A Good Time to Be Broke

Financial crunches of late, both global and personal have severely curtailed my personal spending. The good news is, right now I don't really mind.

Everything on the consumer market that might vaguely interest me nowadays, from movies to comic books to toy cars to DVDS, has me feeling particularly underwhelmed. I stopped collecting albums/CDs a long time ago, and since becoming a lawyer I seem to have become increasingly less literate (as absurd as that sounds) as time goes by, with even comic books becoming a chore to read. But more on that later.

Now that I've seen Tropic Thunder and am only really looking forward to Marc Forster's Quantum of Solace, the latest James Bond caper, there is, rather blissfully, almost nothing I'm looking forward to spending my money on.

In the realm of film, I have to say there isn't much I'm looking forward to, save perhaps for Avatar, (James Cameron's first movie since the monumental Titanic), which looks, from all indications, to be that rarified Hollywood animal: an ORIGINAL blockbuster film, not one derived from a novel, a comic book, a TV show, a toy line, or a video game. That, unfortunately, won't be out until Christmas next year, but the good news is I don't see myself spending a whole lot of money on movies until then. I'm also looking forward to the sequel to Iron Man, the Marvel Comics Avengers movie (as opposed to the Ralph Fiennes and Uma Thurman stinkfest) and film adaptations of Avatar: The Last Airbender (not related to the Cameron project) and the European comic book sensation Tintin, but none of these movies will be out any earlier than 2010, so my wallet is destined to stay healthy between now and then, and any spending won't be on account of rushing to cinemas.

In terms of comic books, the anti-climactic-event-comic-book still seems all the rage these days, with Secret Invasion and Final Crisis topping the comic book charts and most Marvel comic books bearing an "embrace change" banner implying that Secret Invasion is likely to end on a low note with the marauding Skrulls somehow taking over the world or at least staking a huge chunk of its territory, as if real life weren't bleak enough. Considering Marvel, my bastion of comic book entertainment, is still very much into its addiction to shaking up the status quo every year I don't intend to give them business again any time soon. I can definitely see myself picking up collected editions of their Stephen King adaptations and some of their Spider-Man storylines down the line, but the compulsion to buy their books on a monthly basis, to which I was once a slave, is now completely gone, with no sign of it ever coming back.

With DVDs, well, with the Blu-Ray disc having won the format wars I find myself somewhat leery of spending large amounts of cash, whether on real or fake DVDs, on a product that was always destined to one day be antiquated but is now just counting the days till it goes the way of the Laser Disc. I don't have much of a collection to begin with, and although I still want to add Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk to my small and incomplete collection of Marvel movies, well, both the thought of them being outmoded and their prices are just too scary for me right now, especially given my limited funds.

As for my toy car addiction--I mean hobby--which kicked off in December of 2006 and raged for most of 2007 and a good chunk of this year, well, apparently the speed with which I could acquire the cars I liked was greater than the toymakers' ability to come out with new models because I now have everything all the models I want that are currently on the market. The only cars left that I still want to buy aren't even on the market yet, and, I hope, will stay that way for awhile. If I had my way I wouldn't want them to come out until sometime next year.

I don't even spend that much money on eating out anymore because quite frankly I really don't want to keep shopping for increasingly bigger pants every other year. Maybe, if I drink enough liters of water every morning and eat small enough meals, I'll be able to squeeze into my 34-inch pants again someday.

It's a good time to not have a whole lot of money for worldly pleasures, guilty or otherwise, because right now there aren't a whole lot of pleasures on which I'd like to spend it.