I just got back from Nashville, where I attended the 2014
American College of Medical Genetics Annual Meeting. ACMG is always my favorite
conference. The presentations are almost always relevant and meaningful to my
work; the people who go are generally fun, smart, and social; and the
organizers do a good job making the conference fun with stuff like great
refreshments (think wedding hors devours) and spur-of-the-moment polling. In
addition, this wintertime conference is usually at a warm-weather location
about 4 months before/after other major conferences I hit, making it easy and
desirable to fit into my schedule. The ACMG meeting is usually awesome, and
this year didn’t disappoint.
One thing that made my ACMG experience a bit unsavory,
though, was my accommodations. I tried to book a room late for dopey reasons,
and the only place that was less that $375/night and less than 3.5 miles from
the conference center was the Knights Inn. For a place that is only a mile away
from the heart of downtown Nashville, the Knights Inn was remarkably
underwhelming. There was a gas station next door where you could get a bag of
chips or some soda. To get to it at night, though, you had to walk three blocks
around an enormous wall that opens only to a side street (I assume the owners consider
zombies coming down the interstate to be a bigger threat than the rapists and
muggers in the back alley). I got a non-smoking room, which doesn’t really
matter if a place let its guests chain smoke in the 70s and kept the original
furniture. There was no clock, no ironing board, and the wireless didn’t work. A
mini-fridge was useful for storing the 2-liter of Sprite I bought after evading
the Mongol hoard on my way to the gas station, but the microwave was not (the
gas station did not stock microwavable foods. Or maybe the Thunderdome gangs
had looted it all...).
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| The Knights Inn Nashville wasn't a 5-star hotel... |
I survived, though, and it made me think a lot about my
personality. See, when I told my buddy James about the place, he joked, “You’re
always staying in places like that. You’re a real cheapskate.” When I retorted
that it wasn’t a money thing since my travel costs were being reimbursed, he
just laughed.
The thing is, he’s more right than wrong. The truth is that
nice hotels often make me feel like a chump. I may have spent a lot of time
worrying about bedbugs at the Knights Inn Nashville, but I slept just as well
there as I would have at a $350/night place. I know this because I spent my
early 20s ‘living it up’ a lot more. Maybe I didn’t have a nice apartment or
new car, but I’ve eaten at most of the best restaurants in NYC (at least as
they were in the early 2000s), and I’ve stayed in my share of luxury
hotels/suites, whether in NYC, Cape Cod or Vegas. My job may have been to market
ridiculous products, but it paid ***well***, and I loosened up the purse
strings quite a bit. I was a little like those NBA kids who grow up with
nothing and suddenly make millions. The majority blow through their wealth
remarkably quickly in ways that scream both, “So this is the good life!” and “I
need to get back to my roots.” See, when you come from having very little,
you’re uncomfortable with having a lot. My mom worked two or three jobs at a
time, and my dad, well, he lost his way for a while. We made ends meet by being
frugal, and we had a good life. And it all became familiar. This is what people
of means often don’t understand when they wonder why all these athletes and pop
stars go bankrupt so quickly when fame fades. You can’t spend 20 years pinching
pennies and running with like-minded people and suddenly morph into the guy who
eats out 4 nights a week and sips Chardonnay with the book club. It’s
disorienting and uncomfortable. It doesn’t feel right, because people you’re
close to have to get by with so much less and you know you can get by without
it all. To this day, the feeling that I remember most when I think about eating
sushi at Nobu is guilt. $200+ on little bits of raw fish while mom’s making due
with Salisbury steak. Really?
Lest you misunderstand, I don’t have anything against nice
things, and I’m certainly not against having a lot of money. I’d just rather
have comfortable things that can do a lot. My Geo Prizm was the perfect car for
me: broken speedometer, broken odometer, blinker controls you had to push
up-and-down if you were turning right and that flashed at hyperspeed if you
were turning left... but it looked ‘clean’ and it ran *great.* Never had to get
serviced, always got good mileage, but more importantly, I never worried about
it getting dinged or someone spilling their soda. My car was a vehicle, not a
status symbol, and it got me from point A to point B for 8 years (and could
have been much longer). I’d rather have a $300 Toshiba laptop I can turn into a
Linux box than an $1500 iBook that only runs a Mac stuff (yes yes yes, I
understand you can dual boot on iMacs and such, but my experience setting
Ubuntu up on my work iMac was very, very frustrating). For better or worse,
shownership isn’t just lost on me. It makes me think less of those who buy into
the concept. You can make fun of my 10-year-old laptop, but only if you know
how to set your laptop to be a server or to process huge data sets. Give me *some*
reason to tout your computer other than “it never crashes” (weirdly, ‘it never
crashes’ is by far the #1 reason people tell me I should get a laptop like
theirs. I guess it’s a more prevalent problem than I imagined).
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| Rest in peace, Gizm! |
I also have learned to be patient with who I am, and who I
am is careful with my moolah. Too careful, a lot of times: it took me a long
time to realize, “jeez, spending $10 to have my shirts pressed is way better
financially than spending $30 in time washing and ironing them myself. Maybe I’ll
live in high style some day, but don’t expect it to happen quickly!
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