A Serious Case of the Gimmes

Like I discussed at length in my previous post, sometimes when I want something, I want it really bad. A few years ago, it was the iPod (you can read about it here and here) Now, everyone knows that I am a music ignoramus. And I hardly never listen to music. Even when I am at the gym, I watch TV while working out. If there's ever a person who should not get a 30GB ipod, it's me. And I knew all that and yet I wanted it. I imagined myself listening to music all the time and filling my ipod with new age music. Cut to 2010, I have less than 3GB of music in my ipod. The newest album on it is Vettaiyadu Vilayadu. I use for 30 mins each night to listen to Crazy Mohan/S.VE Shekar dramas.

My newest craze is the Kinect. For the uninitiated, Kinect is a sort of add on for the XBox 360 which lets you play games without a controller. In their own words, you are the controller. So they have a camera to track your actions, so that in a dancing game, it tracks your dance moves and you can see it on the screen. I really think Microsoft is marketing it really well. When I see the Kinect ad where people are having fun dancing, driving imaginary cars with imaginary wheels, I want one too. Again like the ipod, I don't doubt that the Kinect is an awesome game platform. It's just that S and I are one of the laziest people to roam the earth. We like our couch and enjoy the time we spend sitting on it. The only games we play on the Wii are the ones that we can sit and play. When we feel the need to exercise, we haul our rear ends to the gym and we both believe that exercise games on the Wii or Kinect are not very effective. So buying the Kinect is not really a good move for us at all. I am sure we will be all excited and play with it for a week and then let it gather dust till someone visits us and wants to try it (that's what happened with the Wii Motion Plus!) However since both of us are moderately interested in regular video games, I am sure that we would enjoy playing games like Halo on the XBox. The XBox 360 costs $199 and with the Kinect bundle it costs $299. Despite everything I've written here I am sure that we will end up buying the Kinect bundle (if we decide to buy the Xbox 360 that is).

While I am very free with my money when it comes to day to day things, ("Let's buy the more expensive laundry detergent", "Let's go out to eat, I don't care that we went out for dinner yesterday", "Tip the waitress 30%, she was really good to us") I am usually wise (or so I think) when it comes to big purchases. I still use the same laptop that I used in grad school and I have no plans to replace it anytime soon - even after watching the numerous MacBook Air ads on TV. Our TVs at home are really old and despite my initial love of the iPad, I don't plan to buy one ever. I know that I am not the most careful with money (like my father likes to point out every time I tell him we went out for dinner for 2 days in a row) but since I don't spend on these big things, I used to think that it cancels out. But the Kinect seems to prove otherwise. Since S is worse than me, I am sure that we are never going to leave our children houses, wealth and money. However we both have a zest for life and a desire to live our life to the fullest, travel widely, do crazy things just because we want to and this kind of people are never expected to have money in the bank, are they? :-)

PS People don't give me grief about people who save money and yet manage to live a full life. A girl is allowed to have her delusions right?