Slow Shopper

When I was in middle school, my sister decided that her passion was elephants. She claimed they were amazing and she loved them. Naturally, with any good passion goes the collection. Remembering back further, I do recall my sister having a fascination with elephants, but back then it was mostly contained to certain times and events. Once at the fair a sculptor made her a tiny elephant from clay, she loved it and has kept it to this day. I once got a statue of an elephant made entirely of sea shells at, ironically, a White Elephant gift exchange which I promptly delivered to her with pride and gusto.

This brings me back to middle school where I began and which began my sister's "collection." She had collected a few elephant themed pieces in the past, but a threshold was reached in which I suppose she must have sat quietly in her bedroom one evening weighing the dilemma in her mind looking at it, as any fanatic looks at his or her fixation, in black and white, one extreme or the other. The moral moment must have had quite the weight to it, her standing on the edge of two worlds, two personalities, the split in the path. Apparently the road less traveled for her, in which she took, was the decision to jump headlong into the passion and upgrade from a simple casual admirer and observer of the pachyderm to the full fledged hunter-gatherer type collector.

She was ahead of her time the way I see it judging that the beloved "Beanie Baby" craze didn't hit until a few years later. Either way I was now related to a collector. At first, I was indifferent to this new development, yes I did give her the sea shell elephant statue, but that was a random chance and free at that. However, as time went on and as I became more self-aware, and with each passing Christmas and birthday I was reminded more and more that my role in these "gifting" events was to become more active and I would soon be responsible for attaining gifts for others, I learned a horrible truth about myself. I was, and am to this day, a horrible gift giver.

It's not that I buy bad gifts or even that I buy good gifts and become utterly shy and nerve racked with the thought of delivering them to the receiver, it's that I just simply and completely do not know what to get anyone for any occasion. Anxiety was beginning to become part of my personality as this horrible trait of mine fully developed. Christmas became a time of worrying where I could be found aimlessly wandering through department stores desperately trying to avoid the personal shoppers and "KB toys." First off, my shopping method is composed of two simple steps. Step one, decide what I need to buy, step two, go to the store to get it. At times there exists a step one prime in which I end up doing a very light amount of research in order to seek out the store that will sell me the item I have decided to purchase, but all in all that's as complicated as it gets. This method leaves room for zero browsing and when I go to purchase the item, as far as I'm concerned, the store is carrying only that.

I have also been called a "slow shopper." This expression describes those times I successfully complete step one and step one prime if needed, but then a pre-step two comes out of nowhere in which I find myself debating the metaphysics of the situation and I commit shopper suicide by beginning to wonder "why" I'm buying the decided upon object of desire. I find this gets worse with age as every year becomes one more year I can say I successfully survived without said object. "Why do I need this, I'm 25, 25 years without it, wow, that's a lot, why not one more?"

Buying for others is even worse in that since I can't get in their heads I really don't know what they're going to find maximum usage with. Then the question becomes, "would they use it, if so how much?" Even if those first two come out affirmative, the third clincher from before always, as ever, throws a wrench into the system, "WHY." "Well then why do they need this? Do they have to use it?"

So, I am brought back to why my sister's collection became important to me and true a source of hope. I discovered through her never ending collecting of a single theme that I was never without a clue as to what to buy her for special occasions. It's her birthday, buy her an elephant statue. Christmas, an elephant statue and a cool elephant calendar for the next year. The county fair, elephant ears are amazing. Life became easy just as fast as it had become difficult. I was now automatically endowed with the power and intuition of always being able to buy my sister the perfect gift. I was awesome.

This quickly became my general template for gift giving. It was so simple all the sudden, just find out what someone collected, and in those cases where they don't collect anything, buy food. At the very least they can eat it and it's not cluttering up their house or fining its way back to you at next year's White Elephant gift exchange.

As it turns out, I am not alone at the department store as I wander about with a blank look on my face. Many people are just as bad at gifting and just as slow at shopping as I am. This is why collecting exists. It allows people like me to be included and feel good at Christmas and birthdays. Some of us, as I have seen, are even clever. When faced with the occasional individual who owns no such collections these quick witted slow shoppers without skipping a beat and instead of letting that original anxiety creep in, quickly create a collection out of thin air by choosing something at random and deeming it the "starter."

Many of us are plagued with multiple "starters," those random trinkets and statuettes that have no earthly place in our home. Of course, at this point, the collection has been started and it's not that the person got you a bad gift, but that you're a bad collector and it's your fault a random item sits out of place on your mantle; of course it's random if it's lone, you're supposed to collect more.