On Self Control

I’ve already fessed up that food is an area of weakness for me.  God and I are working that one out, slowly.  But my other main area of temptation…anyone who reads this blog regularly can probably guess.  It’s books, of course. 

Dan and I have to put some limits on my book buying, a book budget, so to speak.  That’s why the library is such a good thing for me, but then again, I go a little crazy there.

Have I ever told you that I maxed out the University of Vermont’s book borrowing allowance?  I don’t think it happens very often because I’d temporarily stumped the librarian. I had a nice armload of books to check out, and the computer stopped me mid-pile.  After one look at the amount of books in my account, she figured it out.  She wasn’t sure of the exact number, but somewhere after 100 books, you get cut off.  But she’d never seen it happen before (there’s always a first).

In my apartment, I had at least 100 library books stacked in piles.  I could account for where each and every single one of them was.  In fact, all of them were on my works cited list on the paper I was currently writing.  They were resources that I was actively reading and using in my work.

It was painful to pick and choose which ones were destined to be returned, so I could bring new ones into the fold.  I almost cried when Dan and I made several trips with boxes to unload the rest of them at the end of the semester.  Dan had a slightly different response.  We’ll call it “bemused.”

So you can understand my dilemma when I was stuck for 3 hours in London on a layover, and while browsing through an airport bookstore, I came upon Philippa Gregory’s latest novel…the one that isn’t published in the US yet.  I’ve been on the waitlist for that thing in the States for weeks!  I had no idea it was already out in England.  Talk about a kid in a candy store.

After I finished my little dance of joy and wiped the drool off the cover, I glanced at the price: 20 pounds.  Not bad, I thought.  But then, I remembered that the pound is about double the dollar right now.  Forty dollars for a book.  That’s a bit steep. 

I hemmed and hawed and paced around the bookstore, lovingly stroking the cover as I browsed through the other British titles. 

But eventually, I placed the book back in it’s #1 Bestseller spot on the wall.  I gazed up at it longingly, bid it farewell, and walked out of the store.

That, my friends, is self control.  Self control sucks sometimes.

But I only need to hold out until September 16.  Phew.