I Like to Buy Things

Have you ever seen the movie Josie and the Pussycats? It came out in the ‘90s (I think) and starred that one actress whose face and hair always makes me feel uncomfortable, but the underlying message of it has really stuck with me. Basically there are these bad guys (one of them being Parker Posey) who create this machine that pumps out subliminal messages making teenagers all want to buy the same shit. Like they’ll be in the mall, drinking a Big Gulp, and all of a sudden be like, “oh crap, I want orange shoes, like asap,” and then they’ll all go buy orange shoes. I think that this movie is on to something, and that this machine really exists. Either that or I’m just a non-stop greedy asshole because I literally want everything I see at all times.

I just started a new job and my desk chair is super uncomfortable. Well, it’s not so much that it’s uncomfortable, but the chair is wider than the chair sized hole provided by the desk. Do you know what I mean? Like, the chair doesn’t fit IN the desk. This creates a number of problems for me because I like to sit Indian style in a chair, which this situation doesn’t allow me to do because then I’d be 50 yards away from my computer screen, and it also makes it so that my back never touches the back of the chair. I’m always sitting at the edge of it, leaned way over. I might as well be sitting on a milk crate. Like, I might as well not even HAVE a chair. I’ve been noticing that some of my co-workers (two of them) sit on these humongous exercise balls instead of a chair. I’ve seen this in magazines before and I think it’s like a “thing.” Like it helps your brain to stay alert or something because you’re bouncing around all day like an idiot. I don’t know. The point is that after a few days of walking past these brightly colored sitting balls, I was like, “I have to have one of these.” Since concluding that it was pretty much effed that I didn’t have one, I’ve found ways to bring up the sitting balls in almost any conversation. I’ve complimented my co-workers on their sitting balls, inquired as to where they were purchased, made the declaration that I wanted one for myself, and am at the stage where I’m basically like, “I sure do wish SOMEONE would give me a ride to Target so I could buy one of those balls.” I estimate that I will possess one within the next week or so, will be pleased with it intensely for a few days, and then will be wanting something else. Some nameless, faceless, perfect “something” that is, at this point, unknown to me.

When I was in college I went on Paxil because one day I woke up and was unable to walk outside to get the mail. Like all of a sudden, leaving the house was no longer an option for me. It’s still a big problem and I will sometimes start crying because I have to leave the house to have dinner with someone, or because I have to go to a concert that I had just spent the days leading up to it proclaiming that I was so psyched out of my gourd to be going to. I’m pretty much like that guy in Twin Peaks who grew orchids in his house and had food delivered to him by Meals on Wheels. What was his name? Leonard? That’s me. I stopped taking Paxil because it made me suuuuuuuuper fat, and it made me develop a huge impulse control problem, that eventually led to me maxing out all of my credit cards. At it’s most hilarious point, I was ordering video cameras from the Internet and then throwing them in the dumpster once they arrived. I already had a video camera, so I don’t know why I was so partial to this particular electronic device to go nuts with, but I can remember how good it felt to BUY them. I just wanted to BUY something. And then once they came, I felt so ashamed and scared that I was gonna be “discovered” as being a weirdo, that I’d just throw them away.

God. This is getting really depressing. Anyway, I guess what got me started thinking about this again is that now when I find myself really wanting to buy something, I’ll put it in this Word document I have saved on my laptop called “shit I want to buy” and if I still want it in two or three weeks, then I buy it. In my planner for tomorrow I have written “buy gummi worms before work,” but I think that’s okay to buy right away, because they’re what, only like $1.50