Satisfaction

It’s odd but I often feel a sense of superiority in my inferiority. The other day a guy hoped out of his fancy new sports car in the IGA parking lot as I was leaving. He was all cool, chest puffed, chin high and I couldn’t help chuckling. “Hehehe idiot, he thinks he’s so cool because he went $40,000 into debt for transportation around town.” I looked at my reliable junker that I never spend a cent on and thought, “sucker, I paid $300 for this and it does exactly the same thing!”

I remember having the same thought overseas seeing people trapped in antiseptic Hilton hotels where they hide in their western culture islands from the locals outside. I’d be suffering in sweltering, putrid, cockroach motels and painful 20-hour chicken bus journeys and I know I had more memorable, more life changing experiences than they did.

It’s not that I’m cheap—granted I generally have little money, so I don’t exactly get to be generous—but given half a chance I love to tip big, buy things for people and throw money around. But I get a strange feeling, like a deep sense of accomplishment by getting by with the cheapest thing possible, by not falling victim to our consumerist society’s need for the latest, biggest, most expensive.

I take a strange pleasure in NOT buying new clothes, not having the most expensive computer I can afford, and I’d even like to think if I was rich I wouldn’t be out buying Italian sports cars—OK one German one, I still want my Porsche. But I like the idea of, not necessarily an aesthetic lifestyle, forcing myself to go without, but of being comfortable with the least. Of living below my means.

Not sure what I’m going on about. Maybe moving again has me thinking about all my possessions. It sounds like I’m talking about a minimalist existence, but I’m not, I do in fact like stuff. I’m a packrat. But that’s more about a wimpy sentimentality or imagined connection to object, not about new toys and cars and clothes. I often feel more attached to virtually worthless things than the most expensive things I own.

I gotta run. Going to see if I can fix the trunk latch on my $300 car.