how target made my life complete

When I made it out of Target on Saturday afternoon, I had successfully:

• bought presents for two friends
• decided that all wedding cards are over-the-top and ridiculous. I do not want to make my friends read bad poetry, nor am I into gushing sentiments about how their rings are circles because the circle is never ending...just like their love. If I were them, I would be scanning all the cards, just looking for who signed it and if they wrote a personal note. Any script-y font would immediately be shunned.
• {on a related note} decided to just write my own dang wedding card, one that didn't involve poetry, bad or otherwise. I didn't buy a 50-pack of brightly-colored cards at Hobby Lobby to just have them sit in my card closet. {What? You don't have a card closet?}
• bought Double Stuf Oreos on sale for $2.50.
• resisted the urge to buy:
  
  • several packs of Oreos
  • a dress that I didn't really need but was on the sale rack
  • the DVD set of Downton Abbey {You have it coming on Netflix. You have it coming on Netflix. This I kept repeating when my heart kept whispering, 'Period piece. You know how much you love period pieces.' Shut up, heart. You already paid for Netflix, so you better take full advantage.}

My heart pretty quickly got over the Downton downer when it saw—on the shelf right next to Downton—this:

And it was only $8.99.

That's actually so exciting that it deserves shouting: AND IT WAS ONLY $8.99.

Pride and Prejudice, the Colin Firth Pride and Prejudice was being sold for less than $9.00. Considering it's something like six hours long, that's an incredible bargain for entertainment.

I mean, that is such a good deal that I half expected a TV infomercial spokesman—spokesperson, since I should be PC—to pop up in the DVD section of Target and say, "But wait! There's more! When you buy Pride and Prejudice now, we'll throw in—absolutely free—a Special Edition DVD of Downton Abbey. It includes never-before-seen-here-in-America footage with a guest appearance by Colin Firth himself. That's right, you're getting all your dreams to come true in an explosion of period pieces...for only one easy payment of $8.99."

{And then in a really fast "we have to tell you these legal details" voice, the guy would say, "Yeah, we were totally lying about Colin Firth in Downton Abbey thing. We just said it because it appears that he can sell anything, just by appearing in a cravat, or in that particularly famous scene from P&P, in a wet shirt. Sorry for lying. Just pretend we're a nasty relation from a Jane Austen novel, the kind that you never expected to do anything good."}

I picked up Pride and Prejudice.

I looked around.

No spokesperson appeared.

But I bought Pride and Prejudice anyway.

This will, I'm sure, come as a surprise to you, but until Saturday, I didn't own the movie. I've asked for it for Christmas and my birthday for years, but it has never appeared under either the Christmas tree or the birthday tree.

{My birthday is in December, so until my birthday is over, I call my Christmas tree my birthday tree. These are the kinds of things you have to resort to when your birthday is the same month as Christmas and you still want your birthday to be special.}

It was time to take matters and Colin Firth into my own hands: that's what Elizabeth would've done, I think.

So I bought it and emerged from Target—into a summer rain in Illinois—thinking about tea and living in a time when you got to dress for dinner.

And on a related note, I'm going to be really busy for the next few nights. Doing very important things like swooning and learning how to do those English country dances.

Call if you need anything, but I'm warning you: I'll probably answer the phone with a fake British accent.