Every Thursday is Simplicity day at Living Behind the Curve.

Ever since geeks and paranoid isolationists collectively pulled their hair out over Y2K, the entire planet has been swept up in a personal gizmo renaissance – excepting Japan, of course, which seems to have always tapdanced on the bleeding edge of blinking electronic evolution. Gazillions of batteries give their lives every year to feed our need for little injection-molded pieces of plastic that go “bloop!” in a friendly manner. Second only to cellphones, iPods are arguably the iconic personal gizmo of our time.

Think about it. Those white earbuds are so recognizable, Apple didn’t need to show anything else in their ads for a while there. They’ve spawned two separate neologism classes: iNouns and Podverbs. Gig for gig compared with thir competitors, they’re very affordable (though in true Apple style, only just barely), they work ridiculously well, and they’re easy to use. Even the proprietary program that gets the music into your iPod, iTunes, is the best in its class. iPods are freaking awesome.

And I don’t own one.

Don’t get me wrong, I heart the digital music revolution. I was all over Napster when it first came out, and I’ve spent weekends ripping my CDs onto my hard drive. I’ve even forsaken radio for podcasting — I’m an audiophile of the nerdiest persuasion. But I’ve done it all without needing or wanting an iPod, and here’s why: it never made financial sense. Read the rest of this entry »

Every Friday is 11 Things day at Living Behind the Curve.

What is a blog without a good top ten list? We go one better with “11 Things” Fridays. From frugal crafts to completely biased opinions, we give you 11 Things to last you all through the weekend. To start things off, here are 11 Things That Living Behind the Curve is Not:

1. Uptightwad
Amy Dacyczyn, author of the Tightwad Gazette, has a place of honor in our hearts, along with Alton Brown, Julie Andrews and Mike Callahan. The Tightwad method is a marvelous way to cut spending, reduce consumption, save money, and reduce waste. When taken to extremes, it also starts bearing a remarkable resemblance to a cult. We’re big advocates of reducing consumption to save money and simplify, but we’re not going to scold anyone for not felting their dryer lint and making hats for the entire family.

2. Hard-Core Finance
Financial blogs are a dime a dozen (at 4.92% interest, compounding quarterly). I recently found one blogger who deposits 86% of her pre-tax day-job income into a retirement account. Not all of them are quite that extreme, but financial bloggers love numbers, obsessively comparing annualized rates of return to see whose is bigger. Budgeting and saving for retirement are important, but we try to strike a balance between penny pinching and fine living - Dawes, Tomes, Mousley and Grubbs be damned!

3. Donna Reed
If you came here looking for the kind of recipes to serve from your sparkling kitchen in your high heels and perfectly starched apron, you might want to look here. I have nothing against Donna Reed – I just don’t wear pearls when I dust. Hell, I rarely dust. We’re busy people, with a busy life, and an insatiable lust for good food.

Ed. Note: Did you know there’s a drink called a Donna Reed? The frozen version sounds delightful. There’s also a soundtrack released by Nick at Nite.

4. Goat-Milking
There is a large contingent of people who equate simple living with abandoning modern life and establishing self-sufficient farming communes, where the goats are milked by hand, the produce shines chemical-free in the sun, internal combustion engines are a distant memory, and you can hear the sound of paradigms shattering for miles. Nice work if you can stand it — we can’t. Simplicity is possible in even the most spiritually corrupt suburb.

5. Predictable
Well, on Tuesdays, anyway. There’s just no telling what the Kitchen Sink posts will bring. There will probably be some discussion of silly hats, for example. You never know.

6. Impersonal
If you love us, we’ll love you back. Whether it’s a comment, a link, or an email, if you’ve got a thought for us, we’ll think back. To illustrate the point, we have some advice for Jeff, who laments the loss of our original tag line. Always remember, Jeff, that without geometry, life is pointless.

7. A Top Ten List
David Letterman totally did that already. 11 Things are better, because there’s one more!

8. Cheezburger
We appreciate a good LOLcat reference, and I’m sure we’ll make a few, but there’s a time and place for verbing your nouns, and this blog isn’t it. Kthxbai.

9. Perfect
It may sound strange, but I’m looking forward to sharing our failures with you, in addition to our successes. Everybody screws up – the important part is to pick yourself up and keep on keepin’ on.

10. In our Right Minds
We’re two twenty-something people working full time jobs and going to school who, at the same time they are working to simplify their life, decided to create a blog and commit to a posting schedule. We’re a little off, and a little twisted (and occasionally a bit punny.)

11. Kidding
We’re not kidding about how easy it is to life a more simple life, or get your finances under control. In the spirit of full disclosure, however, we weren’t kidding about the puns either.

This concludes our week of introductory posts — Monday will start us off with the actual content portion of our program. If there’s something you’d like to see here, or if you have fabulous sources for silly hats, please let us know in the comments.

Every Thursday is Goat-Free Simplicity day at Living Behind The Curve.

Simplicity is one of those buzzwords that floats to the top of the self-help bookshelf every couple of years, and hovers right below the surface the rest of the time. Have you ever paid attention to this sort of thing before? The Wikipedia entry for Simple Living shows that there’s a distinctly… crunchy granola aspect to the modern concept of simplicity . There’s a lot about organic food and vegetarianism and commune living and ecology. Plenty of “back to the land” type of stuff, fetishizing the small cooperative town. For these folks, their simplicity is fundamentally tied to the planet and their impact on it, and I’d even go so far as to say that it’s an orthodox form of environmentalism.

I don’t necessarily have a problem with any of that, but I do think that the concept of living simply has been hijacked by anti-capitalist, anti-corporate and anti-development left wing radicals. I’ll say it again — I don’t have a problem with this. If your life feels fuller and more fulfilling by living in a kibbutz, milking your own goat, and protesting globalization, knock yourself out and have a marvelous time.

I’m here to tell you that you don’t need to buy Birkenstock sandals to simplify your life. The whole “back to the land” thing is fine, but at best it’s an impractical solution for most of us. Not everyone can be a farmer, or can reasonably be expected to relocate like that. Some of us are city people, allergic to fresh air and wide open spaces. Some folks love their desk jobs. It doesn’t really matter, in the end. We can all simplify right from where we are.

So, on Thursdays, I’ll be discussing the philosophy behind simple living, and Dani will bring you the practical reports of actually doing it. We’ll talk about basic stuff reduction, ideas for completely re-evaluating your priorities in life, and why you might need to re-evaluate in the first place. All this and more, entirely goat-free and updated for the 21st century.

Tomorrow, Dani’s back with 11 Things, proving that, instead of creating meaningless categories and additional extra unnecessary levels of complexity, arbitrary structure and hierarchy are sometimes just what we need to survive to the end of the week without completely losing our shit.