Shopping on Monday Even Though It's Now Wednesday

Things change when you get older. It's inevitable.

Sometimes, the changes are subtle, like those little lines around your mouth.

Sometimes, at work, you hear yourself start discussing privity of contract and holders in due course and you remember not knowing what either of those things were in law school and wonder when you figured them out and how it could be that you're pretty sure you know what they are now.

Sometimes the changes that come upon you surprise you.

One of those changes has become apparent to me lately.

I have, in my older age, become a stockpiler.

Yeah, I can't believe it, either. I never thought it would happen to me.

I've known a few other people in my life who stockpile. My dear friend from law school- and she is reading this now and knows who she is - stockpiled so many tampons in her hall closet that I had begun to think she had some sort of advance warning about the apocalypse.

Until the last couple of years, I had just never done it. I was always the one who was digging through my old makeup bags praying to find one forgotten tampon until I could make it to Walmart.

Not anymore.

Man, do I hate to run out of stuff.

Yesterday I swung by Target and picked up extra hairspray, extra mousse, extra toilet paper, extra tampons and enough shaving cream to stock a locker room. Let me tell ya'll, I am good to go and I am pretty happy about it.

I have extra cold medicine, extra large bottles of both advil AND tylenol, extra floss and extra Qtips.

I'd like to stockpile dog food but I don't have the closet space.

Then there is the diet coke. I, like any junkie, fear running out of diet coke so I have taken to stocking a case of canned emergency back up diet coke in my refrigerator. I truly only drink it in case of emergencies, which is to say when I am out of the diet coke in bottles. Then I go to the cans. I try never to drink the cans unless, you know, it's an emergency. Otherwise, it would defeat the purpose. I don't care if that doesn't make sense to the rest of you, it makes sense to me. Also, what constitutes an "emergency" is subject to my sole discretion.

That's another thing about getting older, you start not to care so much about whether or not other people find your eccentricities weird. I used to care deeply about being normal, or at least being perceived as such. But then a few years ago I decided to embrace my weirdnesses and market them as cute and endearing, in a slightly obsessive-compulsive way. My friends already knew I was weird, so it wasn't like I was kidding them anyway.

As for the stockpiling I don't expect it to get any better. I am only constrained, as I said, by my lack of closet space.