Yesterday I tooted (tat?) my own horn on Facebook, announcing that I returned a shirt I bought on impulse (I had, literally, been on my way out of the store when I spotted the shirt and just grabbed it and picked it up and carried it lovingly to the cash register. What followed is what usually follows when I don't try crap on before buying it; it looked all kinds of wrong) and then proceeded to gas up my car to just beyond the mid-line. I felt proud of myself because the old me would have gone back to the store and exchanged it for something else useless at the store. It is in my blood. My mother and I have the best times ever while we are shopping at Macy's or Marshall's or some other last named place. I inherited the proclivity to be spendy and revel in it.
However, so short lived was my new found maturity that I just g chatted with my sister and said the following:
i can't wait until friday
i am blowing my wad at ulta
then at the vet
This was because I realized that I get paid this Friday and I already have a shopping cart at Ulta.com ready to go. Also, my cat Greta has to go to the vet on Friday evening because I am a paranoid and overprotective mother of my furry children (does that sound wrong, pervert?) and she looks like she is losing weight so she needs to get checked out. Or I need to be reassured in the exact amount of money a vet visit costs. Either way.
In fairness to me, I'm also volunteering at the art house theater again so I can see the movie FOR FREE and I fully intend on sneaking a nectarine as my snack in there. Wait, none of that makes me a good or smart person. It just makes me annoying. I want to apologize for that but I feel like that would need to be repeated later in the course of these blog posts so why pursue something so futile?
The way I see it, money is, was and ever shall be an issue for me. I work all the time. I am at work, in fact, 13 hours a day on most weekdays and most Saturdays, occasional Sundays during the winter months too. I make a decent salary but I am just not very smart with my money. I am prone to spending it enjoying my life through food and booze and films and travel and books and peter pan collared shirts and nailpolish. In fact, I need to save. I need to save for...um.... the future. I have no designs on buying a house or starting a family of my own. I don't especially feel the need to. However, I'm fully aware that my car will not last forever, I will not have the gumption to work two jobs forever (it may have already been forever) and that I need to be smarter about money. But then my sister asks me to go to Barcelona with her and that consignment shop I just discovered in town has such cute things and ooooh what's that shiny thing over there? I'm such a consuming American.
Does it help to know that I regularly donate money to charity? I mean, my name will never appear on a plaque or anything but I do give money to causes that are important to me. Does that assuage my chomping image? Or would I have appeared better to you wearing that shirt I just returned?
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