I Love Vintage

It seems that right now retro and vintage are one of the "in" styles for the youth crowd of high school and college age kids. I find this incredibly ironic as I was retro back in high school in the late 90s when it certainly wasn't cool. I loved Space Invaders and the NES back when it wasn't cool at all. I'm not trying to claim to be a trend setter or anything like that, but I do find it ironic that what I once thought was my own thing has quite a much bigger following than I ever knew.

As a child I had a few vintage toys belonging to my parents. My brother and I played with my dad's wagon train set while my sisters played with mom's doll house. We had plenty of our own brand new toys but we were exposed to some older items early on teaching us that indeed there was a world before us.

Now when I grew older we had some poor financial times with my dad losing his job and being handicapped for a while. So we never had all the newest and greatest things but we did do a lot of shopping at yard sales. When all my friends had Playstations and Nintendo 64 I was rocking with a used NES and an Atari 2600. They weren't just used items to me, they were now mine and something special. Special because they were unique and something that had survived and through the hunt of it all, I was able to find.

I also am a big fan of quality items. While much of our furniture is perhaps out of date and I know my mom would llike to update the style of much of it, we have much better quality items than the average run of the mill Ikea/Target styles that many families buy today. Likewise many of my items for my home office are of great quality. For example I have an antique box holding my pens and pencils which is much more asthetically pleasing than your run of the mill Rubbermaid pencil box and I only paid $5 for it at a barn sale. Don't even get me started on some of my vintage medium format folder and TLR cameras.

One other thing I should mention is that for those into enviromentalism (I'm not, really) vintage also has that neat credential of saving stuff from landfills and preventing new crap in China being made. For the latter reason I try to buy used and vintage whenever possible or at the very least a high quality Made in the USA item but this could spark its own post in general.

Basically to sum up I'm glad that retro is really picking up. When I see a high school age kid wearing a shirt he got at Hot Topic with Tanooki Mario on it I smile and hope that they don't just wear the shirt but actually play the game sometime. While they are at it they could play some records and use a fountain pen. Vintage never goes out of style; it's always cool.

My constant struggles

There are times in my life where I feel that I have zero control over my actions. This is especially true in regards to finances. I know many of my close friends and family will disagree with me and point out how I am often going out of my way to save a dollar here and there but there are times when I just give in. Usually I am alright when left alone but whether influenced by family, friends or simply the urge to "treat" myself I tend to find myself giving in to purchases I never intended to buy.

As I stated earlier, many of my friends and family feel that I'm "lucky" to have a nice job and get quite annoyed that I don't just go around and buy every little impulse purchase that I want. They also seem to have little sympathy when I feel guilty for buying things I don't necessarily want.

While I do try to be good I am, of course, imperfect and I do give in to purchases that amount to either status symbols or to clutter. They tend to break down into two major categories:

Impulse Buys: These are small and on their own aren't really all that bad. For example I spent $10 on this last weekend at a yard sale on a box full of collector's glasses with various characters on them. When I first checked them out I wanted to just get the two Pacman ones for my vintage gaming collection. Yet the allure of having a whole pile of McDonalds glasses and my dad talking to the lady to get a huge discount. While some collectors may say I got them at a good price, I really have no use for them and quite frankly are going out at our next tag sale.

Status Symbols: A year ago I bought a new car. My 98 Cavalier needed serious repairs and it was frankly starting to fall apart. While I suppose I could've fixed it I was afraid of it being a money sink. So I replaced one bad money put with another. I bought a brand new car when I could've bought a perfectly reliable used car for a third of what my "econo" Elantra cost. Yet I felt that with my new job I deserved a brand new car. Because of that, I'm keeping this car until the wheels fall off.

New Toys: A week or so ago I bought a digital SLR. Once upon a time I was seriously considering a career in photography. Since unfortunately the market of photographers is so flooded and I didn't want to be a portrait photographer I ended up back in the tech world. In my college days I would choot at least one 36 exposure roll of slides a week. Now I'm lucky if I get a roll shot every month or so. Besides, I prefer my folding and twin lens cameras so buying a digital SLR was simply a new toy that would collect dust. Luckily the day after receiving it I realized my folly and sent it back for a refund. Now I can buy a digicam for when I want a quick digital or something to carry in my pocket.

So as you can see it's a constant struggle to keep my spending under control. I guess all I can say is that I just need to watch myself a bit more.