Happy Mondays everyone!  I hope you have all had enjoyable weekends, and are excitedly anticipating another week!

My own weekend was by turns relaxing and superbly productive.  On Friday night I went to the cinema to see Inception, which was *amazing* (yes I know everyone has said that, but it was), and on Saturday I had dinner with one of my old flatmates and her boyfriend, which was both delicious (the food) and hilarious (the company).

I baked a batch of lemon cupcakes on Saturday afternoon, which were tasty, if not altogether aesthetically pleasing (this is the defining feature of my baking – tastes good, looks a bit wonky – absolutely nothing like the beautiful creation above), and I had a nose around some of the charity shops in my area, picking up a fantastic long-sleeved print dress in one.  It needs a tiny smidge of work on the sewing machine, but it will definitely be a great addition to the USA suitcase (three weeks and counting!!).

I also got round to dyeing a few bits and pieces of clothes that I haven’t worn in ages.  I bought a white cardigan a few months ago which mysteriously turned a dingy shade of grey after only one wash, and I also have a sundress and a couple of shirts that were looking slightly tired.  The dress was that awful shade of bubblegum pink - eeeeugh!  A blast of terracotta dye, however, and everything is ready to shine once more – one of the cheapest, yet most effective, reinvention tactics there is, I’m convinced of it!

Alongside dyeing (not dying), I donated a carrier bag of unwanted clothing and a couple of old books (I think I’m safely passed the stage in my life where I’ll feel the need to read Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, thank God) to the local Shelter shop, and a few small bits of furniture to the Bethany trust.

This week, I have a number of ‘boring but necessary’ things to do, which are thankfully offset by several things I’m really looking forward to.  In the boring but necessary corner, we have sorting and posting off documentation for uni next year; making an appointment with a careers advisor to discuss finances and listing a bunch of new stuff on eBay.  I was so busy cupcake baking and enjoying myself at the weekend that I completely missed out on the two free listing days – fail.

In the ‘really looking forward to’ corner, however, I have: a vintage fashion fair tomorrow evening at a hotel in the West End; swimming/sauna-ing on Wednesday after work; cushion cover-making with the gorgeous Ikea fabric I wrote about here, and a little bit of writing practice as well, hopefully.

What about you?  What does this week have in store?

Thanks to everyone who left a comment on Friday’s “Choice: Friend or Foe?” post (below).  It’s comforting to know that I’m not the only person who doesn’t deal well with having too many options!  As always, the input of readers to this blog is much appreciated, and the simplest of comments really can make my day, so cheers guys!

Image above courtesy of Flickr – chotda.

I read an interesting article the other day about choice, and why too much of it leads us into making bad decisions.  It was written in the context of the UK Government’s ‘Big Society’ idea, and its concomitant policies on allowing citizens more choice in relation to things like healthcare and schooling, but the idea of ‘too much choice’ really stuck with me, and the more I think about it, the more I come to believe that, in my case at least, too much choice can often be a bad thing.

It’s pretty easy to see that I’ve always had a bit of a problem with choosing.  I’m too much of a weigher of options.  As a kid, I would endlessly agonise over what to spend my hard-saved pocket money on, while my sister would have absolutely no qualms about making snap decisions and sticking to them regardless.  My reluctance to choose applied to all types of things – from cassette tapes to Tiny Tears dolls to sweets.  I remember once choosing a packet of Foxes glacier mints for a cinema trip, on the (well thought-through, I thought) basis that they take a while to eat and so would sustain me for the whole film, only to become completely bored of them after eating about two (I obviously hadn’t factored ‘taste’ into my weighing process), and ending up wishing I’d picked something a bit nicer, albeit faster to disappear, instead.    

The thing about choice, in the consumer sense of the word at least, is that it often makes for confusion, and the more choice you has, the more confused you becomes.  And too much choice seems to be everywhere I look.  I want to buy biscuits from the supermarket, but there are shelves and shelves of the little blighters staring back at me.  Shortbread or digestive?  Chocolate or plain?  12-pack or 6-pack?  I am instantly overwhelmed by the choices available, so I panic, and decide not to buy any.  I go out to dinner at a restaurant and have so much trouble deciding what to eat that when the waiter arrives to take my order I close my eyes, stab an index finger at some unidentified place on the menu and shriek ‘THAT ONE’.  It’s incredible the trouble that such a seemingly easy thing to do can cause me.

And it’s not just shops and restaurants.  The internet is a major cause of my stresses over choosing.  Just the other day I was looking for some tissue paper on eBay.  How many results do you think come up when you search for the term “tissue paper” on this, the website designed to make all our shopping lives that bit easier?  At the time of writing, it was 9278.  That’s right.  Quick show of hands please – who has the time to analyse 9278 types of tissue paper and decide which is the right one for their purpose?  I spent around 20 minutes searching through a tiny fraction of the listings (all of which were by and large the same) and after about two of those 20 minutes had come to the cold realisation that my life would have been a lot simpler had I just headed straight for the nearest stationery shop, which would probably have housed a total of two types of tissue paper, either of which would have done the job in hand just perfectly, bought one of them and then forgotten all about it.  The walk there and back might even have done me some good.  Wikipedia is another source of angst.  At my fingertips lies the power to bring up information on almost every conceivable topic known to man, most of which I would probably find to some degree interesting.  So where do I start?  Well, nowhere, it seems.  Crippled by the sheer number of options laid out before me and the desire to read EVERYTHING, I often end up opening so many tabs that it’s impossible to concentrate on just one single topic.  Many a Wikipedia session has ended in brain frizz and ‘shut down computer’ because of this.  Don’t even get me started on search engines.

Now I’m not stupid enough to believe that everyone experiences difficulty with choosing, and I’ll freely admit that my problem is most probably my often over-cautious personality.  It demands I weigh up options, whether I like it or not.  We might be talking about choice but that’s one area where I have none whatsoever.  Nor am I advocating the demise of choice.  Choice, and the freedom to choose are, by their very nature, good things, and those of us who have them should never for an instant forget that there are plenty of others out there who don’t.  It’s incredible that we have the freedom to eat different things everyday, or to wear different clothes to everyone else, or go on holiday, or go to the cinema, or stay up late, or watch trashy telly, or sew or read or bake or run or cycle…  The freedom to choose allows us to be the architects of our own lives, to live according to the beliefs we hold, and to be different from everyone else.  It also makes for an interesting and varied society.  But it does occur to me that perhaps the freedom to choose can go too far, at least in the realm of consumer choice.  When there’s so much on offer that the mind gets itself in a tizz and there’s confusion, tension and ultimately panic – is the freedom to choose still so great then?  As I find myself in Tesco, agonising over which of the six types of chopped tomato on offer I should buy, I can’t help but think that, in some situations at least, a little less choice would do me a whole lot of good.  

*Since writing this post, my ability to choose what I want to read online has led me to finding out that there is a book called ‘The Paradox of Choice: Why Less is More’, by Barry Schwartz.  I think I need to read this, pronto.

Image above courtesy of Flickr – daiwilliamsuk.