A Journal of My Mid-Life Crisis

15 November 1998 - Life Enhancement

The true test of whether or not it is worth owning something is "does possession of this enhance my life more than maintaining/cleaning/storing it detracts from my life."? This is not a trivial question. I have some things for which it is really obvious that the answer is an emphatic yes. For example, when I turned 30 I decided that I was too old to have posters tacked to the wall and that it was time to buy real art. I bought a Susan Rios serigraph at an auction for what seemed a huge sum of money. It's the one picture I always know where to hang when I move - it has to go across from my bed, so it's the first thing I see in the morning. (Or, at least, the first thing I see after I put on my glasses!) So, yes, it was pricy, it's absurdly heavy so needs careful placement of the picture hook in a wall stud, it has to be dusted and the glass cleaned and all. But I get such immense pleasure out of looking at it that there is no doubt.

And then there are the things I unpack and look at and think "whatever possessed me to get this?" Often they aren't things I bought myself but I seem to end up keeping them longer than I need to. A good example is a really silly gadget my mother gave me, having herself decided it was too impractical to keep. (And, seeing as how my mother is generally considered the queen rat of the packrat clan, that's pretty rare on her part.) The gadget in question was an automatic needle threader. It takes longer to thread this thing than it does to thread a needle and it's not even like it works any better than those little wire loop things. Despite which, i kept this stupid thing around for years, finally throwing it into last year's white elephant gift exchange at Milo's annual holiday party. And, to be honest, I felt some regret watching it go.

The problem is that a lot of things fall in between and it's hard to decide whether or not they enhance my life. Books are the big one. Some books are clearly enhancers - I have read Alice in Wonderland at least once a year for as far back as I can remember, for example. But even the questionable books are hard for me to get rid of. Actually, even the clearly non-life-enhancing books are hard for me to part with. So in the book boxes in storage are lots of works of utter garbage, ranging from series romance novels (Harlequin, Silhouette and the like) to collections of Wizard of Id cartoons (which I once liked but now consider boring and unfunny) to out of date guidebooks. I am not even going to pretend I am rational about this. Slowly I will work it out, I suppose.

Now, it isn't just things that this whole question of keeping only what enhances my life applies to. It has a lot to do with how I spend my time, for example, and who I spend it with. Storytelling clearly enhances my life, playing most computer games does not, professional society activities are in between. (Work is probably in between, too, but having a paycheck is a definite life enhancer.)

The people one is more interesting. There are a lot of people in my life who clearly enhance it - the Bards, Marcia, Lonny and Lauren, Saori and Bob, etc.. And there are surprisingly few who are clear detractors, though I have had to deal with them now and again at work. But it's sometimes hard to decide about specific people.

Anyway, even if the answers aren't easy, it's a good question to ask.

As for what actually happened this week, work plods along just as it did before I left. I spent part of today reviewing IEEE papers, mostly ones having to do with tracking algorithms; Carlton and Don were reviewers, too, so the event was fairly social as well. But the most interesting incident was Wednesday night, when I went over to Santa Monica partly to shop for a lamp (the nominal excuse), partly to have frites with ancho chile mayonnaise for supper (a secondary excuse) and partly to avoid housework and go for a nice walk (the real reason). I was walking down the promenade when I suddenly saw two people I recognized. It took me a second to realize where I knew them from, since they were decidedly out of context. "Philly? Roger?" I inquired, "what one earth are you doing in L.A.?" They were a couple from New Zealand who had been on Charlie's truck (the other Dragoman truck) from Nairobi to Harare and I'd last seen them outside the Hotel Selous in Harare in March! We chatted for a while and caught up and it turned out that they were getting in a few days of sightseeing here between South America and going home to New Zealand. It was certainly a weird coincidence running into them.

And, yes, I did see a great lamp (at Restoration Hardware) - but I haven't decided yet if it would enhance my life enough to spend 150 bucks on it.