It takes a Village

I realized a couple of days ago that my life has degenerated into a continual search for "cute." Cute girls, cute anime, cute toys, and even cute things to decorate my apartment with. Well, this weekend's mission was to work on that last one - cute decorations.

For several years now, I've been wanting to go out after Christmas an buy a bunch of those porcelain houses and shit to make a Christmas village. Every year though, I either was cheap, lazy, forgetful, or a combination. But not this year. I got my shit together. Yeah, kinda goofy to be buying Christmas decorations after Christmas, but that's when stuff is on sale. And yeah, it's even goofier for a 24-year-old guy to be getting all giddy over little houses, but I was. I don't know why I have this fetish for miniature things. It sorta stems from my desire to collect toys; those are just smaller versions of the things I watch on TV and in cartoons. Still, the overall need for small things isn't really explained, but I'm sure it's just some kind of complex arising from my being somewhat of a miniature person.

Psychology session aside, I went a little overboard these past few days and ended up getting 18 different buildings from Mervyn's and The Artist Formerly Known as Jo-Anne Fabrics. Mervyn's has X-Mas stuff at 50% off - not stellar, but not bad. I probably could have waited until things hit 75% off, but I didn't want to run the risk of some of the pieces selling out. Jo-Anne, on the other hand, is already having a 70% off sale. Suddenly $30 pieces are 9 bucks. Fucking sweet. And they have a bunch of cool buildings, too. I ended up making two trips there and bringing home about two cartloads. I couldn't help myself. All this ultra-cute stuff at low, low prices. Some would say I'd have been stupid to pass that up.

Anyway, the new issue is what the hell to do with all this stuff. I've got three whole setups which are occupying my dining room table, a coffee table, and two end tables. We have the 'hood, which consists of five houses; downtown, with two churches, two lighthouses, and some shops; and finally the countryside, with another lighthouse, another church, a farm, and the motherfucking winery. Hell yeah.

Some of you may be confused by that list of buildings. Three churches? From the kid who says "fuck Jesus" and wants to destroy organized religion? Yeah, I know. It is an historic irony that despite hating what church stands for, I fucking love church architecture. I've gotta hand it to the Christ fuckers on this one; lots of times when they build a house of worship, they BUILD a house of worship. "No sense fucking around" is their motto with all that stained glass and all those huge spires, apparently.

The church situation did present one issue. I was planning on putting one in each of the three different displays, but the 'hood was already filling up my coffee table with those five houses. Since I was planning on dividing the town in half with a river since I got this cool little bridge, I got an idea: put one church on each side of town. This way, we can play America's favorite game: Catholics versus Protestants. The Catholics own one side of town, the Protestants the other. And whoever controls that bridge controls... Access to the other side of town.

On the surface, three churches and three lighthouses might seem like overkill, but it isn't. With all the bad-ass lighthouses Jo-Anne's had, I'm lucky I didn't come away with more of them.

Since I didn't buy any little people for my town (save the ones that came attached to buildings), I'm thinking of kicking it Chobits school and calling my village The Town with no People.