Co-op living, backpacking, general outdoorsing, eating vegan food sometimesing, composting. And yet incredible amounts of my time are spent shopping. It's not strolling through the wide plazas of Stanford Shopping Center to Nieman Marcus and beyond, but I am consumed by shopping nonetheless.

I do a lot of online drooling. Given the state of my 1989 Toyota Camry and the fact that it takes 10 minutes by car to navigate the maze of streets and bollards that takes me one puny mile off campus, I've come to do about 75% of my non-food shopping online.

Usually this browsing begins when I just think of something I want or semineed. And then it lasts for weeks. Months. Sometimes the drooling even spans years, as something I semi-want or semi-need wanes and waxes in importance. I started wanting a tent, for example, halfway through freshman year. Three years later, it turns out that I've gone backpacking far less often than I thought I'd be doing, and that most of the time I got backpacking in California, where it can and, infact, does rain no drops between April and November of every year. So I still pour the pages of Campmor, REI, and Sierra Trading Post, in high hopes of a killer deal coinciding with all of the features I want: ultra lightweight, freestanding, metal alloy poles, you get the gist. And it'd still be nice to own one, since I've been counting on the fact that my backpacking buddies do or that Redwood will have them for rent.