Our mailbox is not attached to our house. In fact, our mailbox is not even on our street. It’s complicated and dumb, and the whole issue of our mailbox placement nearly began The Great Mailbox Battle of 2007, but that’s not so important. Our mailbox is just a short walk around the corner or through the (nice) neighbor’s yard, but I drive to it. I drive to my mailbox because it is generally so jammed full of mail that carrying it becomes slightly Hansel and Gretel-ish, except that I don’t leave a trail of breadcrumbs, I leave a trail of flyers for cleaning services, postcards from well-meaning organizations seeking donations, and the never-ending mass of newsprint from local stores with coupons for things like gutter-cleaning services.
Of course, I don’t ever drop any of the approximately 72,000 catalogs that come every day, because I read those. I do. I read the catalogs. Even the really lame ones. Like the Pajama catalog – so lame. The one that annoys me the most, though, is Frontgate. In case you live on the moon and you haven’t received this catalog every other week for the last four years as I have, I’ll explain: this is a catalog full of things for your house. Not exciting, not novel. BUT, usually this catalog “features” a “special home” on its pages. In addition to looking at really useful products that you have to have like the hand-held “SmartShopper” voice recognition grocery list maker and the $3500 poker table with swivel seats and “supple black leather,” you are treated to the life-altering experience of viewing pictures of the most heinously, almost comically, gigantic and over-decorated houses in the universe…except that they’re not really all over the universe; they are almost always in Rancho Santa Fe, California, or some Mansion Farm in Arizona. Which leads me to my question of the day.
Is it weirder to have a special rack in your bathroom for reading material, thereby announcing: here’s where we do our business and sometimes we’re here long enough to get some reading done. OR is it weirder to be uptight enough to refuse to have a designated spot for the reading material that someone in the house will, inevitably, wish to have in there?
Deep thoughts. I know. I’m very, very deep.
