Psychology, mine and theirs

I'm apparently still on Eastern time, so here are two entirely unrelated notes on psychology inspired by our recent house hunting trip:

• I seem to have no intuitive sense of the value of money in amounts over a few thousand dollars. Amounts up to $100 or so are fine: I have at least a rough feel for how many books or CDs I could buy for that, or how nice of a meal. I can extrapolate up to a few hundred reasonably well. Above that I start relying on travel to give me a sense of scale, but travel prices vary wildly from year to year and thus don't help as much. Above a couple thousand dollars, I completely lose track.

  In particular, amounts $10,000 and up feel basically like play money to me: I recognize intellectually that they're huge and important, but pricing anything at that point feels more like a game than an actual computation of value. Negotiating for a salary or a house becomes just a matter of maximizing my score. If the starting point of the overall market had been $10,000 higher or lower, I don't know that I'd recognize the difference (but I'd still play the negotiation game). Maybe in poker it's a good thing to "play the person, not the cards", but it always feels like a crazy way to interact with such significant amounts of money.

• Small, rural towns in America have been struggling for a long time, and that leads to a much stronger dedication to the local community than I'm used to in larger cities. Whether in conversations about banking or on signs in downtown stores, people from the area clearly disapprove of dealing with national chains if there's a local alternative. And the owners of our B&B were glad that we were moving into town; they said that on occasions when a new professor came to the college and opted to commute in from one of the bigger cities 45 minutes away, those folks seemed to be saying "we're too good for you". I certainly sympathize, but it will take some getting used to: you don't see many people here in Upland with that perspective. (Even growing up in Lincoln, Nebraska didn't really have that feel, though I was very aware of it in the smaller towns nearby.)