I can’t tell you how many things I’ve wasted money on in my life. Most of the time they were things I hoped would make me better looking, or smarter, or appear upwardly mobile. If I had all that money back today, I could probably retire to Mykonos and spend my afternoons sipping ouzo on the beach.
First there was the home gym. It cost more than a thousand dollars. Half the people reading this have probably purchased home gyms themselves at one time or another and know what I’m talking about. Ours was the type where you had to change the straps to adjust the weight. That alone was prohibitive. I’m not particularly mechanical, so changing straps was a huge pain in the very area I wanted to improve. Eventually, the home gym became a shelf for our son’s toys. We ended up selling it for half of what we paid for it.
Then there was the Chicago Manual of Style. It’s a 1,146-page reference book for writers. It includes everything a writer could ever want to know about the writing process, publishing, grammar, punctuation, citation, etc. I bought the hardcover version years ago when I was writing my master’s thesis. It cost more than fifty dollars at the time which was a whole lot of money for a graduate student working at Record Theatre in Williamsville, New York. As you can tell from this blog post, I don’t make much use of my Chicago Manual of Style.
One of my most ridiculous purchases was another reference book, one called, The Encyclopedia of Bad Taste. It cost around forty dollars back in the 1990s. I was in my twenties then and found myself socializing with an upwardly mobile crowd. Coming from an economically challenged background, I didn’t know much about fancy etiquette or what was considered good or bad taste, so I thought this book would help me. Did you know that it’s ill-advised to serve Pudding in a Cloud for dessert at a formal dinner party?
Indeed, I’ve wasted a lot of money in my life, but so what? As they say, “You can’t take it with you.” And besides, most everything I wasted money on did buy me one thing that was at least temporarily helpful – hope. I had hope for a while that I’d soon have a great body, author a perfect thesis, and feel comfortable at Downton Abbey-like formal dinners – that never actually took place, by the way. In hindsight, I’m grateful I’ve had some money to waste in the first place, and that I spent it buying hope.
What have you wasted money on? Did it buy you hope too? What would you do with that money today if you could have it back? Tell me about it at mwimmer@wned.org. Finally, are you a member of BTPM Classical? I hope you’ll join us. You can do it right here at www.btpm.org or at 1-877-511-1017 .
