Conflicted

I finished the knitting of the Baby Surprise Jacket and am truly impressed that a flick of the wrist and the blob becomes sweater shaped. Unfortunately, I can't show you a picture. And I'm conflicted... do I wait until I can take a picture, take one, and then sew it up? Or do I sew it up and trust that you, dear readers, have seen the magic of the sweater elsewhere.


Why no pictures?


It seems my camera has taken its last picture. Last night in composing my post, it took me two hours to get the camera to take those three pictures of my sock pal socks. It seems my camera likes to view the world as black with purply streaks and takes pictures of utter blackness. When nearing the end of 2 hours of frustration I told the camera that I was getting the hammer, it miraculously managed to come back to life and took 3 pictures. The LCD screen is fine and I can review pictures stored on the memory card. Today I tried and tried to get a picture out of it, but even threats of hammers won't make it work.


I've been madly reviewing new cameras online all evening and I've found one that I like. Now, do I buy it and feel guilty for spending the money or do I wait two months and feel depressed with no camera?


Of course, on top of this is the new knowledge I have from reading "Stumbling on Happiness" by Daniel Gilbert that we human beings are terrible at predicting what will make us happy. (If you are a psych nerd, this is a must read, and even if you're not, this book is well-written, funny, and engaging). Why are we terrible at predicting what will make us happy? Three reasons...


1. Realism: Our imaginations tend to fill-in and leave out information without telling us.
By this, I imagine myself happily playing with my new camera, but leave out the frustration of trying to figure out how it works, reading the manual, the added costs of additional memory cards and batteries. I imagine using the camera frequently, when in reality after a day or two I probably won't take very many pictures.


2. Presentism: We imagine the future as we experience the present.
Right now I want to take pictures and having that ability would make me very happy, thus I imagine that having the ability to take pictures, say tomorrow if I run out and buy a camera, will make me equally as happy. And combined with problem 1, my imagination fails to fill in the stuff that will keep me busy in the upcoming weeks and ignores that right now I have a bunch of free time to take pictures that won't be available in a few days.


3. Rationalization: Imagination doesn't realize that things appear different after they've happened.
Mostly, bad things look better after they've happened. Gilbert's argument here is that you imagine something really bad happening (for example, being hit by a car) and imagine being devasted by it, it being the worst thing in the world that could happen to you. But if you do get hit by a car (Gilbert doesn't deny that you'll be upset and hurt), you'll actually be able to cope much better with it and get beyond it (emotionally speaking) faster than you predicted. So in the case of my camera, if I don't get a new one soon, the death of my current camera will eventually not be as painful as I imagine it being right now.


In any case, for you, my readers, it would probably be best if I got a camera soon, or you're probably going to get my psychological analysis (note that that's not psychoanalysis!!) on a lot more topics, which might warrant a blog title change to Dr. Girlfriend Psychologizes.