espee ayem

There’s an odd thing about scale. In one sense, it’s terribly easy to adjust to, and difficult to remember that the adjustment has been made. On the other hand, sometimes those adjustments lead to moments of completely warped perspective, when you look at yourself and completely fail to recognize who you are.

In conversation yesterday, for example, I mentioned that twenty dollars was real money, in the sense that if something cost twenty bucks, I had to think about whether to spend it or not. Later I had one of those bizarre moments—twenty? Didn’t I mean five? Or one? But no, I think the combination of inflation, gruppness and moderate disposable income has pushed my idea of real money past ten at least. Not that I always spend ten without thinking; I am by instinct rather cheap. But if I can do something for less than twenty bucks, I generally don’t let the money decide for me. And that twenty is a twenty I sweated over through my high school years.

As a specific example, take pens. At the moment, if I can get a nice pen for twenty dollars, that’s a purchase I’d make pretty happily. There are pens that are even nicer for two hundred dollars, but I don’t even think about purchasing those. Nice or not, however they fit my hand, they just aren’t worth thinking about. Ten years ago, I would have said the same thing about a twenty-dollar pen. What would be the point? I’ll buy this two-dollar pen, which was after all a pretty good pen, and much better than those twenty-cent pens I used to use. Ten years before that, I would have thought—hey! Five pens for a dollar! Great!

So, when I had a day this week where I had less than two hundred spam comments attempted on this Tohu Bohu, I thought, well, that’s a quiet day, and then thought, hunh, up until three weeks ago, two hundred comments in a day would have been a massive slam. In fact, two hundred in a month would have been broken the record. Now the total for the month of March stands at nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-eight. No, don’t worry, I won’t keep updating as various milestones are passed. It was just one of those moments where I startled myself by having adjusted to a totally different scale.

chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.