The "Best time to buy" myth

As I was watching a commercial today from Toyota, the character in the commercial was puzzling about the "best time to buy."
I'm curious why people are so anxious about the best time to buy, whether it's cars or houses or purses or shoes or cell phones, people seem so obsessed with waiting for the best deal. I understand that financially, a lot of people have a lot to be concerned about and saving a few bucks is a priority, but really, gambling with predictions about when will be the best time to buy? Is that not still gambling? In my humble opinion, the best time to buy something is when you need or want it.
The best time to buy a car.... waiting to get the best deal on a car is ridiculous. If it is a luxury car that is extra, that is one thing, but if you need a new car, and are trading in your old one, as the deals on new cars gets better, your old car devalues. How long do you really want to wait to strike the perfect balance over what, a thousand or so dollars that translates to $10-$20/month? How, in the long run, does that save you money if you have to put that thousand into your old car so that it will last until your "best time to buy?"
Clothes, again, the same thing. How does it help you to wear tattered clothes until something goes on sale?
Rather than set your sights on the best time to buy, how about looking for the best product to buy? A car that costs a bit less, rather than waiting for something specific? Clothes that cost a bit less...

Consider this for a moment. Black Friday. The biggest shopping day of the year. For a lot of people, it's about the fun and excitement and hub-bub. But people always think that they are saving money. From a retail perspective, Black Friday is the money maker. If you bomb on that day, your entire fiscal year is down the toilet. With the margins so low on everything that day, you  might wonder how it is that retailers can make a profit. Easy, volume of sales. On Black Friday, the "best time to buy" many people, not everyone, but many many people, buy crap that they don't want or need simply because it's marked down.

There is no "Best time to buy." Buy what you need, when you need it, and buy products in the price range that you can afford. Don't wait for MacBooks to go on sale if you have an Acer budget. Settle for what you can afford and save that extra for what you need next. Spending more than you can afford on a product that is above and beyond what you need, because it costs less than what it normally does is akin to living outside of your means. I can't afford Kobe beef every night. So either I buy better meat and eat it less often, or I buy cheaper meat. I don't wait, and wait, and wait for Kobe to go on sale and then fill my freezer. That's nonsensical. Someday I will be able to afford it whenever I want, that is the goal. But right now, I try to live according to my income and not by stretching every penny to the most luxury things I can manage and sacrificing everything else for the sake of it.

Adventures in my life

Well, since the world deserves to know of my awesomeness, I thought it might be time that I wrote another blog post. It's kind of been a while.

Making the decision to completely change my entire life and life's plan is really super scary. I've got so little to keep me here, and yet so much less anywhere else, unless you count hopes and dreams. I'm certainly rich in those.

So, for those of you who might not know, I had planned to go on to a Bachelor's in Education, with a double major in psychology. Then, I "discovered" neuroplasticity. Yes, that caught my attention. Stole it, you might say.

Reading up on neuroplasticity brought to my attention four people in particular.

Dr. Brenda Milner, a clinical neuropsychologist at the Montreal Neurological institute. Her work with patient HM, and her landmark discoveries regarding his unusual memory loss, are fascinating. What caught my attention more is that the woman is 92 years old and still loving what she does! Not that I don't ever want to retire, but when you find a field that captivates you in that way... well, I hope that I can spend my life doing something I love so much as to still be doing it at 92 years old!!

Barbara Arrowsmith Young, founder of the Arrowsmith Program for treating students with learning disabilities. I first learned of Young's work through Dr. Norman Doidge's book The Braint that Changes Itself. Young is a woman who took herself, through her own ingenuity and dedication, from multiple learning disabilities to a Master's degree. She then took the approach that worked so well for her, targeting individual difficulties through brain based exercises, and turned it into a patented methodology that has helped students with specific learning dysfunctions for the past thirty years.

Dr. Paul Bach-y-Rita, a neuroscientist whose work in the field of neuroplasticity, and more specifically, sensory substitution, has helped him help others whose lives were torn apart by stroke, sudden onset sensory disorders and congenital blindness. He is the perfect example of how fearless persistence in the face of dissent, wild imagination and outside-the-box thinking can lead to amazing advances in science. His work is not knowledge for the sake of knowledge. And it's not all about inventing chemicals to mess around in the brain and "help" people. From what I've read on him, his work takes the idea of the brains natural inclination toward achievement, and assists it in figuring out the direction to take to correct problem areas.

And finally, Dr. Michael Merzenich... pioneering scientifically tested brain based exercises to address normal loss of memory and function, to improve language skills in students, etc. And let us not ignore his greatest achievement to date; controversial though it may be, working with a scientific dream team to develop the cochlear implant.

I've always had an interest in psychology. I've always had an interest in language. While studying education, I had a lab science requirement which, through sheer curiosity, I decided to fulfill with an Anatomy and Physiology course. While I found the entirety of the material we covered fascinating, it was the section on the Central Nervous System which really drew my attention. It was a physical base for human behavior. Not only is it an amazing, delicate, intricate system, but, it has the potential to explain why and how we function; individually, socially, societally...

Between studying the anatomy of the brain, and the interaction between neurons, and learning that perhaps what we thought was so definite (functioning of specific neuronal regions) might not be (as demonstrated by various experiments in neuroplasticity) I finally decided to go for it. I dived into books like The Brain that Changes Itself and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (by the renowned Dr. Oliver Sachs). I began investigating various areas of neuroscience as a profession. I finally decided on neuropsychology. Having significantly more coursework in psychology than in science or math, I decided to shift my focus to neuroscience as a background. I will focus on that for my Bachelor's, with many more electives in psychology, I hope, and then combine my psychology and science backgrounds toward a PhD in neuropsychology.

I had always wondered why I oughtn't go to a fantastic school. A challenging school with an excellent reputation. So, in investigating my options, I set my sights on Johns Hopkins (for the PhD). But what an intimidating school for an undergraduate. They have relatively large, and notoriously competitive classes. While I don't mind working hard, studying hard and mastering incredibly difficult concepts (would I dare venture into this field if I did) the large class size (and Baltimore) hold no interest for me at present. If I am to develop the strong base of knowledge that I will need for this field, I feel that I would succeed much better at a smaller school. After much research and deliberation, I've set my sights on Colorado College.

1. Size. They are a relatively small school, which leads me to believe that I have a shot at personalized attention when necessary. That is, I prefer feeling welcome to discuss difficult concepts with my professors, rather than being brushed off because s/he has 300 students per lecture to deal with, and well, if all of them had questions... just go learn it... etc. I prefer the opportunity to build a rapport with my professors, as nothing is so valuable in a career as a strong professional network. And while they may be my professors now, someday, I hope, they will be my colleagues. And how much easier if they actually have a shot at remembering my face among the crowd.

2. The Block Program. The infamous block program. I know my own learning style. I know that I have a strong tendency to favor one course over another. It's only natural that some subjects would be more fascinating than others. I've noticed in my own education that, while I make great effort not to neglect courses, I also do have a tendency to work harder in those that captivate my attention more. I feel that the block program will provide me the opportunity to focus, wholly and completely, on the subject at hand, which will assure that each subject gets the attention it deserves. In this manner, I hope to actually retain the information that I've learned, beyond the final exam.

3. Colorado College has a reputation; one that is nothing to laugh about. This was not something of which I was aware when I began looking at the school. It was only when I began discussing this decision with various people (customers who teach at Middlebury, former Professors, and other people generally well versed in academia) that I came to understand just what that reputation was.

4. And finally, given the education I can expect from that school (which of course depends just as much on the effort I put in) and the reputation of the school itself, I feel that, of all the schools I was considering, Colorado College would be the best stepping stone toward acceptance at Johns Hopkins' Psychological and Brain Sciences program.

And so, it is with high aspirations, strong direction, and hoping really really hard that I get accepted, that I am picking up my life and heading west.

A Dream

I miss the you I knew last night

Once upon a dream.

I love the you I kissed last night,

But then the morning came.

Will you return again to me

When I fall to sleep?

Can I ever hope that you

Might be there when I wake?

I dreamed of you

I long for you

stranger though you be,

I long for you

The you I knew

Once upon a dream.

Short anecdotes of odd happenings recently in my life.

Once upon a time, I was working at the video store. A customer came out of the back room, and, chuckling, says to me, "I could get lost in here, it's like a candy store."
Maybe I'm wrong, but that's just a little odd. Certainly not the oddest thing, or even close to the creepiest thing that's ever been said to me at work, but odd nonetheless.

I was driving down the street in Burlington, down Shelburne Road. In the middle of the afternoon, amidst quite heavy traffic, and between two lights (and hence between two crosswalks) three women stepped out into the road. Well, as much as I recognize that's a dumb idea, they clearly had plans to go ahead and cross four lanes of busy traffic without so much as a second thought about it. Naturally, my own survival instincts kicked in, aka, I didn't need a lawsuit for running over a jay-walker, and so I slowed down my car. Then, the strangest thing happened, one of the women stopped, dead center in my lane and just stared at me for a few seconds. So I gestured, somewhat impatiently for her to hurry up and get the hell out of the way. When she finally did, she screamed at me as I drove past her. I replied in a louder-than-normal voice, "Well don't stop in the middle of the road." To which she responded by throwing her coffee at my car. Normally, I get very irritated by such things, but at this point, an interesting thing happened, I realized two very important and highly amusing things. 1. No matter how angry I get, she's still going to enter the Darwin competition day after day. 2. Though she may have gotten her aggression out a bit, she is still without coffee. Oh, and for the hell of it, 3. It was going to rain that night, so I didn't even have to worry about cleaning it off my car.
Poor stupid woman.

And also, I hope my ficus is recovering... I trimmed off some branches that just couldn't seem to grow more leaves. And I gave it another shower. So, hopefully it's all good. You see what happened was that it got thrips. So I used some pesticide to kill them, but I had to let the tree dry before I could bring it inside so that the cats wouldn't get poisoned.
But, I left it on the porch to dry, and while I was at work, the temperature dropped. So I think it got a bit of temperature shock. So... hopefully, it's recovering. It looked really happy after the shower, so... And my viney thing... I think I need to re-pot that. I think I'll do that Tuesday. I'll just pull them all out, wash off the whole vines that are still healthy, and put it in new sanitary soil. I'm pretty sure it has spider mites, so...

Anyhow, there you have it. Odd happenings. I posted more than once this month.
You're welcome!

Hello there

Is there anything more pleasing than the sound of crisp leaves racing across the pavement? There is something so unique about that sound. It is made possible by us, by the human race. Without us, across what similar surface could leaves scuttle? They might blow over a rock outcropping now and again, but really, it's not the same.
I love the country, and I love Vermont. I really really do. Driving up the road today, the mountains were finally coloring. The trees have been changing for a little while now, but even when they first start, the mountains still look green, overshadowed by the conifers that refuse to change. As the season progresses, though, there becomes a point when the horizon just bursts into color. The mountains come alive!
Alright, sure, it's cheesy. But if you live here, you know what I mean, and whether or not you'll admit it, you feel the same way.
It's a time for fuzzy sweaters and scarves, hats and gloves. It's the time of the year where you more and more often find yourself saying, "I have got to remember to start my car in the morning. Brr." Or, at least if you're out the door by 8:00, you're saying that.
But the city has it's own draw, doesn't it? Even at the crack of dawn. There is a mystery about the city. You don't know what lies ahead because your view is obstructed. The city, it forces you to look more closely in front of your face, both physically and metaphorically.
While the country inspires us, reminds us to stand in awe of nature in all her majesty, it is the city that reminds us to stand in awe of ourselves. And our cities are becoming ever more sustainable. With increased awareness of our own carbon footprints, we are taking steps to bring a little bit of country into the city. First we thought up green roofs, which help insulate a building while also providing a nice landscape. Then we thought of rooftop gardening. Now we can keep ourselves warm and put dinner (or a contribution thereto) on the table. Standing on a quiet street corner in the foggy evening, the only thing you can see in the city is what's right in front of you. The only concern to which you can attend is yourself, and the magnificent creations of man that surround you. And if you're lucky, you are smart enough to appreciate that.

Good Golly, I've done it again!

Not a very good blogger, me. Well, tons of exciting things have been going on.

Which one?