Birthdays & Shopping = Oh. My. God.

So I had another birthday. They’ve been a little tough since both my parents died. My mother died two weeks before I turned 50, which was The World’s Worst Birthday Ever. So I’ve been kind of coaching The EGE since then, trying to get him into the whole Birthday Spirit, but he’s not really a birthday kind of guy. He did OK for a couple of years there with the crepe paper streamers and the light-up jeweled tiaras, but this year I realized I was going to have to seize the day and wrestle it into submission.
Like I’ve said:  it’s tough to celebrate when you do what you love every day. So what to do? I started out stitching on the front porch, which was nice, but then, when more drastic measures were called for, I got dressed and went to the mall.
Yes, honeys:  I spent a good chunk of my birthday at The Fucking Mall, Home of Sneaky Marketing Techniques, Zombified Shoppers, and Totally Worthless Imported Crap You Don’t Need.
Yes, I did.
And I had an absolutely fabulous time!
See, I didn’t set out to go the mall on my birthday. I set out to go to the post office, but when I took the SUV out of the carport, I went, “Holy crap, that’s one filthy truck!” Seems it hadn’t been washed since we got back from New Orleans, and it was covered with dead bugs approximately the size of Chihuahuas. So I took it to the car wash, which was kind of fun, since I got to sit in the car wash and work on a crossword puzzle I downloaded with an app. for the iPhone. I like crossword puzzles, but I won’t take time to sit and dick around with them. When you’ve got one with you already, though, and it’s not this big chunk of newspaper, and you’re not always having to hunt for a pencil (or a pen, if you’re a show-off), it’s a whole 'nother thang.
And then, since I was already halfway to the mall, I thought I’d go and check on this bag I’d seen on-line. I have a confession to make, an embarrassing one: I love leather bags. I have a severe weakness for them. As a vegetarian and someone who doesn’t believe in hunting, this is a real problem. It’s like those fanatical ministers who rail about the sins of the wicked and then sneak off to Acapulco with the church secretary while their wife is in the hospital giving birth to triplets. You know? It just doesn’t make sense.
But there you go. I’m not always consistent. It’s one of the benefits of getting older:  when we’re young, we think we’re going to find ourselves, discover what we’re like, figure out the world and our place in it and know how we’ll react in every situation. We’ll know what we like and don’t like, what we hate and will tolerate, and we’ll be All Set Forever.
It doesn’t work like that. And isn’t that a marvelous thing? If I knew everything about myself and had me all figured out, I’d be boring as hell to myself. The surprises and the changes and the inconsistencies are the things that keep me interested.
For instance:  I used to hate yellow. Loathe it. It made me queasy. I’ve told y’all why—I won’t torture you again. Let’s just say, as a memory refresher:  Christmas pageant practice, standing in the gym in 3nd grade, singing “Silent Night” next to a kid who’d eaten an egg salad sandwich for lunch.
Shudder.
Anyway:  I use a lot of yellow when I dye stuff. I mix most of my own colors, and the acid green and orange and gold require, well, a LOT of yellow. And as I worked with it, I realized yellow isn’t so bad.
[I still can’t listen to “Silent Night” without needing Pepto Bismol, but there’s still time. . . .]
Anyway. So I love leather. I’ve tried to get over it, making my own bags out of fabric and wearing rubber Yoquis by Keens, but the truth of the matter is that I love everything about leather except that it comes from poor, innocent, slaughtered animals. I love the way it feels. I love the way it smells. I love the way it ages and gets all spottled and soft. It’s almost like a fetish, but without the sex. I swear. I have not progressed to the actual licking of the leather, OK?
Anyway, so I’d seen this groovy bag at zappos.com. And let me just say here that I hate Zappos, OK? They must surely be from the devil, because they make it entirely too easy and pleasurable to shop:  when you have to call them, the people are all nice and cheerful and helpful and will go to a huge amount of trouble trying to fix what’s wrong. The CEO is funny and smart and has great policies, and people love working for him. They have free overnight shipping both ways, and their return policy is such that you can order half a dozen pair of shoes, get them the next day, try them on, keep what you want and send the rest back, no questions asked, free of charge.
Nope. They’re not paying me to say this.
The reason they’re so evil is that they will occasionally send you e-mail with pictures of stuff they think (duh) you just might possibly like. You know, from your Previous Shopping Choices. I had never ordered a bag from them—I think of them as just The Shoe Place—but there, in the e-mail was this bag:

Man, that’s a cute bag (and yes, my love of leather does cause me to use the word “cute” rather too often for my own comfort. Imagine my poor husband, who sees me transformed from his usually fairly logical and sensible (well, come on:  mostly!) wife into this estrogen-charged leather-fondling shopping fiend from hell when I get hit, as I sometimes do, by Bag Lust).
Fortunately for me (or not:  read on), I didn’t think to order the bag and have it arrive at my home in less than 24 hours. Instead, I googled it and found that they carry it at Dillard's. Since I was not yet in the grasp of Bag Lust, I didn’t actually plan to go look at it; I just thought that, you know, if I happened to be Out That Way (snort), I could drop in and look. And I mean “drop in,” as I treat the mall sort of the way I treat an iffy public restroom, holding my breath, looking neither left nor right, hurrying in and getting it over with and getting out before I can see anything I don’t need to see. You know?
But there I was at the car wash, the truck all clean and shiny, flush with my success at filling in 8 and 9 down (“epistles” and “Caspian”), and it seemed harmless enough, really, just going over to check out the bag In Real Life. I told myself that I wouldn’t buy it, even if I loved it, since I do sort of have this odd loyalty to Zappos (plus, you know, if I liked it and ordered it from them, I might want to, oh, you know, check out another couple leather bags while I was at it, seeing how it wouldn’t cost anything to LOOK at them, right? with the free shipping and all).
This is how all problems begin, isn’t it? They start out all innocently: “Oh, I’m just going to try this little, tiny, teeninsy bit of heroin, just to see what everyone’s talking about. What’s the harm, just this tiny, tiny little bit?” You tell yourself you just want to see it, see what it’s like, check it out. Next thing you know, you’re strung out on the street, peeing on yourself and talking to Mozart in Russian.
Well. I go over to The Mall and go in and, lo! They do have the bag! It’s right there, in the hip little Lucky Brand display. And ick:  what a disappointment! This model

must be about 4’2” and weigh, oh, maybe 73 pounds, because there is no way in the world that bag is as big as it looks in this photo. No way. It was a tiny little thing. Well, tiny as leather bags go. Because, really, people:  if you want a tiny little bag, you don’t need leather:  you’re not going to be carrying shit in it, anyway. Leather is bulky. If your bag is 4” square and all you’re going to put in it is your phone and a tampon, come on:  get velvet! Get something sparkly! It’s not like you need Seriously Functional. Leather is for Substantial Bags. Big, roomy, accommodating bags. Bags that will Go With You Through Life.
So the bag was too small = I was safe!
Yeah. Right. You, my fellow addicts, know what’s coming, don’t you? Yes, indeed:  turns out that on Tuesday, My Birthday, someone had, indeed, planned a perfect birthday surprise: in addition to the end-of-season clearance on all kinds of stuff, they had a One-Day-Only (although I’m not sure I believe that and so should maybe just kind of Stop By and check it out, just to be sure it’s not still going on. My civic duty, you know) Additional 40% Off with Your Dillard's Credit Card. Meaning that, in addition to the 50-70% off they had already marked on Shit They Couldn’t Sell, they had another, ADDITIONAL 40% off with a Dillard's credit card.
Do I have a Dillard's credit card? Hell, no. I have only one credit card, and I use it for everything and pay it off every week. I make money on this baby, what with the Driver’s Edge Bonus Points. I don’t have any other credit cards.
Except:  now I do. Now, it seems, I have a Dillard's credit card. You saw this coming, right? Because it turns out that if you don’t owe anyone any money, everyone wants to lend you money, even if it’s supposed to be really hard to get credit. Turns out it took me about 2.5 minutes to get a Dillard's credit card.
But let me back up.
I was still in the Browsing & Sniffing Mode. No! I do NOT mean I was walking through the Bag & Shoe Department sniffing and fondling the leather! No! I told you I haven’t sunk that far yet. No:  I mean I was still in that mode where you walk through and look at stuff and sniff to yourself and go, “Cheap, shoddy crap. No wonder they couldn’t sell it. $19.99? I wouldn’t take those if they were giving them away! Huh.” Like that.
And then My Friend Wendy, the Evil Enabler, called me. She was in Woodstock—yes, that Woodstock:  the one with the 40th  Anniversary going on (although, as she pointed out, Woodstock didn’t actually happen in Woodstock; it was about 40 miles away)). She was calling to wish me a happy birthday, and she had to do it while she was in town because she can’t get phone reception at her cabin. So when I actually answered the phone (which I hardly ever manage to do), she turned around and went back into town sp we could talk.
Big trouble for me. She was checking out Thomas Pynchon’s new novel, trying to decide if she wanted to read it badly enough to pay the Brand-New Hardback Book Cost (about $1,456,000, or $34.99) or if she could wait until she could get it at the Austin Public Library (meaning she has to wait in line until it’s her turn). I hated Pynchon in graduate school and so had to entertain myself with pleasant visuals of shoes and stuff while she was telling me about the reviews. See?  All Wendy’s fault:  we’re talking, and I was looking at bags. And shoes. Otherwise I could have escaped the mall and driven home, see?
Picture this:  we’re talking and laughing (and probably cussing, since we are, after all, Charter Members (we’re all CM’s) of Women Who Say Fuck and have certain responsibilities we have to uphold as requirements of our membership (i.e., say “fuck” a lot). Although none of us is the kind of person who walks around saying Bad Words (or, esp. Really Bad Words) out loud in public, talking on the phone to each other is another matter. There’s no telling what I might have said. So I’m sitting there, finally (I had too much to carry) in the shoe department, surrounded by the other shoppers, which would be Women Who Are Not at Work and Have a Dillard's Card. Meaning, in Midland, A Certain Kind of Woman. I look like I always look. I’m laughing and talking on the phone, surrounded by bags. Several bags. Many bags. Including a red one and One That Matches My Hair!  Wendy’s asking me if I’ve decided which one I’m going to get. I tell her I think I’ll just get all of them. Or none of them: I’ll ask the clerk if 1) I can return them if I change my mind and 2) if I can get a card today and use it to get the 40% off. Her answers will determine my fate.
You guessed it:  yes. And yes.
In the end, I have seven new bags and two pair of shoes, one for me and one for The EGE. This is obscene, and it’s a measure of my love and admiration for you all that I even tell you about this. I want you to know that, no matter what your little secret is, you’re not alone.
Well, unless you ARE actually licking the bags. Then you might be alone. We might need to talk about that one. . . .
I spent (get ready for The Full Confession) a little over $300 (broken down to Money Spent per Hour of Shopping, it really isn’t that much). Everything was on clearance, and everything was also another 40% off.
Guess how much I saved. Give up? I saved (drum roll!) over $1000 dollars. Yowza.  My mother would have been so proud. The EGE was proud of me—that man loves a bargain.
Here’s what I got, plus The EGE’s shoes, which have vanished into The Man Closet, where I dare not venture:

Now, there may be those among you (probably, I’m sorry, very left-brained types, perhaps (although not necessarily) male (although, honeys, I have known some men who love to shop. Hell:  when I stop and think about it, I realize that most of the men I have known in my life have SERIOUSLY loved to shop. Not my father. The EGE doesn’t like to shop for stuff, but he likes to do comparison grocery shopping and bargain shopping and really likes looking in places like IKEA. He just doesn't like paying money for stuff and then bringing it home))—anyway, there may be someone out there going, “You didn’t save $1000. You spent $335.” To you, I say “Phbbbbttt.” You obviously don’t grasp the concept of Bargains, so you need to go away and read your US News and World Report and let the rest of us wallow in our Total Shopping Success Glee.
OK, so I’ve told you mine. I’ve confessed the worst. Now it’s your turn: your biggest guilty shopping thrill? Or your biggest Shopping Bargain Score ever? Which will it be?
And that, my dears, is How I Spent My Birthday.