Five years ago today

Dangerous cheapness

It's been growing on me lately, as our cost of living has gone down while our standard of living seems to be going up, that free stuff has a sinister side effect. It seems like the perfect win-win situation, the ultimate symbiotic relationship between manufacturer, retailer, and consumer (and can a symbiotic relationship even go three ways? -or is it strictly a two-party deal?): the producer gets name recognition and product awareness, the retailer gets business, the consumer gets free (or cheap) stuff.

But ponder a little while (and I am willing to ponder anything late enough at night) and it becomes apparent how the ready availability of free stuff can erode morale. It's a known fact, of course, that we prize highly that which costs us dearly. Scarcity, or even the appearance of scarcity, causes us to hoard resources, while abundance encourages us to live it up. And even my efficient nature is struggling against the impulse to grow callous and lax in the face of apparent plenty. It's becoming harder and harder to wrestle with extracting the last few dregs of toothpaste from the tube when there are two dozen fresh tubes in the drawer, and last week I tossed out half a spoiled loaf of bread with far less gnashing of teeth than would have occurred if it hadn't been free to begin with.

There are a couple of reasons why I still won't give in and be a totally wasteful consumer. For one, I'm not sure how long this spate of feasting will last - I keep thinking that the deals must dry up sooner or later - and I don't want to have gotten too comfortable at an unsustainably high standard of living when reality sets in again. For another - well, I still don't like wasting things, even if wasting free stuff hurts me less. That's just my personality, and quite possibly those feelings would erode entirely given enough time - many people seem to have no qualms about tossing away things which cost them little effort to acquire.

I wonder whether this is an attitude that we're seeing challenged and shaken up by the recent climb in grocery prices. Perhaps American consumers were getting too spoiled by low prices of
cheap goods, and that had a lot to do with the wasteful consumerist mentality that ran so rampant. So is this rise in gasoline and milk prices really a blessing in disguise? An unwanted lesson in character development?

I've also been re-thinking a lot of my opinions on the importance of maintaining a low cost for goods and services. Well, my evolving opinion on Wal-mart is a post for another day, but in short, I've come to see the value of high-priced, quality merchandise. As Ma Ingalls would say, 'Enough is as good as a feast.' All other things being equal, and in a free market where the end price is a natural result of supply and demand, why shouldn't it be just as good to spend a given amount of money on fewer but higher-quality food items that will all get eaten, as to spend the same amount on far more stuff half of which ends up going to waste?

(I had to toss in the remark about the free market as an expression of my irritation at the ongoing farm subsidies, which make corn syrup so cheap to produce and hence so readily available. So now cheap and deadly high-fructose corn syrup is in everything, but it's an artificial construct, because it really wouldn't be that cheap otherwise.)

Oh boy

The ever-wise and all-knowing Pearls, having solved the problems of modern marriage with their previous best-seller, now turn their attention to another troubling matter: the case of the rebellious teenager. How can you be sure that your children will not jump ship 'as soon as they think they can survive without the family—some as young as sixteen years old'? Buy this book to find out.

(I'm guessing that this book doesn't have the answers for those unfortunate parents whose kids jump ship under the age of sixteen - bummer. Maybe you'll have to wait for the sequel on that one.)

Me was homeschooled

67

It's not just thinking of all the countries, it's getting them spelled right. If I hadn't worried about capital letters, I probably could have done more. Not to mention all the time I wasted trying 'THE Bahamas' and 'THE Philippines.'

Love and war

An interesting conversation last week touched on a long-standing debate I've had in my mind, and the issue is still unresolved. But first, a bit of background.

You may remember Michael's brother Eric, who got married last June. He had a month with his bride before being shipped off to Iraq for several months. He returned in February, and we found out last week that they are newly expecting. Great happiness and all that.

When we shared the good news with friends, it led to a discussion on marriage in wartime - specifically, what would you do if the love of your life was about to be shipped off to war?

On the one hand, waiting might sound prudent because you will have the chance to test your love for each other. You don't have to get trapped in limbo between feeling single and married. Being separated for such a length of time would put an incredible stress on the first year of marriage.

On the other hand, it might seem better to get married and have at least what time you can together. This line of thinking prevailed quite a bit in WWII.

Then someone mentioned a further point. Suppose you did get married, and the love of your life did in fact die. Would it affect your future eligibility to be a young heartbroken widow, as opposed to a young heartbroken fiancee?

And then we fell into further speculation. Suppose you did decide to get married first. Would you try to get pregnant before he leaves? On the one hand, if you're fairly certain of his safety, you might decide to wait, so as not to have him miss the child's arrival. On the other hand, if there's a significant chance that he will die, you might want to have a tangible reminder of him - pass on the family name, and all that - some bright hope to comfort you through the grief and loss. On the other hand again, much as you might want a reason to go on living, single motherhood is really hard - wouldn't a framed photograph do nearly as well?

I've very glad I've never had to face those tough choices. I'm grateful that Eric is home safe and sound, but now my young cousin Angela, who got married last Thanksgiving, is in much the same situation. Nothing I can do about it but pray for the collective safety of our brave troops over there.

Sticker shock

When we were in Holland, we felt the pinch of the falling dollar, especially as everything seemed more expensive than it should be to begin with. My brother calculated that gasoline, at 1.52 Euro/liter, worked out to about $9/gallon. Now, of course the Dutch can just bicycle everywhere, and many of them do. The towns are very small, and the way the streets are laid out, on the same cobblestone grid from the Middle Ages, it's faster to get anywhere by foot or by pedal than by car. Moreover people routinely bike to work, up to 20-mile commutes. So perhaps they don't feel the high price of gasoline as keenly as we do.

The groceries, however, there is no getting around. Did I mention that things are smaller in Holland? The portions are smaller, the refrigerators are smaller, and the egg cartons are smaller. (Standard size is six eggs; large is ten eggs; you can't buy a carton of a dozen eggs anywhere.) Everything is on the metric system, which is handy for calculating the price per liter or gram, but you're still stuck not knowing how many lbs. of potatoes you're buying.

Fortunately we had brought most of our groceries with us - dried beans, packs of tuna fish my family smuggled past customs (apparently you're not supposed to take meat into the country, but having lugged provisions across the Atlantic, they were not about to jettison their precious cargo, so it came in undeclared), canned fruits and vegetables, TVP, rice, noodles, and assorted oddments. We frequented the grocery store for our daily bread, the potatoes (which are government-subsidised and hence fairly cheap), and the occasional half-kilogram of butter and liter of milk for coffee.

It was with relief that I anticipated the return to American prices, only to discover that these had shot up alarmingly in our absence. Gasoline has topped $3/gallon, and by a very wide margin indeed. Therefore I am making a concerted effort to stay at home these days.

You've heard that Holland is a small country...