You Don't Deserve It

After a lapse of a week or six during which I lost track of more than my SiteMeter, Missed Boats picks up where it left off, i.e., with the subject of screwing up in the quest to acquire desirable objects. What I've been finding is that a little discretionary income coupled with some free-floating anxiety can mean a whole lot of thwarted bedazzlements on eBay, where the stages of infatuation and loss are so wildly compressed that an operatic affair can be reduced to a day or two of fleeting enervation.
How is it possible that there are, for me, so many disparate, far-flung and yet captivating objects, and each a way to misjudge? How the thing looks, if it is real, if it will be a gratifying thing to own and if so, why I am deliberately holding back from placing the bid that will make the object mine? Is it because I'm cheap? Well, that's part of it. But this is where the operatic aspects of infatuation kick in; the "lost" object must be found--at any cost--even far beyond its original selling price. Since most often what I'm falling for are books, I end up following the perfume of their abandonment into online rare book sites, desperate for the cadence of fast ownership.
But if originally I didn't buy the thing--the book--because I didn't think I deserved it, why then the flood of compensatory over-spending? The usual markers for behavior disappear, and it's as likely I'll break my neck in shallow waters as drown in deep ones. Because, really, who knows when and where to jump?