Materialism gone amok

Being kind of a valley girl by residence :-) I get the local free paper in my mailbox every so often. Lokalavisen Groruddalen, a perfect stereotype of a Norwegian local paper. But I do read it; I mean, despite the clumsy language and the constant focus on nothing but the narrowest concerns (in a geographical sense, of course *cough*), there is interesting material there sometimes ... and it is nice to know what's going on in the area, generally speaking. I was morbidly fascinated by the rat problem at Haugerud subway station. Who is this woman who brings bags of food to dump there every single morning?? But that's another blog post.

I got the paper yesterday and there was one particular story in it that left me pretty much speechless. It was about a woman whose car has been burgled. There's no info given about her age, but in the picture she looks to be in her mid to late twenties. So ... Generation Y, with their fucked up priorities. And how. Brace yourselves ...

So, her car, a fancy Mercedes, has been broken into, and various things have been stolen. The GPS, the CD player, an integrated phone, whatever that is (and who needs it) and shit like that. Including, and get this, a pair of sunglasses that cost 12,000 crowns. o_O That's about $1,900. WTF?? OK, first of all, if you're actually willing to spend that much money on a piece of, pardon my French, fucking plastic, you've got some synapses wired wrong in your brain. Seriously. Think about what you're doing. But it gets worse.

It says in the article that this woman and her husband bought the sunglasses after saving up for them. So in other words they aren't rich people with money coming out of their ears to the point where they wouldn't even notice a pair of 12,000 crown sunglasses more or less. I don't know if that makes it better or worse. RIDICULOUS GENERALIZATION ALERT Rich people suck. In theory I do approve, enormously much more, of people who actually save up to buy the things they want. That's the way to do it, definitely. But people who save up to buy something like this ... not so much. And here's the clincher. Get this.

Now, this is a direct quote from the article. Let's see. I tore it out of the paper so that I'd be able to quote what this woman said exactly. It's so annoying that they [the burglars] take things that are personal like this. We chose to buy these sunglasses rather than go on vacation last summer. WTF?? I repeat: We chose to buy these sunglasses rather than go on vacation last summer. o_O

What kind of fucked up psycho priorities do these people have to actually prefer to rather buy a pair of sunglasses than to go on a trip together and do something real to experience things and create memories??? Oh, how I hope they don't have kids ... !!!

OK, rant over. We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming. Look how cute the Google logo is today. They're celebrating the vernal equinox. Aww.