envy?

My cousin was in Corpus Christi for part of the weekend along with his girlfriend and their two yippy little rat dogs. He and I are almost exactly the same age (he's just a couple of months older than I am), and so I think it's natural that we gauge our progress through life against one another. (To be truthful, I don't know that he does that, but I certainly do.)

And the main thing that I noticed, of which I'm becoming more and more aware, is the conspicuous consumption that he seems to have enveloped himself within. Don't get the wrong idea here -- I'm no posterchild for asceticism -- but my fantasies skew toward simplicity lately, and his most definitely skew toward purchasing things. Most recently, he's been talking about buying not only a huge house out in Hutto (currently being built), but also about trading in his Mustang for a new pickup truck. ("I can deal with wussy dogs," he explained, "but I can't drive a wussy truck.")

To be fair, I, the current recipient of an exorbitant car payment, can hardly complain about somebody buying a new car, but I don't think he had the Mustang for more than a year or two.

I'm not sure why I care about this, really. Maybe it's that he was bashing my new car, which I'm rather proud of. He pooh-poohed my hybrid's quiet motor, saying, "I added a muffler to make my Mustang louder," and bragged about the "American power" behind his car, and the 190 horses powering his desired truck. My response was, "Wow, that's a lot of hay."

Maybe it has nothing to do with the car at all, and more to do with the four- or five-bedroom house he and his girlfriend are buying, and the fact that I'm not in a financial position to buy a house now or in the forseeable future, and that I don't have a significant other to split the cost with. Or maybe it's that outside of my extensive collection of gadgets, I don't have a lot of nice stuff -- like furniture, for instance. And, I mean, sure, I could buy some nice furniture, but it isn't really a priority for me. As much as I'd like not to live like a college student, it just seems like buying more stuff means I'll have to sell more stuff in a few years when I sell everything I own and set out to see the world.

When I started off, this entry was going to be about camera envy, but it seems that I've gone off on a tangent. I think I'll save the camera envy for tomorrow.