Saturday, December 8, 2007

"Bacon offsets" or Why not profit off your friends?

I don't even know how to begin to make fun of this post.

Find an amenable friend, and bet against the outcome you desire. That's what friends and I did in graduate school with permanent offers from our summer internships: anyone who got an offer had to kick in $75 for those who didn't.

This did not, of course, erase the pain of those who didn't get permanent offers. But it did soothe it a little; the disappointment of "they hate me" was replaced with the sudden realization that you had a few hundred dollars to blow on something frivolous. Meanwhile, those who got a job had multi-thousand dollar signing bonuses, against which the pain of the lost $75 was invisible.
Or just steal from their wallet.
And it gets worse;
Recently, I have also been experimenting with bacon offsets. As longtime readers know, I only eat certified humane meat. This creates certain problems when I am invited to brunch or a weekend at someone's house, and they have thoughtfully provided me a meal laden with juicy, delicious, inhumanely raised and slaughtered bacon.
Personally, I only eat dry aged kobe beef, which has nothing to do with why no one invites me to bbqs anymore. But this isn't Megan being royal, she's helping the pigs. (She'd maybe get credit from me for having a point about humane, non-factory farming of the animals we eat if she weren't in favor of those conditions being reserved for humans.)
Luckily, the first time this happened, my friend Matt swooped to the rescue. Matt buys a lot of bacon, but has so far resisted my blandishments to purchase the certified humane kind. However, if I eat bacon out, Matt has agreed that the next time he buys bacon, he will buy the certified humane kind, and let me pay him the difference between its cost, and the cost of the regular bacon. This way I get to be a good guest, and the net amount of animal suffering in the world doesn't rise . . . indeed, it falls slightly, because the going rate is one pack per outing, and I don't eat a whole pack of bacon. Even nicer, the last time I went to brunch at someone's house, they bought "hippie bacon" rather than force me to excercise my offset option.
Because everyone is money obsessed to the point that they'd accept a couple bucks from an invited guest to "offset" the cost of meeting their picky specificities.
This also means Megan has made a point to bring this up either when invited somewhere, or as a general principle to consider, instead of perhaps politely declining bacon at breakfast. And what about the eggs, and the cows who produced the dairy products?
I've decided my new dietary restriction forces me to only eat foods that cost more than $50 per serving. This includes wines and liquors. Please bear this in mind when planning my portion of the menu at any future events, thanks.

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