I recognize that I’m saying this from the perspective of a first-world dweller, but I like simple things. I think it’s part of what keeps me frustratingly (for my friends, not me) about five years behind any kind of trend or bandwagon, and by now most of my friends know not to ask if I’ve heard of something before those requisite 1,825 days.
As I mentioned recently, I got married in October. My wife was the one who taught me about this “wedding registry” thing, and she held most of the interest in keeping and updating it for the longest time. My brain just didn’t have the depth for considering things like receiving wedding gifts. That was until a couple of our friends gifted us with a two’fer: a serving set of margarita glasses and a cast iron skillet.
Y’all, I love that skillet.
Even when we opened them, we both gave audible happy sighs, but then she grabbed the glasses and I hugged the skillet, silently each telling the other, “I love you, til death do we part, but if anything happens, this is mine and that’s yours.”
In the months since then, I’ve taken a real cooking turn. I bought a couple of cookbooks (The Official D&D ones – Heroes’ Feast and Flavors of the Multiverse – because I’m a nerd) and have been churning out culinary creation after creation. A lot of the credit goes to my aforementioned spouse for challenging me to bake her a cake a few years ago (which has gone on to become a solid tradition) for first introducing me to the magic that is following a recipe, and the rest goes to that skillet.
Certain things on occasion call for using food processors and immersion blenders, but I’ll modify as I need to in order to eschew those and make due with the following: a knife, skillet, hands, yum. That does the trick nine out of ten times, and it had me thinking of the tons of kitchen gadgets and shiny things that exist out there for cooking. And that had me think of a couple other encounters where I think it’s easy to be oversold, namely bikes, bows, and everything else.
I remember a time I was at my favorite archery shop. I’d just finished at the range, had packed up, and was milling about before leaving. All sorts come through, from hunters, competitive shooters, casual and seasonal shooters like myself, to total beginners. One such newbie was looking around the store, thinking aloud on where to start, when another somewhat-new guy approached him. I’m all for being helpful, but I…disagreed with his advice.
“Yeah bro,” Sorta New Guy told him, “I tried all sorts of bows when I started looking, and I just got my first. Now, you can get one of those beginner units, and that’s all well and good or whatever. And this puppy” (he said, hoisting up his own, pretty expensive compound bow) “cost me about $1,700, but let me tell you, you get what you pay for. You can feel the difference.”
Which to that I say, you can…to a point.
My bow is a faithful steed that was just a baseline Great Tree recurve, out-the-door all said and done for about $300. He’s stuck by me for north of eleven years and…well, got me preferable results up at the line than Sorta New Guy with his bells and whistles.
Am I against bells and whistles? No. Am I here bragging? Well…a teensy bit, yes. But just more to say that that dude way overbought, and that a sturdy, reliable, baseline set can demonstrably serve you for over a decade. Kind of like the above-mentioned “knife, skillet, hands, yum”.
The other encounter was when I went shopping for a commuter bicycle about six years ago. This was an expensive purchase, but that’s because…I won’t lie, I guess these things are just pricey. Mine cost me about $1,000, which hurt, but I genuinely think it’s immortal. And when I was looking at bicycle prices, the costs could be little dinky ones for less than mine, ones like mine, and then quickly and suddenly up into the thousands of dollars, then thousands of thousands of dollars. Like, Jiminy Christmas, I guess if you’re Lance Armstrong and microseconds count to you in a race, but outside of that, no thank you.
The lesson I found in these things is this: More often than not, baseline will do you. Like bikes, bows, and everything else, stuff can and will get as expensive as you want it to be, but wow will that not really mean that it’s much better. It’s about the skill you apply (or eventually apply, through learning) that will make the difference.
And that’s the fun part.
The Light of Day 