One of Michelle Singletary's suggestions for a money fast is that you fast from all window shopping, including internet window shopping. "Don't window shop," she writes. "A major objective of this fast is to stop using shopping as a form of entertainment."
Yesterday I was walking through a section of Dupont Circle I don't often happen upon. I noticed two restaurants I was not familiar with. I stopped to read their menus.
Then it suddenly occurred to me that reading menus in restaurant windows is a form of window shopping.
Stopping to browse the magazine rack at Books-A-Million is a form of window shopping. Even Googling yoga studios and fantasizing about getting more serious about yoga is a form of window shopping, I guess.
When I think about it, lots of my spending is a form of entertainment. Lots of my entertainment is thinking about things to spend money on.
The money fast is just for 21 days, between April 3 and 24 for me. I can do pretty much anything for 21 days. But fasting from spending or actively thinking about or dreaming about spending money is a bigger experiment than I had realized.
Yarn. Web-surfing sites of purveyors of yarn and fantasizing about instructions for projects beyond my impossible backlog of the time it would take to knit the yarn I have. Not to worry, I hurried up and ordered before April 3, a couple other shades of the colors for my next project, in case the shades I already got don't suit me by the time I knit my way to that point in the project, which realistically is probably sometime in Advent, not Lent. This probably doesn't count as planning ahead. And I still have two weeks before April 3.
ReplyDeleteOh, how pretty is yarn.