Office supplies are like my porn.

I love highlighters and Sharpies. Ever since I was a kid, I'd find tons of highlighters and Sharpies (mostly stolen from my dad's desk and hoarded from the drug reps at my mom's work... I didn't mind that they all said Viagra and Lincare and Celebrex) and just keep them tucked away somewhere in my room. I didn't particularly have a lot of things that needed to be highlighted or written in permanent marker, but there was something comforting about having them. Sometimes I'd take them out and line them up, rearrange them in order of most favorite to least favorite, scribble on scrap paper just to see what they looked like, and - of course - smell them from time to time.

I realize that that makes me a bit of a freak and has most likely contributed to a lot of the problems I have today (and perhaps even to the habit of collecting office supplies in the first place), but I'm okay with that. They smell good! What can I say.

Before coming to college, I bought three boxes of highlighters containing six markers each. I was just glad to finally have an excuse. The lady behind the checkout counter raised a judgmental eyebrow at me, but I smiled and said, "I'm starting college next month." She congratulated me, and like magic, I had taken my under-the-table, brown-bag habit into the light of day. It was glorious.

But I didn't stop there.

I became friends with an art major who lived in my building. We used to paint the floor and ceiling tiles of the rooms on our floor. We did lots of projects together - advertisements for our Student Union Board activities, dorm signs, homemade birthday cards for our friends - before I discovered her Sharpie collection. It was the motherload. She had every color under the sun - colors I didn't even know existed! - and they were all contained in a sexy, black vinyl case. There were hundreds of them. And she let me use them whenever I wanted.

Some people consciously feed their friends' addictions... others just enable them.

Suffice to say, I quickly learned that college would not be the best place for me to kick my office supply habit. Obviously, neither is "the real world." Now I can buy highlighters, markers, paper clips, pens, staplers, scissors, White Out, and binder clips AND CHARGE THEM TO MY OFFICE. I even get wholesale catalogs full of discounts and BULK NUMBERS delivered straight to my office mailbox.

The addiction? I'm afraid she's not going anywhere.