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Impulse Power

I was told the other day that I buy a lot of things on impulse, or rather, I buy things without much deliberation or really warning of any kind. This I found strange.

The examples given were:

I'm not going to try to say that I don't spend a lot of money on toys and material things. I mostly just want to justify my spending so I don't feel like I'm being irresponsible with my money.

The Camera: I was given a Sony Cybershot for my birthday, summer of 2002. As of November of last year, I had taken about 6,500 photos, and had enjoyed taking at least half of them. With photography being an interest of mine, as well as something I seem to be good at (which is why I get stuck taking pictures and family functions), an investment in an updated, decent camera made a lot of sense. I researched a camera for about a week and came up with the Nikon D40. I have since taken 2,000 photos.

The Computer: I was given a IBM Thinkpad A31 for a graduation present, summer of 2003. As of March this year, it had seen two LCD failures, one hard drive failure, one memory slot failure, and had seen as much travel and software abuse as an out-of-state Computer Science student can throw at it after four years of college. Having worked with numerous operating systems in my studies and career, I had yet to touch an Apple system, which I had been watching since they made the move to the Intel hardware platform. I waited more than a year for Apple to come out with their second-generation Macbook Pros.

The Car: When I started driving, my parents gave to me their 1985 Ford Bronco. This was in August of 2001. I drove it for the remainder of high school. The my sister drove it after I left for Arizona while she was between the various cars she had sold, wrecked, or just plain didn't like. If it wasn't too covered in snow, I would drive the Bronco during the winters when I was back, or the summers when I was working. By the time I was finished with college, it had developed a serious brake problem, which I ended up dumping about $1300 into. Around October 2007, it developed an overheating problem caused by an exhausted spring on the coolant cap. Luckily that was an easy fix, and with rising prices of fuel, I only had to drive about a mile each direction for work.

In early March I changed jobs, working at a new location about 7 miles way. This was going to be hell for my fuel costs, so I decided to get a more economical, more mechanically reliable car, and give the Bronco back to my parents.

The Bike: As with most things mechanical, I treated my bike in Arizona very poorly. So poorly, in fact, that when I reached not much more than 1,000 miles on said bike, it basically became unusable. Granted, I only spent $100 on the bike, so I feel like I got my money's worth. However, the bike I was riding around up here was much older. My parents had bought me my Motiv from Costco, somewhere around 5th or 6th grade. After my biking renaissance in Arizona, I started biking around Anchorage more and more. This was fine, until one day I realized that the Motiv no longer shifted gears. Mid-May, I ended up biking 40 miles in this one gear, nearly destroying myself and the bike. I vowed that if I was going to bike any more, that I was going to need something that was not going to fall apart underneath me, and that I would be able to take care of, and hopefully, just maybe, shift into a different gear. So I went to the bike shop, bought their cheapest bike (which was still damn expensive, but at least of decent quality), and was all the happier for it.

The Playstation 3: Totally an impulse buy. I had told myself that I would buy the bike instead of the PS3. But you know, it was the best deal on a Blu Ray player I could find, in addition to it being a decent gaming system, and I could and did put Linux on it. And I don't hear folks complaining when they're watching movies in high definition.

The Trip to Japan: I think I started trying to pick up Japanese back in the spring of 2007, when I was bored between the usual periods of extreme stress due to school and work. Since then, I've had Japan on my list of places I wanted to go. And being that I currently have no responsibilities or obligations outside of work, bills, and family, it's sort of a good time to go. And I have a friend over there who'll only be there for one more year (I think). And it's now been more than a year since I've been out of Alaska.

There. Now I feel a little more justified. Now the fear that I am slowly slipping into a consumer hell can be put farther to the back of my mind.