drugs of choice

i practice avoidance therapy. on thursday night, i suggest to myself that maybe i will wake up and use the morning to run and to study, all the while knowing that this will not happen. when my alarm goes off on friday morning, i will listen to npr for an hour and a half. then i will roll out of bed, turn on my computer, and proceed to watch all of my thursday night television on abc.com. i will watch two shows back to back -- ugly betty and grey's anatomy. and when i'm done, i will feel better.

people talk about self-medicating with various things. the other night, a friend wrote that she had chosen to "self-medicate with sushi." a boy i once knew told me that beer was his "drug of choice." a few weeks ago my sister called me from a bookstore because she had "read all of the harry potter books" and what was she going to do now? she needed to know, what other book would facilitate catharsis?

sushi, beer, harry potter, ugly betty and grey's anatomy on a friday morning. i'm not sure if such actions are meaningful, but maybe they're necessary. my mother once asked me why i studied stories when there were other, more useful disciplines. first off, i don't think i ever truly studied stories, per se. but more to the point, i wish that i had, because they have been endlessly useful to me.