Three hundred twelve dollars and sixty-six cents. That is what my bank app's entertainment category said February cost, and I was reading it at nine fifteen on a Sunday night, on the couch, with a heating pad on my shoulder and a folded paper quote from Endodontist Associates in my wallet for $2,450. Root canal, lower left molar, crown not included. The quote had been riding around in that wallet since February 11.
I did the math right there on the armrest, in the notes app, because adding it up in my head kept making me put the phone down. Netflix: $15.49. Max: $16.99. Hulu: $11.99. Spotify: $11.99. Audible: $14.95. Five Kindle books: $84.95. Two hardcovers from Barnes & Noble: $58.34. Three Amazon movie rentals at $5.99: $17.97. One board game for my nephew's birthday: $40. One used copy of Elden Ring for me: $39.99. Sum: $312.66. Entertainment, said the bank. I could not point to one weekend in February I would call fun.
the card four blocks away
Monday lunch I walked to the county branch on Chester Street and walked out with a library card. Fourteen minutes, door to door, including the part where the clerk looked me up and found I owed $1.25 from 2019 for a paperback I still own and never returned. I paid it in quarters from the truck's cupholder. The card is thin blue plastic with a barcode. It has no monthly anything attached to it, which is the entire business model as far as I can tell.
what the clerk installed
She walked me thru three apps in the lobby before her 1 o'clock shift change. Libby for e-books and audiobooks. Hoopla for instant borrows with no wait list. Kanopy for films, four credits a month, resetting on the first. Between the three of them, the February list shrank to the board game and the Elden Ring, and I will admit I bought those anyways, cuz a nephew's birthday is a nephew's birthday. The paperback habit moved to the Friends of the Library shelf, where Saturday volunteers sell paperbacks by the bag for $2 and do not count them.
eight days for one book
Here is the part the pamphlet does not cover. The first book I wanted was The Anarchy, by William Dalrymple, and Libby's wait list said eleven holds ahead of me on eight copies, which the app translated to approximately five weeks. The clerk pointed at InterLibrary Loan, a form buried two menus deep on the library website, where a different system mails you a physical copy from somewhere else entirely. I filed the form Monday night at the kitchen table. The email landed the following Tuesday, eight days later, two sentences long: your hold is available, pick it up at the front desk.
number 118 of 214
I have become a person who checks a wait list number the way other people check a flight status. The new book club pick had 214 holds in Libby as of Friday and I am number 118, which the app says is nine weeks out. Nine weeks usta be an instant $16.99 purchase. Now it is a rotation: InterLibrary Loan for the urgent ones, Hoopla for the instant ones, and the wait list for everything I am not actually urgent about, which turns out to be most of 'em.
the march rerun
Same categories, March, rerun thru the same bank app. Netflix: cancelled. Max: cancelled. Hulu: cancelled. Audible: cancelled, Libby audiobooks took its shifts. Kindle purchases: zero, six Libby borrows instead. Movie rentals: zero, two Kanopy credits used. Spotify: cancelled, the free tier rides in the Corolla now and interrupts me every fourth song. Hardcovers: one, used, $4 at the Friends shelf. The entertainment category for March read $4.13, and the whole $4.13 was parking at the branch.
what the dentist got
The money angle, cuz this is a money story whether I like it or not. $312.66 a month runs $3,751.92 over a year, and that is the number I circled back to every time the cancellations itched. The root canal quote is $2,450, cash, no payment plan, no financing offers taped to the wall. As of April 8 there is $2,611 sitting in the old entertainment line doing nothin', which is the most I have ever liked watching money do. The appointment is June 2. A tooth is about to be the best entertainment purchase of my life.
the honest ledger
Three honest costs to all this. Kanopy's four credits run out in a bad month, and a bad month is exactly when you want a fifth film. The Libby waits are real, number 118 is real, and impatience has a price tag I used to pay without noticing. The free Spotify tier in the Corolla stops every four songs to sell me the upgrade, which my commute has absorbed to treat as a co-host with firm boundaries. None of it costs $312.66.
sunday night, again
It is Sunday night again, heating pad, bank app, same couch. April so far reads $2.00, all of it branch parking, and the wait list number for the book club pick is down to 104. The folded quote came out of my wallet on Friday and went into the recycling, cuz the date is circled now. That is it. That is the whole swap.
