Addiction

As usual, a trip to the bookstore (especially with graduation money in hand that I had already specifically set aside for book purchases) is enough to convince me that I have a particularly serious case of book lust. It is almost impossible to walk away empty-handed, even though I know I still have a dozen or so books on my to-read shelf, even though I have access to two public libraries and a University library and will almost certainly be able to find any book I'm looking for (and several I'm not), even though I'm already going to have to ship two bookshelves worth of books out to Michigan at the end of the month and adding more books to the collection is only going to make things more expensive for me in the end, and even though the half dozen or so books that I suddenly absolutely had to read had not entered my mind once before I saw them on the shelves.

Last night after this trip to the bookstore my roommate moved back into the house after being gone for the summer. I helped her shift things around in the room downstairs and as I slid a rather heavy box across the floor, she apologized for putting all her books in a single box. I stopped, looked at the fairly smallish cardboard container, imagined the the columns of similar boxes upstairs in my own room, and just laughed.