It's School Supply Season!

I love this time of year. Everywhere I go, colorful school supplies crowd store entrances and the "seasonal products" aisles. Notebooks, pens, binders, backpacks ... they all make me nostalgic, and I always end up caving in and buying at least a few things.

It's not that I loved school when I was a kid. The social game could be brutal, and while I was a decent student, I cherry-picked which subjects I'd pay attention to and ignored the rest as much as possible. But every fall held the promise of a do-over:

This year I'll be popular and have a boyfriend.
This year I'll get straight A's.
This year I'll write the great American novel, and be the next S. E. Hinton.

These never happened, of course, but I made the promises to myself anyway, like some people make New Year's resolutions. I'm still tempted to buy a brand-new notebook or binder every time I start a new project, because new supplies tend to put me in the right psychological place to believe that I might actually accomplish my goals.

The problem is that I really like the whimsically-designed school supplies that only crop up a few months of the year; the rest of the time I'm stuck with the bland offerings of the office supply stores. So every year I buy a few things, intending to hold them in reserve for the rest of the year when such imaginative designs are harder to come by. But they never last. New notebooks burn holes in my pockets just like money does for other people. I just can't resist virgin paper.

I don't think there's a cure for this particular obsession of mine, so I'll just muddle on as usual, buying a binder here and a pen there until the stores start running out of their supply in late September. See you in the "seasonal" aisle!