Lying on my floor...

and sorting out quarters for the laundry machine (now $3.00 total for wash and dry), I came to 3 shamefully obvious realizations. (1) I have a lot of quarters (2) I can't justify spending $21 to do laundry here when I can do it for free at my parent's house and (3) carpet is itchy on bare arms.

All of this aside, as I lay there looking at 7 piles of 12 quarters ($21 for those of you slow at math) and contemplated the uses that I have for $21 which are not laundry-related, I came to a precise understanding of the change-psyche. If these coins were a $20 bill, it is inconceivable to me that I would have tossed that in a change machine and trotted off, coins in hand, to do laundry. The slow accretion of coins over weeks, however, somehow makes this same price reasonable. I think this stems from the idea I have in my head that change is somehow not money. It's tolls or laundry or soda, but not REAL money (real money being paper - and somehow the dollar coin doesn't even get the status as change - I mean I have like $12 of them in a jar in my apt that I never even think about). I can either combat this tendency with a trip to the coinstar or paying for everything with quarters. I don't know about you, but I feel really sheepish whipping out a pile of change to pay for anything. Nickels and dimes are even worse - at least quarters SEEM useful, but the nickel? really? I can't think of a single use for a nickel by itself. Don't even talk to me about pennies.

Clearly this is insane.

I don't think that it's just me. There is a reason that people are willing to pay $.07 on the dollar to have their coins converted to paper. When I pay for something that is $.95 It really might as well have cost me a dollar, because there is no way that nickel is being trotted out to pay for something else. I mean, how many of you have change jars that you're saving up to turn into "real" money?

Really, if you think about it - the same kind of thing is happening in a lesser degree to the humble $1. When you look in your wallet and all you see are $1 bills (no matter how many there are), don't you feel poor? What if those were converted into $5’s and $10's? Would you not feel less poor?

Interesting. I may just go pay for dinner with quarters to make myself feel better.