I have this internal obligation to use everything that I own, and if I find something I’m not using that I should be, I find myself chucking the guilt into the trash can or figuring out a way to use it. As with any trait, there are upsides and downsides. The upside is that I am not wasteful. I WILL NOT let any of those cookies go into the trash. The downside: I waste a lot of time doing things I don’t want to do just for the sake of avoiding tangible wastefulness.
You might remember The Undomestic Goddess from my beach reads post a couple of weeks ago. The author, Sophie Kinsella, wrote the Shopaholic series (most famous book in the series is Confessions of a Shopaholic, if ya didn’t catch that). Based on my go-to beach read qualities, these books should be some of my favorites, but I had forgotten that I don’t actually like them.
Remember Amelia Bedelia from grade school? The maid in all of those children’s books who made mistake after blubbering mistake? I hated those books, and all of Sophie Kinsella’s heroines remind me of Amelia Bedelia. Instead of being intrigued by the catastrophe unfolding in the plot, I’m just annoyed. Watching other people make bad decisions is just painful.
But instead of putting the catastrophe down when it becomes painful, I keep going. I had myself convinced that I wanted to finish the story when in reality I wanted to finish the book. If I wanted to finish the story, I could have found a summary online. Thankfully, for the second time ever in my memory, I made an agreement with myself to drop a pleasure read without finishing it—after the point where pleasure reads or pleasure foods or pleasure classes stop being pleasurable (ugh, I swear there’s no innuendo here), I have to remind myself to drop them.
two L allison 