Golden Things

My eye always catches golden things: gold dust in cats' eyes, hair turned gold in sunlight, paintings ocher and photographs old. My ear tunes to golden sounds in gardens, I feel gold in warmth and safety, in gold-rimmed embraces and watchful golden cats. Dogs wag gold, loving voices vibrate gold, God's heaven is paved with gold. Everything love touches turns to gold. Even green leaves turn gold when cold comes to let trees sleep. 

Phone Covers

Luddette was walking in Best Buy the other day looking for pens. The large preoccupied boy in a blue shirt at the front door said they didn't sell pens, but I wanted to prove him wrong. I have this thing about beating sales clerks at their own jobs, showing them up to myself. It's petty, but satisfyingly petty, since I often win this one-sided game. In this case, the boy was right, so I chalked up the tour of the store to experience. My experience was that there are too many phone covers available, and all of them look silly.

Self-expression or too ridiculous for words?

     I will support any American's right to get rich in the free market and die of complications due to obesity, but that short wall of phone covers just bugged me in its excessive novelty. I may have the term "phone covers" wrong--I sort of perversely hope I do--but what I mean are those rubber or plastic things that snap onto the very big phones all the people are gazing into like mirror-mirror these days.
     Why do we need all that variety of nonsense? It just represented, in one poorly designed display, all the specially-colored crackerjack that we dangle to define ourselves--protracted childhoods and childhood junk. Of course, if I like something cute and nonsensical, it just expresses a lighthearted side of my well-balanced adult personality. Needless to say.
     I eventually found pens at Fry's, and they were really cute little ones, which perfectly match the cute little notebooks I got for the Mister. I thought they'd be cute for him to carry around in his chest pocket. Their being cute and little are inherently necessary qualities of the items, geared for a purpose, and not marketing choices calculated to excite my childish desire for novelty.
     
    

I Don't Want To Feel This Way

Sad Bear Represents Ludette

Whether he was placed here by a humorous employee or left by a distracted mother will never be known. Ludette came upon this poignant sight at a local (now defunct) Big Lots! Why Ludette would shop such a lowbrow merchant is no secret: I'm cheap, but I'm not heartless, and Sad Bear moved me.
     I identify with Sad Bear, especially when it comes to work. Can't you just feel his sense of being overwhelmed, outnumbered, wholly inadequate to the task? His forehead to the cool surface of the cardboard is the best thing that happened to him that day. (In Dialectical Behavior Therapy it's called "soothing touch.")
     Yesterday was a case in point. We received a list from Merchandising that had something like 99 new price markdowns on various shoe styles. I write "99" but it might have been 999. What this means to you, Dear Reader and Consumer, is that if you came in our store yesterday, you would have seen four women between the ages of 22 and 50 peering at shoe box labels and scratching numbers on peel-and-stick flags with Sharpies, which flags were to be put on said boxes.
     This scenario repeated for hours on end, while cruel fate, in the same spirit of whimsy that drove Sad Bear into a depression, decided to send us five running children; four needy women; three crying babies; two sullen husbands; and a busload of yelling families. Per hour, it seemed.
     I am sorry to report that I did not use Wise Mind. In fact, I was limping pretty heavily in Emotion Mind most of the day, and "snarling" was the verb I used to describe my customer service approach--or close to snarling.  I don't want to feel this way today. It's a new morning, and I have a right, as God's creature, endued with intelligence, wisdom, and spirit, to feel OK, and see things in a better light. And that's my call on myself.  I wish myself a Good, Calm, and Happy Day. (First, I'm going to write "How To Be a Polite Customer" and post it in Leaves From the Brain Book.)

Self-Indulgent Luxury Addict

The warm, "right brain" collection

Anno Domini 2013-ish, Luddette discovered perfume. Like most women, I had some scent in the cabinet (later to find out that the typical warm, moist environment of a bathroom is a fatal location for fragrance) but it was well in hand--not a hint of excess. (On a related topic, see Luddette's busy little Bathroom Cabinet how-to in Leaves From the Brain Book.)
     What happened, I don't know...something about a Christmas gift for the Mister, a suggestion of sexiness, the decisive spritz onto the wrist (later to find out the anterior of the arm, with its hair and oils, is a far, far better place to trap scent molecules), and I boarded a train that took me $1,900 and head-first into a world of self-indulgent luxury.

The cool, "left brain" collection

     Most mothers have a few bottles--mine had L'Air du Temps and Tabu, and maybe a couple others. I eventually amassed close to 75, not including miniatures. (See the full-blow addiction in photo #3.) the first two photos are of my collection in its infancy. I didn't see the incipient danger in my making it all just so. Collection I, top, from left to right, first row: Givenchy Amarige, Dana Tabu, Cacharel Anais Anais, Chopard Casmir; second row: Emanuel Ungaro Diva, Jean Desprez Bal A Versailles, Estee Lauder Sensuous; third row: Giorgio Armani Red, Oscar de la Renta Volupte, Yves St Laurent Opium, Rochas Femme. 
     Collection II, below, from left to right, first row: various miniatures; second row: Nina Ricci L'Air du Temps EDT, Guerlain Mitsouko, Guerlain L'Heure Bleue; third row: Oscar de la Renta signature EDT, L'Air du Temps EDP, Molinard Habanita; fourth row: (hidden) La Perla signature EDT,  Gres Cabochard, Rochas Eau de Rochas.
    

This wasn't even all.  By the end, I had stuff stashed.

Luddette has a tendency to take a good thing, and then go and spoil it.  Not satisfied with what I could buy outright, pry from my mother, or hunt for at yard sales, I started selling perfume online to support my increasingly expensive habit--the addict who deals.

The secret from the husband, the hoarding, the final revelation and showdown...it was halted.  I repented.  I sold or gave away almost all.  But there was a time when I felt rich and exquisite. The secret charm of the Good Life is learning how to feel rich and exquisite without spending a small fortune. That is Luddette's next life lesson plateau.

Unpin Me

Pininterest is the latest technology I'm avoiding. I don't know if I spelled it correctly, and I don't care. I don't like the association with pins. Pins stick me when I reach for one, they're unnecessarily sharp, they fall on the floor and roll away, or hide in the carpet and stab me like scorpions. I'm not interested in pins, because they're not interested in me. They actually like to hurt me. Pininterest is only for people who get along with pins. I prefer pens. The worst they do is smudge my thumb and middle finger pad. Sorry! That's okay, little pen. You didn't mean it.

Charming Things

Things that are charming:
--take a penny, leave a penny
--a toddler inspecting her pacifier
--an insect grooming its antennae
--a freshly washed old car
--a slice of moon over a chimney
--a boy in a tuxedo

Right-Turn Lanes

People in right-turn lanes seem to fall under a meditative trance when it's their opportunity to go.  Where they may have sped up, passed me, and jammed back in to get ahead, the approach of a right turn recalls all their mindfulness skills, and they travel each degree of the arc with steady, observant grace. During this exhibition of presence of mind, cars veer off wildly behind us to avoid a crash and I pray I'm not too badly disfigured.  Or perhaps they're mere sensualists, and a curve, even a concrete one stuck with a preoccupied teen and a trash can, begs a slow caress of the flank. Maybe they realize this last turn means Home Sweet Home, and any unhappy or begrudging association makes them to slow to a crawl to stave off the inevitable. All I know is that it scares me every time.