Coupon Saver

I spent three hours in the bookstore today. Not that I was too busy purchasing everything tagged with a discounted price; I was there, rather, to cover an event for some private tutorial center, and to interview a sixteen year-old math wizard who is about to apply for a scholarship to Stanford.

Impulsive shopper that I am, I ended up clutching on my way home a brown paper bag containing three new books. If you’re curious, the titles are: Dubliners by James Joyce, An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro, and The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane. And I can see that this imprudent extravagance, this extravagant imprudence, shall pretty much ruin the plans I had made for the weekend, which supposedly was to include a Saturday night trip to the bar, an hour of afternoon basketball, the home viewing of a bunch of DVDs my boss had lent me (so Matchpoint has to wait yet another week), and of course, my writing a feature story on some young girl whose name I couldn’t remember and whose arithmetic skills I can never come close to matching. (The great damage of illogical sprees like this on my finances simply escapes me.)

However, the fault –mathematically speaking- shouldn’t be entirely mine. The newspapers have been heralding all week the magnificent opening of McNally Jackson – formerly McNally Robinson. The windows of Barnes & Noble have been plastered with huge, colorful posters announcing the stores’ ongoing sale. And it was payday last Thursday.

The snakes, therefore, have presented to me the apple on a shiny silver platter, a fruit simply begging to be eaten by unassuming earthlings with a weak will. The three hours I spent in a bookstore saw me picking the fruit from which to take a tiny, yet guilty, yet perfectly understandable bite.

No regrets, though -only apprehension, perhaps, on the consequences I foresaw but did not consider. I was truly looking forward to a good run on the court, and I was truly looking forward to watching Scarlett Johansson on my humble home theater. Most notably and to my chagrin, my calendar will again be modified to further inconvenience.

But hopefully, on Monday, I’ll remember the young girl’s name.