Recently, one of my best friends from college, Anton, and his wife Hannah stopped into town to visit me on their way home from Seattle.  While here, Anton saw the gear that I’ve been purchasing for this summer’s trip sitting in my office, and he asked how I went about choosing my pack without ever having seen it or tried it out in person.  I really didn’t have an answer for him at the time (I think I mumbled something incoherent in response), but it got me thinking:  How did I go about choosing this pack?  What made it special over other packs?

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that the answer was fairly straightforward.  First, it’s not a North Face or an Osprey because frankly I don’t have the budget for every piece of gear to be top of the line.  I need to make compromises.  Second, of the packs within my budget, this pack (an Alps Transcend 55 L) was fairly high-rated in online reviews.  It has good rain casing if needed, storage for a large hydration pack, and overall simply shines as a good value for its cost.  Finally, the pack had a subjective appeal to me.  For example, another pack I was looking at was also highly rated, and even larger than this pack at 60 or 65 L (I can’t remember the size exactly), but its “electric yellow” coloring and clunky aesthetic turned me off from the investment.

I guess looking at the factors I considered in making this purchase, the purchase is your typical undergraduate level economics problem.  Utility maximization.  A balancing of cost, objective, and subjective value that at the end of the day has led to a pack.  Maybe not the best pack or the most comfortable pack, but the pack which I feel to be most likely to handle the job given what I’m trying to accomplish and what I can afford.

Hopefully, three months from now I’m not looking at this pack differently.  Proverbs scare the crap out of me. “You get what you pay for,” is one that comes to mind.

If you’re still reading at this point, thank you.  I swear I’m getting somewhere.

Today was my birthday.  I’m 29 today, the start of the last year of my 20’s.  If you’re wondering why I’m not out celebrating, well today hasn’t been the best day.  Out of nowhere, some heavy legal issues popped up on the docket, and I’ve been reading and writing up a storm.  Also, it’s dawning on me that my local friend situation is pretty sparse.  Outside of my family and work colleagues, there was only one person in the area who wished me a happy birthday.  While I was happy she went out of her way to offer me a birthday wish, when she asked what my plans were for the day and I told her that I had none, she told me that I at least had my trip to plan for…I’m still trying to figure out whether that was intended to cheer me up or shoot me down.  In any event, it’s bizarre knowing that I have so many friends all over the country who love and miss me and who I love and miss, yet here in my own backyard I find myself so alone.

Sorry.  It’s not my goal to turn this blog into a pity party or a diary, and there’s a definite reason I want to bring this up.  It’s just that as the day went on, I started thinking about those words, “At least you have your trip to plan for,” and for some reason it got me thinking about what Anton had asked me about my pack and the reason that I chose it.  Maybe I’m just trying to justify a bad day in my mind, or maybe I’m just engaged in wishful thinking, but I think that the words we choose to say or not to say to one another follow the same calculus that is made when choosing the right pack.  That is, I like to think that those weren’t the ideal words that she wanted to say, nor were they the ideal words that I wanted to hear.  They weren’t the North Face or Osprey of words.  But, the North Face or Osprey of words might have been too costly to say at this time, and maybe of the words available, those words were her best choice.  Anyways, if she was having a bad day and felt alone and without plans, I would have told her the North Face words.  I would have asked her to spend some time with me.

So how does this all tie back into my trip?  I’ll let you decide.

On a possibly unrelated topic, and seeing as this blog has dropped references to The Office already, have you ever seen that episode where Jim plans a trip to Australia?  It’s an older one.

Cheers,

Rob