My Last Hundred Bucks: Brunch, Bacon, and a Busker

by Miranda Popkey

$100! It is a lot of money, and yet, it is also not a lot of money at all. Where did your last hundred bucks go, Miranda Popkey?

$14: Pack of Parliament Lights and a small, red lighter at a bodega: I don’t self-identify as a smoker, which means that I am that irritating person constantly bumming cigarettes from friends. Occasionally I’ll be overwhelmed by guilt about this and buy a pack, which I then mostly give away, in the spirit of karmic balance. And then sometimes I’m a little tipsy and I’m with a friend who doesn’t smoke and buying cigarettes suddenly becomes totally essential to my quality of life.

$15.60: Late brunch with a friend at Brooklyn Buschenschank in Carroll Garden; I ate an entire pizza and drank a Bloody Mary.

$9: Jameson on the rocks at the Ear Inn after a friend’s art opening. There was semi-secret beer at the opening, but no snacks, which shouldn’t have surprised me.

$2: The busker in the subway station was playing “Life on Mars” on a broken guitar; I was surprisingly moved.

$21.76: I was instructed to buy a Spanish white by friends I was having dinner with; the wine shop I stopped apparently only had one in stock (or they were lying!), and I was already running late, so I broke my usual pay-no-more-than-$13-for-a-bottle-of-wine-because-you-don’t-know-anything-about-wine rule.

$8.78: Bacon and cream cheese for brunch with couple friends; they had made (!) bagels and we mixed fresh scallions into the cream cheese. Then the lady half of the couple solved my life by hemming my jeans and patching two crotch holes (which holes had not prevented me from wearing the jeans to work!).

$23.19: Bacon, Parmesan, eggs, pasta, garlic: fixings for pasta alla carbonara, the only dish I can reliably make. I owed a friend dinner, didn’t want to poison him.

Previously: William Foster

Miranda Popkey is an editorial assistant; if she had a million dollars, she would spend it on food, apparently.

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