I wrote the below yesterday, planning to post it today.
Over the course of driving back to Indy today, it gave me pause, though.
I mean, for all the “I don’t have fancy stuff” below, I am inherently a privileged, and fairly “fancy” person. I mean, I grind my own coffee and use an aeropress. I drive a friggin’ Prius (as unfancy as I might find it below).
I’ve been really lucky in my life to have what are actually a lot of “fancy” things beyond a roof over my head, a bed to sleep in and enough food to not be hungry.
And there are many among us - some likely very near where I live - that don’t even have those necessities, let alone all my fancy things I don’t find all that “fancy” below.
Anyway. Here’s my fancy ass complaining about not having fancy things.
Enjoy!
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Over the New Year’s break, a question entered my head:
“What’s the fanciest thing I have?”
It came up in reference to a new car for some friends of ours, but for my own little family unit, it’s a trickier than I expected question.
In thinking about it, we don’t have a lot of fancy things.
Our house we bought off a foreclosure and the bottom end of the market. It’s fine, but certainly not fancy. We haven’t done much since to make it fancy, either - maybe the built-in bookshelves my Dad helped us build shortly after we bought it more than a decade ago?
Our cars - a Toyota Prius V and a Honda Fit - are bought to be practical, not fancy. Maybe the vegan leather seats in the Prius are kinda fancy? But not by the time we bought it used several years into its life.
Most of our furniture we bought before we had kids - and kids have happened to most of our furniture. But we knew that would happen, and they’re not fancy.
Our largest TV - new this Christmas - is a budget model with a hardware defect along the right side. That doesn’t seem fancy. Picture’s nice, though.
My work desk has a monitor arm on it - that’s kind of fancy I guess, even if it fell off the back of a truck, so to speak.
Could my fanciest thing be my desk chair? A Steelcase Leap I bought used years ago when I gave consulting a try? Maybe that.
For my birthday, my wife got me a Tom Bihn Co-Pilot bag. Tom Bihn’s fancy stuff, right? Feels kinda fancy at least.
Anyway … As I got the end of thinking of this, I asked myself another question: “Why don’t we have fancy stuff?”
And I answered:
Because we’d rather do fancy things instead.
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Ok. That out of the way, tomorrow I’ll tell you about how - if you’re located around Central Indiana - you can volunteer at Second Helpings, a food rescue and hunger relief organization in Indianapolis, and what that’s like.
