You could see this one coming a LONG way away, couldn't you?
So a few weekends ago, we were taking Lucie up to Palo Alto (yeah, I know; on purpose no less!) to her favorite new find, Nordstrom Rack. I've been working an awful lot of overtime lately, and we wanted to spend some money frivolously to make ourselves feel as though our long hours haven't been entirely in vain.
So we find surprisingly close parking and enter the estrogen-rich and discount-frenzied environment that is the Nordstrom Rack. I actually find a pair of sunglasses that fit decently (later to find out that they effectively destroy any peripheral sight, thus making driving MUCH more exciting when trying to see my blind spots), and Lucie follows the sound of fairy-like tinkling bells and heads toward a column of softly beckoning light on the other side of the store, where she scores her first Dooney & Bourke purse, a brown suede number that's more than half off the regular price (which is still expensive, but a very good deal.)
Now, I'm a guy. I don't understand purses. I don't get the big deal of why D&B is on par with Coach, or why Kate Spade is good, or any of that stuff. But Lucie's ecstatic, which is good enough for me. And after my first attempt to find relativity by asking if her finding the Dooney & Bourke purse is kind of like when I was able to find the Jerry Garcia-patterned Birkenstocks back when Gilroy had the Birk outlet store makes Lucie wince as though she just tried swallowing a pine cone, I stop trying to understand and am content with just seeing her happy.
Or, to be more precise, I'm content with just seeing her happy AND with talking her into stopping by Valley Fair Mall so I can press my face up against the glass like a child outside a candy store, only with a little more drooling. See, the weekend we're doing this is the same weekend that the new iPhone 3GS is out, and I want to enjoy the experience vicariously through others. I've still got a year on my indentured AT&T servitude, so can't really justify the extra money just to upgrade what is already an awesome phone. Thankfully, Lucie is still so dazed and slightly goofy from her recent retail conquest that she agrees to this, and we're off from the Nordstrom Rack to the Apple store (and yes, my wallet just hurt a little when I typed that.)
We arrive at Valley Fair and I prepare myself to silently mock those suckers who're willing to wait in line multiple hours just to buy the new iPhone on opening weekend (ignoring the fact that I waited in line for almost 3 hours LAST year to buy the iPhone 3G three weeks after it had come out.) Ha!, I mentally sneer, you losers are such technogeeks that you're willing to wait in a line of humanity 500 people long just so you can be the first one you know to get-- OH HOLY CRAP THERE'S ALMOST NO LINE! I want to be the first one I know to get this phone! I don't care HOW long it takes!
Willpower goes out the window like a cigarette butt on the freeway, and the dry roadside brush that is my plan to wait until next year before upgrading goes up in flames, fanned by my hyperventilating gasps of excitement and fed by the tinder of the rubber I burn running to the end of the line.
Half an hour later, I get to the front of the line, and experience eerily familiar fairly-like tinkling sounds and softly beckoning light from the 3.5-inch screens of the display phones. I nod absently at the words the Apple pimp is telling me without hearing a single word, mindlessly sign my name wherever he tells me to (if we ever have kids I think the first one might be going to Cupertino; I don't really know for sure) and try not to wet myself when I'm handed the box containing my new 32GB black iPhone 3GS.
Angels sing. Bunnies and predators dance together and rejoice. And, although it only lasted for just a hundredth of a second, I'm pretty sure peace was achieved in the Middle East.
Not knowing or caring why my finger has a drop of blood on it, or why the Apple pimp grows horns and laughs as he rolls up a contract written on parchment, I wander out of the Apple store and find my way home. I'm pretty sure I drove, or maybe Lucie drove while I held the iPhone box and made cooing noises, but at any rate I get home.
Shortly thereafter, Lucie gets my old iPhone 3G set up with her old phone number (sorry, Tmobile) and I change over to a family plan with AT&T, with dual data service plans so we can both surf the net on our glossy black rectangular surfboards.
Life is good.
Life is suddenly a bit more EXPENSIVE as well, but good nonetheless.
.
