Sunday: I have a busy week this week, and will be away next weekend, so I could just not write anything, but I have a more or less continuous once-a-week-at-least streak underway and I feel compelled to maintain it. It's Sunday, and I have to do some actual work for my actual job today, but I thought this morning that if I could choke at least a single paragraph out of myself, then I'll have a start for the week. And then I realized, as I wrote this, that this IS actually a paragraph, which I DID choke out of myself, so I DO have a post started. Mission accomplished!
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But really. There's so much to write about, in life and in the world. I could write about a certain hockey team, but apparently, I'm now a sports superstition person. This is why I've been carrying my least-favorite red handbag since the end of April.
Or I could write about media bias and the double standard that so-called conservatives always complain about. This week, they're actually right. I think that Ivanka Trump is a silly, shallow, stupid, and yes, feckless person. I think that her thoughtless little Instagram post featuring her beautiful self holding her beautiful baby was insensitive to the point of cruelty. And I also think that Samantha Bee should be fired.
I'm probably not the most impartial observer here, because I find Samantha Bee even less likable than Ivanka Trump, if that's possible. But that word used to describe a woman is beyond the proverbial pale, and it's even worse when a it's a woman who says it. Like Ms. Norbury said: "You all have got to stop calling each other sluts and whores. It just makes it ok for guys to call you sluts and whores." And worse.
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To the two girls who flung side-eye at me as I walked and sang along to Cascada's "Evacuate the Dance Floor:" Keep walking, ladies. Nothing to see here. Worry about yourselves. Maybe go and do something useful, like learning CPR. Because what if that beat actually was killing me? Did you think about that?
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Tuesday: I read two stories today, one that made me sad, and one that made me even sadder. And I can't help but think that the two are connected. I'm not sure why.
I don't care much about shoes or jewelry, but I have always loved handbags, and Kate Spade's were exactly suited to my taste when I first started to earn enough money to buy a real, grown-woman handbag. In the mid to late 1990s, before I was married and had children, I owned at least 10 Kate Spade bags and wallets. I still have one tiny evening bag; all of the other original nylon Kate Spades from the late '90s are gone (they were beautiful, but not very durable). Kate Spade once wrote or said something about how in the Midwest, where she was from, a woman chose a handbag because it was pretty and she liked it, not because it was a status symbol or the must-have accessory of the moment. Ironically, her simple nylon black-labeled bags became the must-have accessory of the moment; and I won't pretend that I have never been interested in having the must-have thing, just because it's the must-have thing. But the real reason why I bought Kate Spade handbags was because they were pretty and I liked them.
Sometime in 1998 or 1999, I came home from work one night, so exhausted that I took off my shoes and my coat, and fell asleep on my couch, still in my work clothes. A few days later, I was paging through a magazine (I used to love magazines) and saw a Kate Spade advertisement, in which a young woman, just home from work, was sound asleep on her couch, still in her work clothes, her Kate Spade bag sitting on the floor in front of her couch. The young woman in the advertisement was pretty, of course, but not intimidatingly beautiful. Her apartment was colorful and book-filled and cheerful and just a little shabby. It was as if someone had taken a photo of my life, and then made it a little bit nicer and prettier and more glamorous than it really was. And that made me really happy, just for a minute.
Now I wish just for a moment that I'd been the scrapbooking type of girl who cut ads out of magazines and saves them. I also wish that there was some way for Kate Spade to have known how much her work, and her ideas, and her inspired, down-to-earth but completely original vision meant to me and so many other women. Maybe she didn't know. Or maybe she did, but whatever she was suffering was so awful that she couldn't find solace even in her great success and tremendous accomplishments. I'm so sorry for her family, and I hope that they and she will find peace.
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National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: https://suicidepreventionlifeline.org/. 1-800-273-8255.
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