The Amazon Wish List

The days of getting crappy birthday presents that you have to trudge down to the mall and try to return are long gone. The Amazon.com wish list function has changed all of that. However, since becoming a popular trend amongst the Dream Team, I realized that a public wish list comes with its own baggage and potential for embarrassments.

I pride myself on my cultural pretensions - deeming myself a literary conossiuer. For example, I'd like to read about Sophia Hawthorne (Nathaniel's wife) and her sisters. This shows the world (i.e. people who stalk my wish list) that I am interested in American cultural history - I am no Joe Sixpack! But look a little closer, and one realizes that this book has been on my wish list since 2006, and the paperback version has been available for one year now.

Sometimes I look at my wish list and think of it as a work of art - a mix of eclectic and intellectual - not too geeky and not too mainstream. A great way for my future husband to look at the list and say, "Wow, Mariam seems very interesting. I'd really like to get to know a girl who wants to read a book entitled Heavy Metal Islam!"

That all changed yesterday. Sarah told me she had been stalking my wish list to find me birthday present.
"I found this wish list, and I was really confused - all the books were chick lit. I wasn't sure it was yours because it had books like In Your Shoes and Loose Lips."
As I stared at her in shock, Farrah helpfully added, "Maybe that was another Mariam Qureshi!"
"Yeah! There's a Maryam Qureshi right here in Toledo" I exclaimed. I'm a horrible liar so I mumbled, "Um I had different reading tastes back then."

When I got home, I typed in my name into the "Wish List search" box and sure enough, the embarrassing list that had 8 chick lit books from circa 2003 appeared. Teenager Mariam liked to read books with shoes and bows on them, books with little character development, a formulaic plot, and a saccharine romantic ending. And so, I did what any self-respecting, pretentious hipster who had a reputation to protect would do - I made that list private.

But then I realized we spend so much of our time ignoring the fact that we were geeks way back when. We weren't always the picture of the cool, self-assured future professional who likes NPR, Ethiopian food, and the complete works of Ian McEwan. At some point in our lives, all of us (with the exception of Gwenyth Paltrow) were nerdy 17 year-olds who read those dumb romance novels with the sad hope that we, too, could find love in the most unrealistic, unreasonable place imaginable. And then I had an epiphany - the fact that we were not always the epitome of cool was okay, and we should own our high school geekiness and blog about our embarrassments for the world.

Full disclosure: my current wish list
My wish list as a teenager

--By Mariam, who has to get up at 5:30 tomorrow so that she can vote. Who knew being a good citizen would require such grave sacrifice?