Due to a great amount of luck and literally no amount of foresight or knowledge, I won a bunch of March Madness brackets this year, netting almost a thousand bucks.
This surprised nobody more than it surprised me, for two reasons:
- I pay no attention to college basketball. Literally none. I am an NBA fan, and there are NBA fans who watch college basketball in the air of scouting draft picks — I am not one of those people.
- I won March Madness last year, again under circumstances best ascribed to the fundamental chaos of the universe rather than any particular personal achievement, and I figured my allotment of luck in this venue was forever exhausted.
That amount of money is tricky. It’s not trivial enough to do something singularly irresponsible with it; for $100 I could get a nice dinner or buy a sweater I’ve been eyeing. It’s approaching the size of being so much money that treating it irresponsibly would be, uh, imprudent: that’s half a month’s rent! (Or, if you live in someplace that has a kinder housing market than Seattle — that’s a month’s rent!)
Still, I wanted to do something relatively exciting with it, or at least with a portion of it. One of my friends recommended upgrading my sound setup, which is already fairly bougie (I have a bunch of Sonos One devices scattered around my apartment like tiny Scandinavian obelisks) but not quite the surround-sound institution befitting the stereotypical “developer who owns an Eames chair and is, like, really into Uniqlo” identity into which I’ve found myself slowly sinking over the past few years.
My resistance against this suggestion was something that I felt at a deep fundamental level — and it’s something I never really knew how to verbalize until exactly then.
It’s not that I think that it’s a bad idea. But, you know, I’ve literally never listened to music or watched TV and been like “hm, you know what is lacking? the sound.” That thought has never occurred to me, you know, that I’m at a local maxima sound-wise.
I struggle to think, though, of times where this resistance to palette-expansion has borne out as correct. I can think of many times where I was wrong about not needing or wanting something, especially when it comes to work:
- I was convinced that programing was a fun thing to do in high school but not worth any of my time in college until I found myself in love with my Data Structures class;
- I was convinced that IDEs were a crutch for bad developers until I actually used a good one;
- I was convinced that AirPods were standard bluetooth earphones with a $100 Apple tax until I bought them;
- etc. etc.
So, probably at some point down the line, I am going to find myself in an apartment with beautiful 5.1 sound and wonder how I ever lived without it.
And I’m trying to think of the other things that I’ve thought to myself “nah, there’s no point in investing resources in this” — low-level programming languages, baking, networking, winter sports. And perhaps, at some point, I’ll redouble my efforts.
Anyway. I think I’m going to buy a blanket and throw the rest in my savings account, unless any of y’all have any better ideas.
Happy Sunday.
I hope you get yourself something you’ve been thinking about for a while. (Even if it’s small. Especially if it’s small.)