You may think that I'm out of hand

So!  Remember when I said this on Thanksgiving?

And P.S. I am not buying a single, solitary thing on Black Friday.  Not even a cup of coffee.  You know why?  Because Black Friday is dumb.  Take that, The Man!  I am immune to your commercialism.

Friday dawned all brimming with hope and anticipation.  It's interesting setting out to be an anti-consumer.  But how hard could it be, taking My Own Personal Boycott to the streets?  I don't buy that much stuff anyway.  Right?

One thing I do love to consume: Coffee.  We're lucky to have a few local roasters in town.  I've been wanting to stop by my favorite of the lot and get a quart jar filled with decaf beans.  Because!  Then I can avoid unnecessary packaging!  And my jar is so cute!  And I could leave for work early!  (Hello, fighting children!)  And then I remember: My Own Personal Boycott.

We'll call this Consumer Crisis #1.

Well, fine.  I still had coffee beans anyway.  So I made an extra-large pot of coffee, with plans to bring some with me to work.  Because I also love to consume coffee at work, especially now that the weather has changed.  But Eric, my one true love, saw that I'd made extra and had a cup, which threw off my rationing scheme (confession: There IS no rationing scheme).  And of course I was running late, so I didn't have time to make a new pot.

No biggie.  Eric deserves lovely coffee, too, and anyway, water is good for you.  Yay water.  (No exclamation point.  Water just deserves a period.)

I get to work and... well, stuff happened, I guess.  It was a paper day, so that was awesome, but it was also the Friday after Thanksgiving, and no one was really thinking we'd be open, I guess, because the place was dead.  I'd look out at Eric's office, all dark and gloomy, and try not to feel depressed.

And then Stacey was all, is it a coffee day?  Some days just are coffee days.  The ladies at work gave me that coffee card for my birthday, and believe it or not, I still have money on the thing.  And we've had plenty of coffee days since July.

But.  I said I wasn't going to buy anything, and technically, using a gift card is still making a purchase.  I guess.  I can pretty much justify anything, but I was having trouble justifying that.

And then I was like, hey, I think I have a free one coming!  So I checked and sure enough, I did.  So that's not consumerism, right?  Going and getting your free cup of coffee?  Because you'd already purchased ten?

I hope not, because I totally did, and the whole time I was drinking my delicious hot tasty coffee, I was thinking, crap, I wonder when I blog about this if my public will understand?  (So essentially just my mom, and she thinks I'm wonderful, so we're probably cool.)

We'll call this Consumer Crisis #2.

Drink my coffee, yadda yadda yadda, the publisher comes out about 4:30 and is all, you can go home now if you want, because nothing is going on.  And I was all, cha-ching!  Getting to go home early takes me back to my school days when we'd have an unexpected snow day or school would get out early because of inclement weather.  I can't help it.  It just brings me joy.

But then I had Consumer Crisis #3.  We were planning on leaving Saturday morning for my grandparents' house, which is actually over the river and through the woods, and my car needed gas.  Do I go home and tell Eric that I would have filled up to save us the time Saturday morning, but I couldn't because of My Own Personal Boycott, or do I buy gas because waiting 12 hours is dumb when I have the time now?

I filled up the car.  Eric, who was not boycotting (and bought a pinochle iPad app, of all things), thought that was fine, because gas isn't something you buy just to buy.  And I was like, what about a cup of coffee, except that it was free?  And he was like, that's okay, too.

I love my husband.

Anyway, the whole experiment was interesting.  It really got me to think about what I buy and why I buy it.  I'm STILL thinking about it.  There are just things I enjoy purchasing, and it's sort of a pain not to buy something on a certain day just because you've arbitrarily decided to do My Own Personal Boycott.

What I can't decide: Did it matter in the grand scheme of things that I didn't technically buy my cup of coffee on Friday if I ended up going shopping on Saturday and Sunday?

I'm not really sure where this leaves me, unless you count that uncomfortable feeling that maybe I'm not immune to commercialism after all.  It sucks to have your bubble busted.

New Order, "Regret."  When I was in college I'd listen to this over and over and over.  "I was a short fuse burning all the time."  "We're dealing in the limits and we don't know who with."  "Just wait until tomorrow.  I guess that's what they all say, just before they fall apart."  You might have to be 19 to appreciate it, but still.