Underemployment, Illustrated; Why Not Take Your Cat To A Restaurant?; & More

Link Roundup time!

Why not take your cat out to eat with you at a restaurant? Well, for one thing, the restaurant might not serve you. But you could get take out, anyway, and meanwhile amuse the other patrons. I’ve never brought a cat with me for company; I did feel very grown up the first time I summoned the courage to eat in a cafe alone with a book, though.

The dangers of giving your “little sister” a 100 rupee bill.

[In my purse] Lily found a tattered old banknote: 100 rupees, to be exact, or about $2 Canadian. Lily liked the funny letters on it, and inquired about the bald guy. We talked about Gandhi, and then a bit about Rosa Parks, too (“The little boy who refused to give away his seat on the bus?” Pretty close, I said). Then she asked if she could have the note to show her friend, and I gave it to her. Because it, too, felt good.

She took her new find to school, where I like to imagine she brags about how cool I am and all the super awesome stuff we do together. But when a teacher spotted the bill at lunch hour, she confiscated it and sent Lily to the principal’s office.

“Where did you get $100?” the principal demanded. (That the bill was 100 rupees was misunderstood, unnoticed or ignored.)

“My Big Sister gave it to me,” Lily explained to the teacher, the secretary and the principal, all of whom did not buy it. That a kid like her could ever acquire such a big bill was impossible; that she stole it was inevitable. Lily didn’t even really have a “big sister.”

Lily begged them to call her mom, who could have called me, but the school refused. Instead, Lily was told to sit there until she confessed. And, like Rosa Parks, just a bit, she sat there the rest of the day.

There are memorable details in that story about the author’s trip to India, too, where she got the 100 rupee bill in the first place.

Hey, Amazon’s not arbitrarily and annoyingly sorting toys by their supposed gender anymore! Now if only Toys R Us will stop it with the pink aisle / blue aisle madness. Kottke also suggests, rightly, “how about you do something about this Amazon Mom thing? What’s wrong with Amazon Family?”

Three cheers for this lady who is biking through food deserts in Cincinnati to deliver soup:

SoupCycle, a bike that transports soup to community centers, parks and events. Suzy DeYoung of La Soupe has been supplying the soups for about a year, and they’ve been a huge hit with those on the receiving end.

“My daughter was a pedi-cab driver in Boston, and she said anyone can pedal 350 pounds thanks to gears,” Matthey says. “So I thought, why not give it a try?”

DeYoung’s soup is made with ingredients bought or given from local chefs and discounted produce from grocery stores. Soup is a great way to help people experience healthy eating as well as introduce them to ingredients they’re not familiar with, Matthey says, and SoupCycle also helps kids learn to make more informed eating decisions.

“Why we still don’t have cheap, customizable 3-D printed shoes.” Would be worth reading for the glorious, McQueen-ish pictures alone.

“From graduation to garbage job — literally.” “Underemployed” is a beautifully illustrated and painfully sad account of graduating into a recession and trying to get meaningful work.

What were your favorite vaguely-money-related reads of this week?

Support The Billfold

The Billfold continues to exist thanks to support from our readers. Help us continue to do our work by making a monthly pledge on Patreon or a one-time-only contribution through PayPal.