Shopping and Stuff

I watched this movie, "Confessions of a Shopaholic", which was surprisingly good and funny.

Ahh, the power of something new and shiny and still fresh out of its cute packaging or shopping bag. I have to say though that clothes don't really do it for me. With me, it's shoes. I get that mushy feeling if I get a really cute pair of shoes. Luckily though, unlike so many here, how much things are worth was a lesson instilled in me by mom pretty early on. So I can only enjoy shoes that I bought in a really good deal. So spending $150 on a pair is something highly unlikely I will ever do.

All that nonsense aside, I can understand the addictiveness of shopping. It's so easy, especially here in the U.S. to fill the void with shopping. It's as if you can distract yourself from your life with a parade of cheerful colors and newness. It's a fantasy. An acquisitive and endlessly greedy part of your brain says "YES!! Give me more, I want every color and every option, and I wanna keep it all!"

For me, I noticed that getting involved in a shopping effort, and then postponing the decision of buying for a week, reduces all things I want to buy by about 75%. The need is gone, but the fun of shopping was still there, because you promised yourself that you'd get it if you wait. You decide to buy most things based on emotions. Emotions are insistent and they want to be satisfied right now, they don't want to be kept waiting for a week. So once you wait the week, they're gone. Your brain doesn't usually store emotions from last week, it would be very inefficient. Once you think about whether you want the blouse, you have to think about it with the "rational" part of your brain. And the rational part won't say "Ooooooh, Pwetty, Give Give Give!!", it'll probably say something along the lines of "Hmm that blouse was green, did I really look good in it, it costs a $100, that's a lot. And I'm really short on money this month..." In the end unless it's something you "need" or it made one heck of an impression, you'll probably forget about it.

Well anyway, that's all over for me. I had a brief shopping spree during the spring (well, a spree for my standards) but now I'm suffering from withdrawals. I sit and browse websites: Amazon, Victoria's Secret, Macy's, Buckle, Zappos... and I sigh. I have a decent amount of clothes, plenty of books to read, and despite having 14 pairs of shoes/sandals, I wear my desert friendly beige sketchers 95% of the time.

Oh yeah, I'm half way through the month and I've so far spent only $85 on food, which comes down to around $6 a day for 3 meals. I think I'm gonna make the $700 mark, and that has taken some serious impulse control and penny pinching.

I'm currently arguing with myself on whether I should cave and buy a $5 brown eyeliner :/