life's small luxuries

 - or also: the best things aren't really things.

I was thinking about this today. What do I consider luxuries in my own personal life, in the sense of "things I don't get to have often but enjoy" or "things I have but that other people do not, and so I should be grateful for?"

A big one among these is: I am not an on-call sort of person. I can say "no" to doing work on short notice. I know there are some people - often fairly precariously-employed - who are tethered to their cell phones, waiting on the call that says "there's a shift open, come in." I would hate working like that. I can have a policy in place where I will not make appointments with less than 24 hours lead-time, and in most cases I can refuse meetings with less than 24 hours lead-time. I can go home for the weekend and if I come in to work, it's because *I* told myself to, not because some Lumbergh told me it would be "greeeeat" if I could come in and work on a Sunday. (Which basically means: you're coming in)

I do have a certain degree of freedom in what I teach and how I teach it; some schools (esp. the for-profit ones) tend to be more prescriptive in how their faculty teach, and I suspect there are also some nations in the world where university professors are more constrained.

But the other luxuries, the things I don't get often, but enjoy when I do:

Being able to sleep until I'm ready to get up (which is usually not so very late - usually not past 6:30 am - but still later than I normally get up) and not having to immediately jump into doing exercise for the day. (Sometimes when my schedule is easier, I do it in the afternoons, but there's no time for that right now). Or Saturdays, when I take a break from working out.

Being able to leave campus on a weekday and go run my errands (sometimes I will go to Sherman on a Friday afternoon when my classes get done early) so I can do it before everyone else is. Being able to avoid crowds and also interact with the shopclerks and the like when they're less stressed. (Hopefully, this afternoon I will be able to make a little time to go and arrange for a new dishwasher. I *could* get someone out on Friday afternoon to install it if someone is available that soon. I pretty much know which brand and model I want so hopefully I can do this quickly)

Being able to go out and do "fun" shopping: going antiquing, going to a fabric store. I don't get to do this much but then given all the stuff I already have that's probably a good thing. (And I really need to work on using up some of the yarn and fabric I already have)

And another luxury to be grateful for: having the money in my bank account to go and either write a check or put it on my credit card and trust I can pay it off at the end of the billing cycle, and get a new dishwasher without the worries. And without having to cut back severely on other necessities (I will probably reduce unnecessary buying for a while to build those funds back up).

But also: the occasional luxury to sit down and do what I want, to knit or crochet or to play the piano without one eye on the clock. Or to read a book for fun. Or to work in my garden, again, without one eye on the clock.

Hot showers. That's one of the things that most redeems the modern world from my (sometimes) bad feelings about it (bad feelings mostly about how every atrocity that happens is shoved in our faces, thanks to the 24 hour news cycle. I'm sure terrible things happened in the past, but (a) unless they were local you didn't hear of them and (b) there was no "get famous for this" aspect to tempt some of the worse specimens to do stuff). But yes: clean hot water on demand, water that is so cheap through my city's water service that it's almost free, and whatever soaps and shampoos I want to buy. And yes, I acknowledge that not everyone in the world - heck, not everyone in our country - enjoys clean safe abundant water heated to the desired temperature, but that does not lessen my gratitude that I have it.