It was a rude shock to realize today that I’m still addicted. The things spam can do.

Some people call those emails “The Pottery Barn specials,” or “The Container Store bargains”. I call them “Container Porn.” I thought I’d managed to unsubscribe from them, but one snuck through the spam filter today and triggered my container addiction. As part of my 12-step program I readily admit I am powerless over containers. Seriously. If time, space and money allowed, I’d be swimming in boxes, crates, and matching file folders.

In a past life - one where I actually had an apartment and a job and money to spend, I spent hours drooling over containers. I made friends with people who shared my obsessive compulsive need to compartmentalize everything in my life. I once struggled with how to tell people how tense and irritated it made me feel to see spices and cans of soup sitting around un-alphabetized in their kitchen cabinets. Even worse, seeing that someone mixed tall spice bottles with short, fat spice bottles from a different brand was enough to make me weep.

I remember sighing with relief when I first watched my best friend come home from the grocery store and empty all the boxes of cereal, rice, beans, flour, sugar and whatever into mix and match tupperware before putting them away. When she and her husband fought she would invite me over and we’d wash out all the containers and repack them for therapy. She had kids with sticky fingers and feeling all those freshly filled, clean containers go back on the shelves was pure rapture for us both. Seriously sick, I know.

Other women saved for the jewelry they saw on the home shopping network. I pined for the mix-and-match bowls and handy dandy kitchen cabinet storage rack.

I actually bought those 24 and 48-pack packages of toilet paper and paper towels at Costco and Sam’s club. I just liked the way I felt when an entire shelf or two in my bathroom closet was crammed with toilet paper. After a time in my life when I had to ration toilet paper or steal it from gas station restrooms, the sheer joy of abundance for life’s little pleasures was intoxicating. But being able to put them all in plastic cases designed to hold them and keep them dry was almost erotic. I know. Stupid. Sick. But true.

So I’m working today and get an email from the Container Store in my in-box and I opened it. I know better. But there it was - (see photo above) and I got distracted. I started doodling what I’d like my new organized and containerized office to look like. Sigh.

I confess. I spent several hours this weekend sorting tools and paper and odds and ends into boxes and labeling each one. On one shelf of my office I now have 10 lime green topped shoe boxes ($1 each at Walmart) filled with assorted stuff I’ll never use or find even if I need it. But at least it’s all organized and labeled. I’m still a container queen.

Okay - back to work.