Opportunity Cost

"The word 'opportunity' in 'opportunity cost' is actually redundant. The cost of using something is already the value of the highest-valued alternative use. But as contract lawyers and airplane pilots know, redundancy can be a virtue. In this case, its virtue is to remind us that the cost of using a resource arises from the value of what it could be used for instead."

David R. Henderson

Opportunity Cost

The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics

Library of Economics and Liberty

2008

This will be a post about my cousins, and about opportunity cost. 

If you are a loyal reader, you already know that 1.5 weeks ago, I spent the weekend with my BFF and her family down Indianapolis way, for the purpose of celebrating Alex's birthday with him for the first time in his life. He turned 11. While I was walking out the door, I got a text message from a cousin inviting my family to a barbeque. I declined for myself (obviously), but my parents attended the barbeque and came home with this:

This is a disaster clean-up kit. It's so official that it says "gift" in two languages. Besides an unfamiliar-to-me bottle of surface cleaner and degreaser, the contents are a hard-bristled scrub brush, a bottle of bleach, rubber gloves, and some plastic bags. It came with a box with the same logo on it, which contained a broom and a mop. 

I would not trade playing Fruit Ninja on a larger-than-life screen, geocaching with Alex, or grading papers with my BFF for anything. Even for this bucket. That's not to say that I don't wish that the barbeque (which I keep misspelling, but now I'm attached to my own special spelling of barbeque) had happened on a different weekend. I can assemble my own bucket, albeit without the super official logo. 

In case you don't remember your basic Wealth of Nations (free for Kindle!), the official bucket and the time spent with my cousins is the opportunity cost for my miniature road trip to Indy. 

A different cousin of mine recently posted the following wisdom on facebook:
"The reason why nothing ever happens is because people are too worried about what might be better." Pasting his quote from his facebook timeline totally messed up my font, but is legal because it is less than 10% of his facebook timeline, and I am also going to encourage you to support his photography business by inviting you to like his facebook page. 

As I try to find gainful employment, this concept haunts me because I may be passing up the opportunity of a lifetime and substitute teaching hoping for a call from elsewhere that may or may not ever come. I have the sudden urge to watch Sliding Doors and read Gut Symmetries.

However, as you know, I still have upwards of 200 pages left in 1491. 

What are the opportunity costs in your own life?

Around the Block

According to yahoo answers, which I think is less reliable than even wikipedia, the phrase, "been around the block a few times," originates with British Pagans who believed their lives would be prolonged if they danced around the "blocks" of Stonehenge. It might not be right, but it's a good story. 

I'm using it here to refer to the obvious writer's block that I complained about in last Friday's post, which I'm hoping to get around. 

The Memoir of Narrow Escape actually does have a theme, and I wonder what you think the theme is. Haha. 

In the meantime, I have envisioned other blog concepts, one of which I'll discuss now. I suggested it to my cousin, but she did not respond to my suggestion, so feel free to steal it. 

Concept #1 is "Second Life," wherein the blogger follows an item s/he has sold, freecycled, or (dare I say it) pawned, either researching to find the story of the object as told by its previous owners, or keeping in touch with its new owners to see where the object ends up. Kind of like a geocaching travel bug, but concentrating more on something like the ratty old couch (which is how the idea started, because the ratty old couch came from Krista's first classroom, and I know there's a story about how it got there, but I don't remember it). 

(More parentheses, huzzah! There's a second ratty old couch that was purchased by the former project facilitator, now a high school teacher, which at last viewing was in the lounge of a high school where she worked a decade ago but doesn't anymore.) 

Concept #2 (that's right, there's more than one) is more of a short story collection, because it is fiction, and it involves a Sliding Doors-type collection of vignettes that follow Jeannette Winterson's idea that there are millions of versions of us, because each time we make a choice, there is a parallel universe where one version of us lives out the other choice, the one we didn't make. Therefore, we follow an opportunity that we failed to take advantage of, all the way to its natural conclusion. 

All of this reminds me that I would still like to write a novel. 

Any suggestions as to what it should be about? Let's see if your concepts come anywhere close to what I have in mind. ;)