First World Problems

The phone rings, and it's my mom.

"Would you like a TV for your anniversary?"

Mom's been trying to come up with an anniversary gift since our anniversary a month and a half ago. Every week or so I get an e-mail suggesting something, and I keep forgetting to run the ideas by Hopper, so nothing moves forward. But this time, I promised to ask Hopper as soon as he got home, and I did.

Hopper, being a film buff, was excited about finally having a widescreen TV (our previous TV is eleven years old and looks like a Borg Cube) so I agreed. This afternoon, my parents arrived with a 32" TV, and Hopper set it up, only to find that it didn't have connectors for the DVD player or the Wii.

Well, that would not do. We don't have cable, and we mostly watch Netflix and DVDs, so that TV was more or less useless to us.

Somehow when we went back to the store we came back with a bigger TV.  Because, aspect ratios being what they are, a 32" widescreen would result in us watching Star Trek at a size smaller than we were used to, and that just seemed silly.

So now, just like everyone else, we have a giant flat-screen TV in our living room.

Don't get me wrong--I really appreciate the gift and Hopper has been wanting one for a long time. I do see the appeal of having a beautiful TV. (Okay, I'm starting to love it.) But I was feeling so smug about having an old TV. It made me feel like I was just a little bit better than everyone else who feels compelled to buy new things, or who has two TVs in the house. Here I was, with my one TV and it was eleven years old! I'm not one of those people who gets rid of things just because they're not the latest thing. I keep things as long as they work, and make do.

Shut up about the three laptops in the room. I have a VCR and I use it!

Well, we are planning to keep the old TV--it will go upstairs, either in our room or the new office that we will be setting up because Boo wants to move out of her room and into the old office.  So we're not going to be adding to the landfill. And we did get the most energy-efficient TV we could find.

But it's a bit of an identity shift for me nonetheless.

Who's coming over for movie night?