Halloween is over and Christmas decorations are up in the stores. Actually, they were up in some stores along with the Halloween costumes and candy. What’s the world coming to?! I suppose there’s only so much money to be made from Thanksgiving (after all, how much can we really eat), so retailers have been deciding to focus on Christmas as soon as they reasonably can. But I’m here to tell you: HALLOWEEN IS TOO SOON to be marketing Christmas decorations!! That’s not reasonable AT ALL!
On another note, I think I now understand the addiction that is People magazine. After returning home from my last trip to the grocery store, I found copies of People and Us in the bottom of one of my bags. My first thought was “they better not have charged me for these”, as I didn’t buy them (honest!). I have no idea how they got into the bags that became mine, but they didn’t charge me for them, so I suppose that’s my windfall of good luck for the month.
The magazines have been sitting on the kitchen table for a few days, and I’ve been having my breakfast with Keith Urban’s smiling face staring up at me while I read Newsweek. But today all that changed. I actually opened it up and started to browse. Browsing turned to actually reading, and now I am a walking source of information on the Backstreet Boys reunion, Spice Girls exercise tips (I can imagine that having 7 babies between you really does require exercise to get back into spice girl shape), Jane Seymour’s plastic surgery (breast implants so small they had to be special ordered), and, sadly, the deaths of Porter Waggoner and Robert Goulet. It was addicting. reading the first story led me to read the next. And the next. It took a great deal of strength to stop and get back to work after breakfast.
I can see how easy it would be for someone to get hooked on these things. There is a certain voyeuristic joy to be gained from reading the sordid details of someone’s life, which is only made better when that someone is rich and famous. How nice to know that these folks suffer just as we do. How sad to know that it takes a lot of money to fix the problems they deal with. So we’re made happy, then sad – all in the course of one story. So we go to the next story, hoping to find something to make us feel better in our miserable, little, normal-person lives. (Note that I do not think that a “normal-person life” is necessarily little or miserable, it’s just that after spending 15 minutes reading People I feel that way temporarily.) And so the addiction grows. It’s like a bag of the best potato chips you’ve ever had – you can’t stop.
Luckily, I was able to pull myself away just in the nick of time. I mean, I was on the verge of calling the Home Shopping Network to see if I could special order some implants.
I’m still going through withdrawls.
