I complain a lot about my wife’s and my financial situation.  We’re just kinda making it.  Living more or less check to check.

One of the big problems is that we lie in New York City.  In other parts of the country, we’d be doing okay.  Just some regular Americans, doing the best that we can, mostly getting by.  But in New York City . . . well, every month at rent time, I feel like I have to hold my breath, tighten my belt and say a couple of Hail Mary’s — and I’m Jewish!

Because NYC broke is another kind of broke. Here, you can’t keep up with the Joneses, because in NYC, the Joneses are billionaires.

But then I feel guilty that I’m complaining because I know that people have it much worse.  Like people who live in Darfur.  Their big concern each day isn’t making rent, it’s whether someone’s gonna genocide them that morning. 

On the other hand, they don’t have to deal with the anxiety of whether they’re going to have to send their kid to private school because NYC schools suck, and we can’t afford private school, so now we have to move to the suburbs, and buy a car, which we can’t afford, and my wife and I will have like a 2 hour commute into and out of the City each day, which means we’ll be constantly stressing about getting home on time to pick up our son from daycare or school or having to figure out how we afford a nanny to watch him after school. 

So, yeah, I know people in Darfur have to walk 27 miles each way to get water while dodging guys with machine guns, but they don’t have to figure out how to get their kid into a good kindergarten for less than $30,000 a year so he can grow up to go to Harvard and then graduate in debt, get a crappy job and be as miserable as the rest of us. 

That’s NYC broke.