Other parts of the weekend were good too. Friday night's UHS dance party was a trip - kids are different than they used to be but still exactly the same. Chaperoning a young high school dance made me feel old but also recalled a time chock full of teenage akwardness and angst. Afterwards, a round or two at Woodward Avenue Brewery before heading home... french fries on 8 Mile and a voicemail clearing the next day. I was raised never to celebrate someone's malaise but also not to lie, so I'm defaulting to the second of those because I was fine with not having to get up on Saturday morning for a TMI module. Instead we shopped for a couch and enjoyed the last Yost game of the year in a very short, very lazy kind of day.

Mixing genres is supposedly bad, but I'm going to give it a whirl today. Michigan is raising the minimum wage, pending likely legislative approval, from $5.15 an hour to $7.40 in July 2008. I think it astonishing that this basic sustainer of life has remained flat since I was in high school; the implications of a minimum wage job are so broad and debilitating that I can't comprehend resistance, yet that is what the bill is getting. Imagine bringing in (pretax) just over $200 per 40 hours. This is not life-sustaining, let along family sustaining. Opponents argue that the additional $2.25 an hour won't make much difference and, more loudly, that the increase will be passed through to consumers. My answer is: of course. No, it hardly helps... $90 per 40 hours isn't enough to make things alright, but that is almost 50% more than where we are now and that is significant improvement. Yes, the difference will get passed through to consumers. My response is this: if you are living so close to your margin that you can't afford an extra dollar an hour for lawn service, you are living outside your means. If it is hard for a 'median' family to make ends meet when minimum wage goes up a dollar or two, try to internalize the hardship for a family surviving on minimum wage if it doesn't.