I dunno. Does on-line shopping actually count? It’s sorta like running my cute little roomba instead of wrangling the big old Hoover (or whatever that thing with the tornado on the front of it is). Roomba does a pretty darn good job of vacuuming but somehow if I am sitting around facebooking while roomba is running, I feel like I am not doing anything. I suppose I’d feel better about it all if I was cleaning or decluttering or organizing something while roomba was running. Roight? Anyway, I probably spent about a half hour shopping online this morning and I think I bought 4-5 Christmas gifts. Plus a couple additions to my stash of *comfortable* bizcaz clothes. The name of the game is to *feel* like you’re wearing your kayaking clothes but *look* like you’re wearing bizcaz, don’tcha know. Butchy’all do know that…

So I did some on-line shopping today but I still tried to do at least a little bit of real Christmas shopping where I had to get into the Ninja and drive. For starters, I actually went to Tarjay. I had a legitimate errand there, which was to use their handy dandy photo printing thing-a-ma-jig, which was working today, thank you very much and I’m not gonna tell you what that was all about because it’s a secret. Since I was there, I walked around a little bit too but, yaknow, for the most part, it’s just the same old same old. I do not buy clothing for other people (unless they ask for a very specific item) and I probably wouldn’t buy clothing at Tarjay if I did. Household items? Everybody I know has too much of that stuff, including my own 20-somethings.

I made a foray into Borders and then just a bit of one downtown but that one was mostly to visit Mouse at her work and ask exactly what kind of bread she wanted from Trader Joe’s. I mean, there is usually a package of it on The Landfill Chitchen counter but the name totally escaped me. She text messaged it to me, to make sure I had the exact thing, and I headed out to TJ’s (which was a blasted ZOO!!!) to procure it. I failed on the crystallized ginger. Could not find it. Felt lucky to get outta there (not to mention the parking lot) alive.

It is busy out there but not frantic (except for Trader Joe’s). I did not go near Briarwood Mall. I avoid the mall like poison as a rule. I failed at any kind of bricks and mortar Christmas shopping today but that is partly me. I get out there in any kind of crowd at all and, if I don’t have a specific mission (and even sometimes if I do), I get just a little panicky. It isn’t *quite* agoraphobia. But. What on earth are all of these people buying? How can they spend so much time trolling the aisles of Tarjay? Don’t they (and their gift recipients) all have a houseful of crap already? I remember when I was a kid in the 1960s hearing about planned obsolescence and how aaawwwwful it was to have to buy new things all the time. Well. It is. But it is worse than that! Because so many people do NOT get rid of the old broken-down thing that got replaced. “Oh, we’ll fix it one of these days”, yada yada yada. Roight. Not. So now we all have all of this crap and when people ask me what I want for Christmas or whatever, I just say, “a dumpster in the driveway.” I do not want to burden my children with a bunch of junk.

Goodnight,
Kayak Woman

P. S. If you are planning on buying books for the holiday, please consider buying them from Borders.com. Borders started out as a small but comprehensive independent bookstore here on The Planet Ann Arbor. I’m not sure what happened to it exactly but I remember it well before it got big and started stocking stuffed toys (which I used to buy) and romance novels (which I will *never* buy, fer kee-reist!).

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