Tuesday, August 30, 2011

Elevator luck. I’ve had a run of it these past few days, and if you work in any kind of high-rise, you know exactly what it is. Now, you may call elevator luck by another name, but it’s really just the good fortune of hitting the call button and having the steel doors open instantly. Swish! No waiting at all. From a rational perspective, such a phenomenon might occur because your building has a shitload of elevators, scientifically speaking. I’d like to think, though, that other people’s timelines just so happened to have intersected with mine, arriving right when I needed to depart.

But I’m not really thinking about elevators tonight, so much as one of the reasons for why we ride these elevators, day in, day out, and that’s money. Cashola. Cheddar most fine. I dipped into my savings a few weeks ago for the first time in, like, ever, because my checking account needed an infusion. Money’s been flowing out at a healthy clip, what with summer birthdays, legal counsel, property tax, and a confluence of other expenses that necessitated a transfer of funds.

Cry me a river, right? On the one hand, sure, but on the other hand, this episode evoked emotions similar to what I felt when I bounced by first–and last–check ever, way back in college. For me, savings is a kind of vault to be breached only in catastrophic instances. Well, breach it I did, and now I owe myself a chunk of change, with payback still a couple weeks off. But these are the benchmarks I’ve set for myself, and the mantle of adulthood, unlike cash flow, is heavy and unbending.