Shopoholic

There are less than 20 days till Christmas. And I haven’t started my shopping. I made a list of names though. And to be honest that is a considerable headstart in comparison to my usual holiday shopping habits. You see, I don’t like shopping. If it weren’t for the food court I would find malls completely pointless. The only stores I really enjoy are the ones with flat screen TVs and rows upon rows of disc-shaped things that I simply must own, but then never actually listen to or watch. I just take comfort in purchasing them and knowing that if I needed to I could watch Reservoir Dogs and Steel Magnolias (quite a double feature).

But you can’t do your Christmas shopping at Best Buy, it just doesn’t work. First of all buying people disc-shaped things is way too impersonal for me and second of all the odds are I’d just keep all the disc-shaped things and then be back at square one on the whole shopping thing. But on the up-side I’d have plenty of new DVD’s to watch while I thought hard about what to get people for Christmas.

On the other end of the shopping spectrum exists people like my friend Jodi. Let me give you a little back story on Jodi. I’ve known her since the second grade and since then we have been pretty much polar opposites. We’re like day and night. She’s day, I’m night. She shops, so I don’t have to. She has what could be classified as a serious shopping problem. As her very good friend what do I have to say about this problem? I say she is doing her part to help our economy. And maybe, just maybe, I might get a little something out of it too. See, Jodi loves to shop, but feels guilty shopping when her closets are already full. So instead of stopping the shopping, she instead chooses to empty the closets. She’s a problem solver, this girl.

Then I receive bags upon bags of clothes that she has worn a few times at the most. Occasionally I’ll get things that still have the tags on them, “It just never spoke to me after I got it home from the store.” One time I casually mentioned over dinner that I needed to go get some new t-shirts and the next time I saw Jodi she was holding a huge bag of t-shirts. She’s like Oprah Winfrey with the whole Wildest Dream thing. My Wildest Dream is to never have to step foot inside another dressing room as long as I live. Oh, and to own a flat screen TV the size of my entire wall. I mean, if we’re getting wild about it.

At least 70% of the time I talk to Jodi she is in some sort of retail location. If she’s got extra time in her day she’ll spend it at a store, sometimes just looking around to see what’s going on in there since her last visit. Me? I can’t remember the last time I’ve actually been inside a store. And I doubt that everyone on my Christmas list will fit into Jodi’s clothes. So I imagine I should venture out into the abyss soon. Of course there’s always the internet. But given the fact that 90% of my shopping is done on December 22, (the other 10% will look lovely in one of Jodi’s t-shirts) I don’t think the internet will work out. I’m thinking I might start bending on the whole “impersonal gift” thing. I mean, who doesn’t love Steel Magnolias and Reservoir Dogs? If a Julia Roberts dying and a dude getting his ear cut off don’t scream Christmas, I just don’t know what has happened to the holiday.