There is nothing better than a thrift store. Goodwill, Salvation Army, that thrift store down the street that's got some generic name that you can never really remember - just the idea of a thrift store is my favorite thing. And that's for a few reasons, like finding cheap books, cheap CDs, cheap movies, and cheap clothes. Though I like the clothes for more than the price. Because when you go to a thrift store, you can find something that's actually a little bit different. You can find a hideous turtleneck that you have to buy just because it's hideous. You can find leather mini-skirts, and everything denim; denim dresses and denim vests and denim-

There's a lot of denim at thrift stores.

The clothes at thrift stores are great if you're into looking like a time traveler from 1993.

It's not just the cheap of any item you might find at a thrift store that's great - or the fact that thrift stores are just about the only place that you can buy CDs anymore, apart from Amazon - it's the fact that they're different. It's the near-total certainty that you're not going to see someone else wearing this long-sleeved, long-skirted denim dress (because honestly, who would?), especially after you take a pair of scissors to it, because, hey, it was like three bucks and why not make it look a little less sister-wife? The certainty that you're going to be different, because literally everything you're wearing is older than you.

I'll cede to the fact that my love for thrift stores probably comes from this thing I've got for wanting being completely different from everyone around me, but the absolute weirdness of thrift stores is really what gets me. It's the whole, there is one of these teal waffle-weave shirts that I need to buy now or I will never get it again. And if you decide to venture into other departments, it's the creepy porcelain clowns. It's tape recorders. It's giant flannels from the men's department, it's denim jackets with Looney Toons on the back.

Everything in a thrift store is unique - apart from those thirty VHS tapes of Speed that seem to be in every one- and that's the cool thing about it. If you really want something, you've got to get it just then, or you might never be able to get it again, and when you look at that creepy little porcelain clown or plaid skirt, that spotted sweater or those Avril Lavigne-reminiscent green cargo pants, you have to go for it. And then you go out of there with ten cheesy teen horror novels from the '80s and '90s and, having spent about a buck and a half, go out feeling pretty good about yourself.

So that's why I like thrift stores. Not only because they're cheap, but because they give me a lot of room to express and fuel my 'look at me, nobody in their right mind would actually wear this' side of me. Because they're the only place you can find things like the soundtrack to the movie Empire Records, or old Sixpence None the Richer CDs.

And, naturally, because of the possibility of finding another creepy porcelein clown.