When I was young, my mom would do this thing. Whenever she went shopping, she'd say, "Geez, I thnk we're out of pickles. I'd better pick up a jar." Then she'd get home, start putting the groceries away, and find six unopened jars of Vlasic Kosher Dill Spears behind the cereal boxes in the bottom cabinet. The new jar would join the old, and they'd sit there, undisturbed, until the next time Mom headed for Safeway and the same thing happened again. Soon we had enough unopened jars of pickles to supply pregnant women from San Francisco to San Diego.
Like most teenagers, I couldn't understand what was wrong with my mom. I mean, what was so hard about remembering you already HAD a gross of pickles (and I do mean GROSS) in your kitchen cabinets? Why couldn't she just be normal and buy pickles like a normal person -- say, every four or five months? I was certain that not only was I adopted, but that I would never become so flighty and distracted that I couldn't remember a simple thing like how many jars of brine-encased vegetables I had sitting at home.
Fast-forward twenty years.
Now I want to take back every bad thing I ever said about my mom and her pickle-buying habits. Because I now do the same thing. No, not with Vlasic spears:
Well, I think it went something like this. One day about three years ago, I was in the middle of a project and noticed that I was running low on glue dots, so I filed that small piece of data away in a memory vault somewhere. After all, it would be really inconvenient and awful to run out of glue dots the next time I really needed them. I mean, there's really nothing so upsetting as a glue dot emergency (unless it's a patterned paper emergency, another eventuality I am careful to guard against).
The next time I go to the scrapbook store I say, "Oh yeah, I need glue dots!" so I pick up a box.
Unfortunately, the fact that I bought the glue dots doesn't make nearly the emotional impact that the thought of running out of glue dots made. So the fact that I need glue dots overshadows the fact that I already have several boxes sitting at home. Because you really don't want to ever run out of glue dots. That would be horrible. But having too many glue dots? That's just being prepared, like having an extra few gallons of drinking water and a roll or two of duct tape tucked away in the garage. It's not flightiness -- it's forethought.
So, now I have more glue dots than I could use in the foreseeable future.
At least they're not pickles.