Skill Pornography

This one takes an explanation.

Once upon a time, I loved (and love still), books on interior decorating in a Japanese/Modernist fashion. They are awesome. Upon seeing my lavish collection of tomes, one of my friends remarked “Hey, nice house porn.”

I said “What?”

“You know, House porn. Houses you’ll never, ever live in cause they’re too extreme, or too expensive, but that you lust after anyways.”

Ah ha, I said. Well, I’m keeping those books. But I’ve found a terrible cousin: skill porn, ie, books or materials, that by buying them, arbitrarily made me think I could do the skill they talked about or equipped. Let’s count some of these objects, shall we?

1. Skiing Jacket with goggle wipe attachment, buckles and crap I don’t even know how to work. There are a number of toggles for holding the inevitable iPod, even little sleevelets inside the main sleeve that go over your thumb and tuck into your gloves. I can barely ski on Wii Fit, why do I own this? Another multiple hundred dollar bargain from Dillards.

2.Boxed Writing Set with Glass Blown Pens. A gift from my wonderful wife from a museum that I just HAD to have. Why? I wanted to write cool letters. So I bought Crane stationery, and a Bombay company writing desk. None of which enhanced the utter crap which is my penmanship. Wish I had all that cash back. Now what to do with it? eBay.

3. Giant Coke Bottle Bank. Oh, how this beckoned from the window of Spencer’s Gifts circa 1992. Oversize novelty items were the shiznit, and I had to have it. Years later, dusty and forlorn, I pull it out of storage to give to my best friend from middle school, who also admires it. Now it’s his problem. Oh yeah, I suck at saving money, especially coins easily spent in vending machines, thus why this one counts as skill porn also.

4. Books on damn near anything: poker, Japanese, etc. All skills I want, but not at the cost of doing something. How I loathe these the most. Most all of them are gone – except Japanese, cause I took a year of it once. I know I can do it again.

5. Exercise anything. I loathe exercise, and even now am struggling to return to Wii Fit. Maybe tonight. But now I’m hungry.

The vast majority of my junk falls into the skill porn level – oh, I’d love to have it, but I’ll never put the work in cause I just don’t care that much. What wastes of cash do you have rotting around your house doing nothing?