This has been a weird week, and I'm in a weird mood. Some good things happened, though.
The most recent good thing was that we went out to dinner for my wife's birthday. The dinner was pretty good. We went to the Olive Garden, which is Fine Dining around here, and a very popular place. I felt badly -- I didn't get her anything, not even a card. She always says that I don't have to, and I know that's true because its true when I say it, but still.... you want to get something as a recognition. She didn't mind, but I still want to do something.
Buying stuff. I have found over the years that what they say is true, at least for me -- buying stuff does not guarantee happiness. I know that's a trite observation, and in a way its hardly new -- we neither of us have ever felt that buying things just because you can is a desirable thing. I don't understand people who buy new, flashy cars (though I like the cars) or gleaming, blinking audio systems (though I like the systems) or even new clothes when the old ones are perfectly good (though I like the new clothes, especially the Tshirts I just got from Lands' End; yum). I think maybe I like the idea of having new stuff; I just don't like the idea of paying for it.
Yet I'm not cheap, not in any real sense. I just don't like spending money for things that I don't really feel like we need. We recently bought a new dining room table -- actually, it'd be a new dining table, wouldn't it? Why do we say dining room table? Well, why do we say salmon but we say tuna fish? -- and having used the table for a while, I can say that its very nice to have, yes indeed. It is solid and comfortable, and the PIR post I made a few days ago notwithstanding, I am glad that we have it. It was Worth The Money. But a lot of things aren't, at least not to me, and I try not to obviously envy people who either have the money to get this stuff without having to think about the cost, or just get it; to hell with the cost, put it on the credit card. How money works -- how people use it -- has always interested me, a little bit. I recall, years ago, when I lived in South Dakota, courtesy of the Air Force, how people would buy houses downtown for the duration of their stay, and at the end of it -- usually about three years later -- they'd sell them again. I was quite pleased with myself when it occurred to me that they weren't actually buying the house; they were renting it from the bank. I was wary of that idea -- what if no one wanted to buy it when I was ready to leave? What does it cost to get an electrician, a plumber, furniture? I wasn't ready for any of those things, so I didn't even try to get a house. The pleasure of ownership wasn't Worth The Money. That's part of the thing about buying a birthday gift -- its got to be Worth The Money. Some amount of the cost can be directed just to the pleasure of getting it for her -- I'd unquestionably spend more money for her than I would ever spend for myself -- but still, there is the WTM consideration. Jewelry, for example. I've never bought into the idea of A Diamond Is Forever. Does that make me cheap? Maybe just a little....
Another Good Thing that happened this week is the drama camp that my daughter is attending. It's small-potatoes stuff -- even little theater is more advanced than this is -- but she's enjoying it. The play is going to be held at noon today, and of course I'll go. I am glad when she enjoys things like this, because its sometimes quite difficult to find things that she does enjoy. Part of it is that she's not comfortable with making friends in a crowd, so the mass activities at the regular camp don't appeal to her. She's a friendly, open kid, and she enjoys having friends -- but only in the micro sense. In that way, she's a lot like me, though she's better at the concept than I am. Like most parents, I wish I could give her the social skills that I never really mastered. If being part of this drama group helps her there, I'm delighted --but even if all it does is give her something to do, and maybe a sense of accomplishment, that'll be a good thing, too.
Work has been slow this week, even by normal standards. That's made me glum. I really want to be busy, I really want Stuff To Do. Not so much that it drives me crazy, or fills every waking moment with an awareness of its looming mass, but enough so that I feel that I'm contributing something. I get a lot of my sense of value from what I do at work, and if I don't do a lot -- well.... And yet I was surprised to find this week that this doesn't necessarily translate into a desire to try new things. This was an unpleasant surprise. What happened was that a colleague told me of a technical tool that could make one of our systems run better, and I found to my surprise that reading the manual, I had almost no interest in doing it. I'm not sure why. It could be that the concept scared me, but I don't want to believe that. I told my group's manager (I always think of him as the group's manager, not as my manager) that I don't mind failing, but I do mind not having the opportunity to fail. Well, that's true, but not as true as it could be. The truth is, I do mind failing, and I think I've lost my taste for trying new things because I'm getting afraid to fail. You can see how that would be a disturbing realization. I don't like it.
So much for now....
No comments:
Post a Comment