fun with ebay

do you know what's fun?

ebay.

now that I have successfully won ONE hotly contested auction, I spend my free time looking for deals on Ebay. My "items I'm watching" list grows by the hour, and if the time is right and the price is low, I contemplate bidding. So far I've managed to talk myself out of most purchases, because what if something better, cheaper comes along? There's also the issue of no, I do not need that. If other people are bidding, I gauge their ebay skills not only by their feedback rating (the lower, the more naive, in my opinion) but by the items they've previously purchased that are recent enough to still be viewable. (I hope that last sentence makes sense.) It's pretty weird to want to buy the same thing as someone who put the highest bid on this book*. Or this:



or this:



and yes, these purchases were made by THREE DIFFERENT PEOPLE, people! Three entirely different individuals, with spectacularly odd tastes, all want to buy the same thing I do. You mean I have something in common with them? This makes me question every opinion/like/dislike I have ever had, and it makes me feel depressed.

*A reviewer on amazon (who gave the book 5 stars) said, and I quote:

Right up front, let me say that recapitulation is, by conventional standards, a pretty weird way to heal yourself from your past. It is breathwork in a box. That's right, a wooden box that you build and do all of your recapitulation in.

I don't even know what to say to that, so I'm just going to go back to ebay now.