliate), but since it was Memorial Day and an a rehabbing Clay Buchholz was on the mound, even the $6 lawn seats were taken, so we saw Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Capitalist Monkeys instead. My hosts graciously purchased my ticket. We also saw Waterfire, which is a cool occasional happening downtown in which pyres are lit along the Providence River's central canal, and street performers and vendors hang out next to the water as gondolas take people through the burning trench. That was free. So where the did the overage come in? Where else? Food. In addition to feeding myself airport meals (because Delta, which otherwise provides a fine experience, charges $8 per measly meal), I treated my hosts to dinner twice in exchange for the free lodging. I can't think of a better way to have spent my money. The question now is: what do I do? Just continue on as before? (In my paralysis, I've declined to spend a penny since getting back.) If I make it through the rest of the week without spending any money at all, I'll still come pretty darn close to my overall goal of $310 for May. But if I forgive myself the vacation spending, that frees up another $62 of groceries for the week and a final $12 worth of allowance. Right now, I'm leaning toward spending nothing. It will mean scrounging a bit on food, reaching into the dreaded back corners of the cupboard where sustenance comes in old boxes and cans, but I'm determined that this experiment, however artificial it is, should have some internal integrity. Plus, it feels more "right" to limp across the finish line than to charge through with cash in hand and a full stomach.
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