Calls from the Clubhouse


Periodically they have these sales exhibitions at the clubhouse in my apartment complex. And my wife will usually drop in and see what they have for sale on her way to the gym. When she liked something that she wanted to buy, she will almost always call me to come down with cash or a card. I initially wondered why she didn’t carry the cash on her? Then I realized it must be because she doesn’t want to be having things to carry when going to the gym.

But then the same thing continued to happen even when she took her mom for these sales! That didn’t make sense: surely, her mother could carry some cash, I thought.

I think I have finally stumbled upon the reason for this insanity: it must be one of those Hamlet things (“Though this be madness, yet there is method in it”). I am sure you got the madness part, so what is the method in it?

Ta da! My wife is one of those rare women who doesn’t like to spend money. Except on the kid. She doesn’t carry cash or card because that way she cannot succumb to (momentary) temptation. Calling me down with the dough gives her time to think and re-think whether it is really worth buying!

Of course, it would just be simpler to have self-control. But hey, I am not complaining: any measures she tries to cut down on spending are always welcome!

P.S. Because such blogs always run the risk of getting misunderstood, I reiterate what I said previously: my wife is one of those rare women who doesn’t like to spend money.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Student of the Year

Image
As a toddler, my daughter loved Alia Bhatt’s songs, esp. the ones from Student of the Year . (That movie did have many good songs and well-choreographed dances). Fast forward to present day, when she is 12 yo. She rarely watches Hindi movies now, but one of the few ones she likes of late, Raja aur Rani ki Prem Kahani has, yes, Alia Bhatt.   If I had any hopes that there was anything to be read in the name of her toddler-time favorite ( Student of the Year ), they have been dashed. Our conversations come exam time are perfectly captured by this photo and its caption: In fact, the pic below captures how she and I look at her answer sheets – me intently, she with an expression of “It’s over, so why are you even looking at it?”   Of late, we pull her leg and tell her that she isn’t showing any signs of academic prowess, she’d better find a rich guy to marry. Some time later, she showed us this meme on the Internet: “Me No Study, Me No Care Me Go Marry Millionaire If He Die
Read more

Animal Senses #7: Touch and Remote Touch

Instinctively, we think touch is based on contact. Not entirely true, explains Ed Yong in Immense World – there’s a more important aspect than contact: “These incredible feats are possible through movement. If you rest a fingertip upon a surface, you can get only a limited idea of its features. But as soon you’re allowed to move, everything changes. Hardness becomes apparent with a press. Textures resolve at a stroke.” As you run your fingers over a surface, they hit the tiny peaks and troughs and set off vibrations in the mechanoreceptors at their tips.   At the tip of its snout, the star-nosed mole has many pairs of hairless appendages. It uses them to touch things around itself. Alive or dead? Food or ignore? It does these movements at an insane speed. In the time it takes to blink our eyes, the star-nosed mole can probe, identify and swallow its food. “Light may be the fastest thing in the universe, but light sensors have their limits, and the star-nosed mole’s sense of
Read more

The Retort of the "Luxury Person"

Image
Coming up with biting and witty retorts. It’s something we dream of, but rarely manage to pull off. Worse, the more we stew over the offending remark, the more likely we are to come up with that dream retort, as Calvin ruefully points out: During our last holiday at the Taj Resort, seeing my wife carrying towels to our poolside chairs, one of the kids there mistook her for a member of the staff and asked for a towel. When my wife narrated this to us, I did not imagine that my 8 yo daughter would come up with her own retort. But a day later, my daughter recapped the incident, an incident that didn’t even involve her in the first place , and said, “You know what I’d have told that kid who asked for the towel?”. And without waiting for an answer, she told us anyway: “I don’t work here. I too am a luxury person who is living at this resort. Go get your own towel.” We were highly amused by the phrase she had coined: “luxury person”. It certainly captures the kind of holid
Read more