Quote of the Day: Albert Camus

“Life is a sum of all your choices.”


Last weekend, I faced a very difficult question that didn't seemed to have a single decent answer. I burned up a lot of brain power thinking about it and even now I'm still not sure I made the right choice even after agonizing like Hamlet.

Of course, I am talking about the purchase of my new pillow. I've never quite figured out why but shopping can be an overwhelming sensory experience when it involves something outside my narrow range of expertise because I think too much about it if I don't know exactly what I am looking for. Maybe it has something to do with primitive gender roles and hunting and gathering or maybe it has something to do with the fact that I have a "Thinker" personality according to most sales psychology questionnaires. Who knows? What I do know is that my range of expertise can be defined as anything you can find at Barnes & Noble. Everything else I am pretty much clueless at. I'm sure I am going to have a nervous breakdown when I finally decide to buy a house.

So normally I buy the first product I find that adequately fits my target criteria and move on with life just to get the whole process over with. This works a good majority of time because most of the time a pair of socks is a pair of socks. This philosophy does lead to the occasional bad purchase though. I really thought a gallon of pickled herring was a good idea at the time.

However, this time I decided to study all my options carefully before pulling the trigger because I wasn't buying something frivolous like a car but something vital I would be having an intimate relationship with every night. I was fooled at first about how easy it was going to be because it only took me one pass down the aisle to select my top three based on price. (Down was automatically out because I desire firmness out of most things in life.) When I started narrowing them down even further I noticed that they were all for stomach-sleepers and I'm a side-sleeper most of the time. I had lots of questions. Why didn't my education prepare me for the fact that you had to buy pillows based on sleep-position? Why do I have to buy a pillow based on sleep position? What happens if I decided to change up my sleep style every once in a while just to be different? How come they were all different prices? What if I only thought I was a side-sleeper when I really wasn't? It was all so confusing that I thought about giving up and going back to my old pillow but my aching back wouldn't let me.

I won't tell you what strategies of divination I used to select the right pillow for fear of shocking impressionable readers but suffice it to say my pillow and I have been very happy the past week.

I am not quite ready to say that I learned that being a mindful consumer paid off because that would destroy my fragile world view and because I could roll over onto my back any one of these nights. The only lesson I can say I learned for sure was: "Never wander around Target without a responsible adult holding your hand."