Remember that line in Jerry Maguire where Tom Cruise says "you complete me" to Renee Zellweger? That's how I feel about lip gloss. It completes me. My husband says I have an addiction and for years I have tried to deny it. But, when I look around my house, I realize that I do seem to have become dependent on having moist lips. I have multiple tubes of lip gloss and Vaseline Lip Therapy in practically every room in the house. In my night stand, on the treadmill, in the powder room, upstairs in the office, in the living room, the basement, the kitchen, and the master bathroom. I always have one or two in my purse and keep an extra in the car. What can I say? I don't like dry lips.
Some believe that there is a true conspiracy among chapstick and lip balm makers who use special ingredients to get you hooked on the stuff. Check it out on the web. All you have to do is type in "chapstick addiction." Seriously though, you could say that about anything. Lately, in my household, we've all been addicted to SweeTarts jelly beans which only seem to be available during Easter season, unlike Starburst which are available all year round. If you haven't tried the SweeTarts yet then you need to get yourself to the nearest retailer and get some! If there are any left. I've been buying them by the case. I'm pretty sure the secret ingredient being used in these jelly beans is lots of tarty flavor and sugar.
Getting back to my addiction, I'm not the only one I know that's constantly craving moist lips. I've seen some men pull a tube of lip balm out of their pockets on occasion and I believe Alex and Cameron were in the early stages of dependency this winter. It started with one of them asking me to pick up a tube of Chapstick the next time I was out. Cameron did quite a bit of snowboarding this year, so it was probably him. While I was at it, I bought an extra one which Alex took for himself. I started noticing him using it at regular pace. There were even a couple of times he had to conduct a search in the house and go through his pockets in the name of Chapstick. I warned him to be careful (in that sing-songy voice we sometimes use when we're warning someone of impending doom). "You don't want to get addicted like me." Then, yesterday, Cameron was outside hitting baseballs and he specifically came in the house looking for his Chapstick and he hasn't been snowboarding in weeks!
At what point does an addiction become a compulsion or are they the same? I guess the difference between the two is that when you stop an addiction, you have actual withdrawal symptoms. Whereas, with a compulsion, you just "can't" not do it. It's not normal for you and it will continue to gnaw at your brain if you don't fix whatever is bothering you, even though nobody else notices anything is "wrong."
For instance, if I'm only partially opening the horizontal blinds on the windows, they need to be in line with the muntins inside the windows. If they are not, then there are too many horizontal lines for me to deal with. Also, my knick knacks need to be aligned or angled in a certain fashion. Both of these concepts are lost on Ed. He can open the blinds to any degree or replace stuff after dusting in any random fashion. I can walk into a room and instantly be freaked out if there are too many horizontal lines staring at me in the face. Also, I love that he dusts (since my last posting you know I have dusting issues) but I have to go around behind him and rearrange everything back to the way it was. My clothes in my closet are color coded too.
What's funny is that we can be so fanatical about doing something one way and yet not care about other stuff at all. Why is that? How come it's crucial that a picture frame face me at a certain angle, but I don't care that there's two inches of dust on it? I know, it must be because dusting is Ed's compulsion and I don't want to take that away from him. Yea....that's it.
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