Show Me Your Wish List

Cataloging desire on Amazon.com

What does it mean to want a thing? What does it mean to want this thing so much that you verbalize that request? And what does it mean to want it so very much that you name that desire in front of strangers — potentially, in front of the whole wide world?

Perhaps that final question is inherently flawed. Maybe the desires we name publicly are not what we want the most. It is easier to say “I want a Smeg ’50s Retro Style Aesthetic Coffee Grinder, CGFO1 (Pastel Green)” than “I want a love that is present, real, and passionate and tender and funny, with good boundaries, lots of space for me to make my art and be by myself, something that is monogamous but flexible enough to ride the waves of closeness and distance, and we better both be in therapy or have recently been in some great therapy, because I’m not here to fix your shit and you better not be here to fix mine.”

Hard to fit the latter on an Amazon wish list, and I’m 100% certain they don’t stock it in any of their warehouses. But you sure can get a lot of other stuff from Amazon, and I decided earlier this year to find out just how much.