I am somewhat a slave to my iPod. I didn’t want to be. I really didn’t. I thought they were pretty and shiny and oooh, look, music. But it makes everything so easy, all of those sounds sitting in your delicate hand. It’s organized the way that I think, which is to say that it’s entirely schizophrenic, sometimes by sources, sometimes by groupings, and sometimes just a jumbled glut of 3194 thoughts one after another. I simply don’t know how I lived without it.
Penny and I drove to Milwaukee in her Monte Carlo and at least four times, I caught myself wisting for songs from the iPod, which was sitting on my computer desk. My sister Mo asked if she could use it when she goes to the dentist to have her teeth drilled and I told her to ask our brother for his because I have class and will absolutely die if I have to make the jaunt down there alone in the car without my faithful iPod sitting on my right knee. Yes. Die. There would be a chalk outline of my body somewhere north of Sheboygan, which is the point at which I can start getting the good radio station (102.1).
Which reminds me, Penny and I embarked on what I have come to think of as Cashmere Quest 2005: The Gluttoning. I did, by the way, find ridiculously marked down cashmere sweaters in my size, including one that was perfect, oh so perfect, and in fact, was so perfect that it is the same one I bought in October for twice as much, exact same color and everything. I didn’t buy it, even though it was marked down so much that karma is right this moment placing three very hungry moth larvae on the right breast of my cardigan, to punish me for being practical.
Despite the lack of viable cashmere, it was a delightful if not exhausting day, and was highlighted by a stop for late lunch at Maggiano’s, which I suspect is at least partly to blame for America’s collective weight problem. Even the lunch portions are enormous and let’s just say that they spare not the cream in the alfredo. Penny, who is the slowest eater on the planet and has not, in recent memory, left a restaurant without a carryout container, and I together inhaled actual serving platters of mushroom ravioli al forno (the individual ravioli were the size of saucers), chicken saltimbocca (with two gigantic breast cutlets) and a side dish of spaghetti marinara. And then we split an order of cr’me brulee and then I got all snorky because between the cheese and the cream sauce and the custard, I had run circles around my tolerance for dairy and was venturing into emergency antihistamine territory.
As we waddled out of the restaurant, sans the expected trademark bag of leftovers, Penny wondered where they kept the vomitoriums, and I can’t say that I blamed her. Pasta binge’ not the best idea when there is more shopping to be done. It was all we could do to sit in manicure chairs and pay fastidious people to do our nails for us. I seriously hope that there aren’t any non-Americans reading this, as that last paragraph is shaming me to death. No! That cashmere isn’t good enough! You there, paint my nails as I sit on a tuffet and belch like Jabba the Hutt!
Really, non-American readers’ we’re all not like this. It’s just me.
