I hate cars. What I hate more than cars is having to spend money on cars. Right now, I'm driving Jen's Focus, which before today has always gone from A to B. After today, it continues its daily trek from A to B, only now its driver is $240 poorer. Herein lies the bitter pain of car care: I need to vomit money at the thing just to maintain the status quo.
Today we needed new tires. Okay, I get it, tires wear out. Off I went to Tires Plus. I was braced, though, for the inevitable alignment upsell, because, frankly, it is sorely needed. Before today, the Focus would shake on the highway. When I drove between 53 and 66 mph, the thing would vibrate enough to register on local seismometers. I've lost 3 fillings during my morning commute. It's bad. So, another $70 got tagged onto the bill.
The most grievous of repurcusions of this alignment is that I had to spend an extra 30 minutes in the waiting area of the least comfortable Tires Plus ever designed. In all, just over one hour of my life I left in that waiting area. A month ago I'd been at the same location to change the oil, and they'd had the day's paper; figuring the same would be true today, I left our Star Trib lying on the porch at home. This ensured beyond a doubt that there would be no paper there today. There was none indeed.
There was a tv, though, mounted up on the wall. It was off and looking neglected. I gave it a chance, having nothing to lose. It turned on to static. I flipped through a dozen snowy stations until I came across a channel with a beatiful, flawless picture. Perfect. Ten seconds of fiery sermon and solid gold pinky rings later, I realized it was a televangelism channel. Jackpot. My finger shot back to the channel button, and I kept flipping. More static, until another perfect signal, and another sweaty preacher. I could only laugh at this point. In all, I paid witness to almost 50 channels, only 3 of which came in at all, and all of them were flawless images of Benny Hinn knockoffs.
How can you program a tv to do that?
Tempting the very fires of hell, I shut off the tv and turned my attention to the magazine rack, a cracked and depressing number by the wall with two old copies of Architectural Digest and a weather beaten pamphlet on prostate cancer. I chose Architectural Digest, but only barely.
If you are ever sitting idly in your own personal purgatory anguishing over how many ramen noodle lunches can cover an extra $70 car bill, reading Architect Digest will not cheer you up. It may actually cause a homicide or two. I think maybe it has already. Has there already been an Architectural Digest Killer?
Architectural Digest is a beatiful, glossy full-color manual on the many ways your life can suck. I did appreciate its stab at inclusionism, though: "How many times have you found yourself flummoxed by the weighty decision of what style to build on 39 acres in the Umbria region of northern Italy? Well, so and so was in just such a pickle last year..." After two cover-to-cover experiences with this periodical, I feel like a total jerk for being the only person in the US without 120 feet of Puget Sound shoreline and an infinity pool the size of Vatican City.
I liked the "subject/homeowner as victim/hero" motiff that underscored a few of their articles. One in particular was about a New Orleans banker who bought a 15,000 sq. ft. French Renaissance manor just-barely-pre-Katrina, then wrastled with the question of whether to rebuild just-barely-post-Katrina or not. He did. In the eyes of Architectural Digest, this was an act of unparalleled humanitarianism, and this banker's likeness is currently being chiselled into a rock face by Lake Como.
I'd stored up some more acerbic and trite observations on Arch.Dig. as I whiled away my time, but now that I've summited the midnight hour, they're all evaporating. I'll sum up: that magazine is filled with douchebags. Man, I should have just said that in the beginning...
Day one hundred and fifty.
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