Emotional overspending

I’ve managed, over the last few years, to get my emotional overeating just about under control. I still do a little emotional overeating, but it is always within reason and within the bounds of what is controllable under the rest of my diet. I don’t overindulge in emotional overeating anymore, and it has made quite a lot of difference.

I still seem to do some emotional overspending, though. I haven’t thrown myself into debtor’s prison yet, and credit card companies seem to love me and banks have told me that they’d love for me to buy a house, so I think I’m doing a good enough job keeping up on payments on everything appropriately. Still, when I get really deeply emotionally affected by something, like the recent death of my mother, I tend to find myself overspending.

An effective preventive measure is to just keep me away from anyplace that sells anything I might like to buy, but am otherwise keeping myself from buying because it would not be economically feasable. Like Zia. I know that right now I’m in a little extra bit of debt because of the cost of taking this summer school course, so I shouldn’t be spending anything at Zia if I can avoid it. Except as I walked home from class tonight, straight past the Zia, I found myself wandering inside and looking around. After my second, dangerous pass through the store, I sort of looked up through a purely mental haze and realized that I had no idea what I was looking for or why I was even there. I looked down into my hands and found that I had some $50+ of CDs and DVDs.

I just made another couple of quick swipes at names I always hope will have something used but never do, and proceeded to the checkout. I tried to get away with what I had in hand, but I also suggested that I ought to pre-order the Harry Potter DVD used. Now, some of the Zia employees are cooler to me than others, and some of them recognise me as a regular who can’t seem to help himself from spending hundreds and hundreds of dollars there every month. This guy grabbed the used copy of Harry Potter that was waiting patiently for someone else who had special ordered it (and who had already been called to come pick it up a couple of weeks ago; I’ve been hovering over this thing since it came in) and added it silently to my total, now some $72 dollars with tax.

So, now I own Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone on DVD, Say Anything on DVD, The Crow on DVD, the two newest White Stripes albums, and that Avril Lavigne album people have been harrassing me to buy.

Oh, and I don’t have Mariah Edgeworth’s Ennui, a book that I’m supposed to read and respond to by 9AM Thursday, but which does not appear to be readily in print or in bookstores of any kind.