I think I've come to the conclusion that I don't want to buy anything more made out of plastic. As part of my 'year in review' (see
28 Dec 07 ) I made note of the junk that has been accumulated at our house and much of the junk is made of plastic. I/we have purchased many things over the years from Wall-Mart and other 'regular consumer stores' and they are made of various sorts of plastic, or particle board with laminate (plastic) vernier with fake metal handles etc. In the end all of these things seem to fail or we stop using them because they never quite worked in the first place. They are not really something we can repair or 'maintain' they are designed to meet the 'bare minimum' and no more.
So, I've come to the conclusion that I'd like to purchase things, when they are needed, from 'real' materials. I.e. furniture should be made from real wood, cases, backpacks etc. should be heavy duty man made or leather. I need desk drawer dividers for my new desk and I've decided they should be wood not plastic. It's simply too easy to go to some regular consumer store and pay $129 for a chair that is going to last for 4 years when I could pay $350-$550 and have it for most of the rest of my working life. What that means is I'll have to do without some things while I save up for better quality - maybe that's a good thing.
This Epiphany was echoed by some other items on the Lifehacker blog (I think): I use a
Moleskine notebook for my 'analog pda' it's my 'everything but work items' notebook, for all my meetings (I volunteer with Scouts, the Church, etc.) and I prefer to use a fountain pen with the notebook. Turns out that I am not alone in this, there are others in the world that use this setup (good notebook and expensive pen) and it too costs a little bit more (small moleskine notebooks are about $14 rather than $7 for a cheap Hilroy). My moleskine is built better, comes with an elastic band to hold it shut and a place marker. Best of all it will 'lie flat' for writing, making the entire page more useful, so for those few extra dollars I get a much better experience overall, I'm going to try and apply this philosophy to everything I buy, we'll see how it comes out.
Evan
P.s. I wonder if my moleskine/pen thing is particularly five-ish?
