The Price of Love

Whoever said you can't put a price on love, obviously didn't live in 2008. Let me break down for you, mathematically, exactly what my affections for my girlfriend cost me this week. She a Spartan in East Lansing, and I drove there to see her Tuesday on a limited budget and in my buddy's POS (piece of shit) Pontiac Sunfire. He calls it The Black Beauty by the way, but in my opinion in would look a whole hell of a lot more beautiful pancaked flat in a scrapyard.
Anyway, before I left I set out trying to calculate exactly how much gas I would have to put in this heap to get me there and back. Here's where the math comes in: my buddy''s Sunfire gets roughly 23 miles to the gallon, count the POS factor and we'll call it 19. The round trip to my girlfriend's house is roughly 170 miles, and gas on that day was going for $4.17. Wait a minute, I almost forgot that I drove a mile more down the road to "save some money" by filling up at a place where Unleaded was going for the bargain basement price of $4.15! To be honest folks, I probably burned up my savings drivig the extra mile to get there.
But back to the math. at 19 miles to the gallon, 170 miles of travel would require 8.947 gall0ns, so for sake of ease let's make it 9. 9 gallons of gas cost me $37.75. To put it in perspective, I make $7.45 an hour before taxes, let's say $7.15 after. To earn that money, I had to work nearly five and a half hours.
This brings me to my final point. All in all, it cost me five and a half hours of my labor, or $37.75, to drive to Lansing to lay on the couch with my girlfriend and watch Across The Universe, which if you haven't seen it is an abomination to the Beatles music and should not be watched by Beatles fans. (And let's face it, anything featuring Bono is pretty much out the window) You may ask why? Why did you spend the money? Make the trip? Why not just stay home and watch a movie you liked? The answer, folks, is simple. I did it for love, to make the girlfriend happy and to keep everything on an even keel. But if gas prices keep getting higher, I guess love can no longer be a part of my budget.
Just don't tell my girlfriend that....