iNflAtioN

to be completely honest, any discussions, speculations, insights, and the like regarding the economy, utterly bore me. the economic realm sparks zero interest in me and i usually tune out convo's of this type fairly soon after they have started. the whole watching the stock market and stressing out about things that i have absolutely no control over just seems like a complete anxiety- provoking waste of time. thus, i tend to ignore this facet of society. however, during the past couple of months, perhaps a bit longer, all this talk of a bad economy has hit a little closer to home. i know that it is bad, in my tiny world, when i see big increases in my budget in the realms of gas and groceries. its become personal, not that this will lend me to paying any more attention to economy-talk, but i get it, its bad. and yet, its become even worse then i realized, as whatever the forces are that drive prices up have proven effective in yet another arena of life...teeth. be it inflation or just a bad economy or whatever, tooth fairies around the world, or at least around my part of the world have seen a major hike with regards to the fair market price of a tooth. and just to clarify, we're not even talking molars here. joey informed me a couple weeks past, after the thrilling event of losing his first tooth, that the going rate was five bucks. five bucks??? for a tooth?? i mean, im only 27, so we're talking what, 20 or so years ago, i got like 50 cents, perhaps a dollar, ok, so i dont remember exactly. but for sure, the going rate was certainly no where near that which it is now. how did this happen? somebody needs to run the figures and see if the inflation of the price of teeth is in any way correlated with that of the cost of living. from my naive and ignorant perspective, it surely can't be. inflation has hit home..