You snooze, you lose.

via Leeds List

So a while back I got a notification that the awesome and otherworldly King of Crimps Noel Fielding is coming to town, playing at the Danforth Music Hall next Wednesday. I got pretty excited, because I loved him on The Mighty Boosh and IT Crowd, and every time I see him on any of the millions of quiz shows in the UK he frequents he’s the highlight.

(On a side note, why don’t we have brilliant quiz shows like they have – done purely for entertainment value, no money on the line, just bragging rights? The only time I’ve seen it done over here was Whose Line Is It Anyway, which is a US version of the original UK show, and it was incredibly popular, so what’s the excuse? I mean, QI? Big Fat Quiz Of The Year? Nevermind The Buzzocks? All brilliant! OK, end of rant.)

So I put out feelers amongst my closest friends to see if anyone wanted to join me. Comedy’s always best when you’re with someone else after all. But no one else wanted to go – they had either never heard of him or he just wasn’t their cup of tea. I thought, ‘okay, I’ll go by myself,’ but by this time there were no tickets left that weren’t impossible to see the stage from. I consoled myself with the weak excuse that, ‘well, his standup isn’t as amazing as the other stuff, maybe I should be OK with this.’

Then last week they announced A SECOND SHOW had been added for the Tuesday. I jumped up and down for a while, then checked to make sure I was actually free that night, and started asking around again. I even widened my search for companions to my entire Facebook circle and thought I’d give them a couple of days to think about it. In the meantime I checked the ticket availability. ‘No problem,’ I thought, ‘plenty of seats left.’

This was my downfall, you see. I hadn’t learned my lesson. I should have just remembered, ‘oh yeah, none of my friends want to go, just get a single ticket NOW.’ But I didn’t. And now that couple of days have passed, and I’m in the same boat – no seats worth sitting in are available.

What am I taking from this? That I should really stop shuffling my feet about things and make a solid decision.

This is really indicative of how I think all the time really. I suffer from Fear Of Missing Out (or FOMO as some people call it – not me, that’s a really irritating acronym, though not as bad as YOLO), which makes every shopping trip really annoying for anyone who’s with me, as I won’t just pick up the thing I like and buy it; instead, I pick it up and then spend the next hour circling around the store making sure I’m not missing a better, cheaper version of the thing in my hand. It’s the extreme opposite of impulse buying, I know. It makes me buy things just to buy them, like if I’ve paid admission to a special show I feel cheated if I don’t pick something up while I’m there, so I end up getting something whether I’m in love with it or not.

[Edit: March 17] Now I see Jimmy Carr is coming to town. And a part of me wants to just jump on it and buy tickets, but at the same time I’m not sure I’m as big a fan of his standup, and I don’t want to go just because I missed out on Noel Fielding. I suppose I just have to get better at distinguishing things I actually want versus knee-jerk reactions.