Sunday 9 September 2007

Pic of the day: Money can't buy love, but it can buy some pretty awesome anime. (Like Lucky*Star here!) Even so, it is cheaper to rent, not to mention borrow from a friend. ^^

Cheap pleasures

I can understand if not all of you want to wait for some woolly New Age to make it all better. Of course it is not really that woolly to me, but then I have taken an interest in everyday psychology for years. You may call me a conscientious observer of the human soul. It is certainly an interesting life, but you don't need to be me. You can get a lot more out of less simply by not being experimented on by aliens by advertising.

When I was a boy, I was hardly an incarnation, old soul or indigo child. I was small and weak, smart but very immature for my age. I grew up on a farm in rural Norway, at a time before Norway became one of the world's richest countries. The rainy, mountainous province where we lived was hardly well off even by Norwegian standards, and eking out a living from just our farm didn't make us rich even there. Yet this was not the destitute inner city poverty in a rich country. It was a time and a place where it was still perfectly normal for mothers to mend clothes with patches and darn socks with woolen thread.

At the time, you just did not expect to be able to suddenly walk into a clothes shop (as if there were any nearby) and buy something that caught your eye. No, you might get something new for Christmas, but probably something Mother had sewn herself. (Of course, now with import from China it may well be cheaper to buy finished clothes than sewing them, though homemade may still fit better if you are good at it.) Younger brothers would inherit clothes from older brothers if the textiles were not falling to pieces. Older brothers would inherit from cousins and possible even more remote sources. I remember inheriting a pair of trousers that obviously came from a girl, they were rather bright red. I had very mixed emotions about that, naturally. But generally we never made a fuss. It was an age where you could not just buy clothes randomly, but you didn't miss it either. Of course, if kids today suddenly were told they could not buy clothes, they would probably be very upset. But it is not like humankind has suddenly developed a biological need for new clothes. It is just an attitude.

It is the same with toys. Most kids now have very advanced and complex toys, often models of real-life objects in amazing details. When we were kids, we played with used-up batteries. Occasionally we would make a boat from a small piece of plank that we sawed to a point on its front end and hammered a cube on. Inspired by Thor Heyerdahl, I made rafts from dried hollow stalks that I tied together and placed a mast on, then played for hours in the stream that ran through our farm. Once when I was small I also got a plastic toy ship. It was called Santa Maria, I think, and looked like a ferry or perhaps a cruise ship. It was pretty simple by today's standards, but it was an amazing thing to me. Consequently I cried hard when the stream took it away toward the ocean and I couldn't find it again. The small rafts (suitable in size for a very small mouse perhaps) I lost with equanimity, though.

(Although I didn't know what equanimity was, of course. I still tend to spend it "equinamity", so perhaps I still don't know. Of course I did grow up in a time when horsepower was literal, which may influence my spelling in some subtle way. I remember riding with my grandfather in our simple horse-drawn carriage, back before my dad got the old car that we had for the rest of my childhood.)

One thing we always had was coloring pencils and pens. In the winter we would carry wood for heating in from the barn where it had dried for a long time, sometimes years, and for this carrying we often used large paper sacks that had been used to hold livestock feed grain. These sacks were big, each holding 50 kg of feed, or about a hundred pound. I would rip large pieces of white paper from them after they were used, and on it I would draw maps of imaginary lands. Shorelines, rivers and cities defined my lands: Blue lines for water and red dots for cities. Borders were drawn in various other colors, and would change as my empires grew through expansion and later righteous war. (I had a special fondness for peninsulas, I remember. This may be part of why I have always liked Malaysia since I heard of it some years later. That and the hysterically funny name of their capital, Kuala Lumpur. Of course it helps that "ku" means "cow" in my mother tongue.)

Despite unlimited access to pen and paper, I never got the hang of drawing. I have later concluded that I must have a right-side brain damage, for not only am I unable to draw even to get my dream job, but I also have reduced spatial skills and use my right hand, leg and eye for everything. Perhaps I fell down and struck my head when I was little. This would also explain why I am just a genius and not a complete superhuman… ^_^ Anyway, it may well be that your children will be more accomplished with pencil and paper than I was. And even I had some fun with it, although my favorite motifs were a pirate flag, a sheep, a tractor and a pig seen from the front. That was pretty much all of it, although I later managed to draw recognizable butts. Even with that, I would just barely have been able to make an average web comic. When I see what some of my friends can do, I would say that a dozen coloring pencils or crayons is money well spent indeed.

Another childhood memory is the manual typewriter my father kept at his home office. I discovered it around the age of five, I think, but it would take a bit longer before I was allowed to use it. I wrote some really embarrassing stuff which I am sure my family has stored somewhere; my brothers still quote it decades later. Be that as it may, I grew up and a typewriter became one of the most important tools for my self-expression. I wrote pounds of fiction, burned it and wrote new. It did not stop until I got my first little computer. Today I guess even a used typewriter is more expensive than a cheap computer, or at least an Alphasmart. In any case, if you are that type of person, something to write on can bring you years of excitement.

Of course, it helps that we had walls of books in the home where I was born and grew up. Actually, I am not sure that is what helps, it is probably more that I share the genes that love literature. You sure can have a lot of fun with books, and it is probably good for your brain and sometimes for your soul (though that would depend on the books… my brothers had yards of western books for instance). But even if money should be an objection, there is always the public library. Despite our home almost being one, we would still stop by the real thing and borrow one thing or another. I remember by the time I became a teenager, I went to the public library and politely asked the female librarian to help me find some books about sex. This could have been the beginning of a really dubious story, because we all know that female librarians are very hot. But she did actually pick three books for me, one of which was clearly meant to be a textbook in school (not that we had sex ed in school ever), and one which was pretty creepy as it wrote about things in France, where men had sex with men and insulted them in the process. I forgot which was the third, though it may have been The Naked Ape by Desmond Morris, one of the most influential books in my life after the Bible and Jung's memoirs. I know I borrowed it around that age.

OK, you probably see the typing on the wall by now. Having extra money is loads of fun. I generally try to buy a new computer each year myself. But really, it is no biggie. You have food, decent clothes, a place to live? Buy crayons and you're all set. Most of the rest is so very, very optional. Some of it is actually more stress than it is worth. I thank the Light that I don't need a car in my job, for instance. You can have a lot of fun with them, I am sure, especially if they have a cassette or CD player. But the fun/money ratio is horrible compared to crayons, or even a cheap computer. Alas, most of us can't use crayons in our job… although I do have a friend who does, and seems to enjoy her job more than I do mine.

***

I hope this gave you a little inspiration, even though I know I didn't exactly discover some long lost secret. It is all obvious, but you have to be a conscientious observer to not be oblivious to the obvious. This is how it works. But I'm happy to be of service!