I suppose it's shallow of me -- and I despise it a bit -- but I like getting packages. Mail order delivery is fun, and it's great to be able to open a package. The joy is in the anticipation & the waiting: there's nothing like that moment before Christmas. It's especially great when the contents are good; and even better when it's free-ish. (Free-ish refers to those things you can think of as free, but you'll get someone who's preternaturally disposed to picking at nits and will point out that I paid for it, just not cash up front.) Naturally, since I'm writing about it, that happened today.
Discover's branched out so that cash back is only one of the ways to get money off of that card; the other way is rewards at stores. Like Borders.com. Which recently became Amazon.com's latest partner. Which means I can order Amazon.com stuff using this system.
(Yeah, yeah, they're a monopoly. Until I can find some way of getting free-ish stuff from the non-monopoly people, I'll use the monopoly for the free-ish and purchase the rest at Powells.com or whatever politcally correct store that my liberal brethren have determined is good for us today.)
Anyway, this is a long way of saying, I got Aimee Mann's latest album today, and it's pretty good. Great, in fact. And I'm quite pleased by this; it's soothingly depressing & deep. It's not harsh like many depressing albums, nor incoherent. It's a salve to soothe the burns of an less-than-wonderful life.
So, I got free-ish stuff, I got it in a package, and it was good free-ish stuff. Getting packages is just a joy from beginning to end.
Posted by Ted Stevko at January 20, 2003 11:24 AM