every now and then

This has been a really long, dragging, plodding week, the kind where time moves at a pace so slow you wonder if you stumbled upon the lip of a black hole and yet your mind races past the speed of light making time pass even more slowly. I feel like if I'd planted a sapling on Monday, I could go home after work today and find a towering giant tree all covered in moss. And when weeks like this occur, as tired as they make me I can never sleep. An ever present headache has followed me patiently around like a minion waving a palm frond and my eyes register the surrounding world through a soft-lens glaze.

So today I truly thank God that it's Friday.

I did the grown-up thing this week and finally opened up a savings account; then I went to Borders to change a few money things around and started poking around in the bargain section -- a bad habit of mine which, for once, paid off. I discovered that most of the stuff back there had been reduced to one dollar. So I loaded up, bought $350 worth of goodies for $18, and carted it all home just to open it all up again, peel off stickers and gloat. My couch looked like Christmas and Simon paced around in distress because his self-designated spot next to me on the sofa had been overrun by books and beautiful blank cards and plastic bags.

My favorite purchases: Jamie Oliver's basic cookbook which came as a set with his "flavor shaker" (a nifty modern lazy person's mortar and pestle) (retailed at $60); David McCullough's box set of John Adams, Truman and Mornings on Horseback (retailed at $65); and Asimov's Guide to Shakespeare (retailed at $25, but the point was more holy-crap-Isaac-Asimov-wrote-a-book-on-Shakespeare?! It was like discovering a weight loss program centered around the overconsumption of chocolate and wine -- the best of all possible worlds, the melding of my nerdiness and geekiness into one beautiful though formerly unimagined whole).

Those were the bright spots of my week. So bright that I still have them stacked on the sofa like Christmas, and when I think about them I smile.

Perhaps that sounds horribly materialistic. It is. I love "stuff." (Particularly booksy stuff and antiquey stuff.) I've been really, really good these past couple of years with tighter budgets and beltlines, and I'm fortunate in loving small, fairly inexpensive "stuff" which also happens to be useful (form and function); but I do love to buy things and get to know them well and find their perfect feng shui niche in the organic and eclectic makeup of my home and watch all my other "stuff" accomodate and absorb and complement my new "stuff" (much like Eliot's theory of the Western canon, where not only does the old influence the new, but the new influences the old in a timeless back-and-forth reverberation), and when I can indulge that tendency at such a good bargain that it leaves me walking out the door feeling virtuous it just utterly makes my week.