The fuck is wrong with me?
It seems that I absolutely have no conception of what one does with money other than buy books. I'm currently staring at a bookshelf containing every book I've purchased now in my possession since I left for Finland but four months ago. A translation of Ulysses into Finnish. Alastalon Salissa. A history of jazz. Winston Churchill's six-volume history of World War II. And to top it all off, a 16-volume (and big volumes) 11th edition (1913) with 12th edition supplements Encyclopedia Britannica- at $75, I refused to pass it up.
That's not even counting the crap whose existence I hid from my parents during that period by ordering them to a friend's house- not from a financial standpoint, but we need to move out at the end of this year, and I don't want them to freak out about moving costs. There are about forty books there, including such reads as The Dravidian Languages, The Axiom of Choice, A Grammar of Modern Welsh, a dictionary of Esperanto, a 19th-century pornographic novel, a two-volume history of Sweden, and An Introduction to Topology.
It's madness. At the age of 17, I have never had steady employment and own about 700 books (many inherited, true, but mostly stemming from the fact that I don't spend money on about anything else). And they're all over the place. Romance of the Three Kingdoms, anyone? Fruits Basket? In Search of Lost Time? Finnegans Wake? Teach Yourself Catalan? An Introduction to Axiomatic Set Theory? The entire oeuvre of Jane Jacobs? Collectible Spoons of the Third Reich?
I am secretly proud of myself, but it'll be a problem in college, when I can't just buy books willy-nilly because I'll have nowhere to keep them...
(In b4 anyone tells me to get an e-reader: E-readers are the work of Satan. They are dangerous, sacrilegious abominations and I refuse to possess one.)