Too Much of a Good Thing
Many people believe that too much of a good thing is wonderful. I’m not one of them.
Take shoes, for instance. Like most women, I love them. But enough already! When I was a child, I had three pairs of shoes — one for school (penny loafers or saddle shoes), one for play (Keds), and one for Sundays (black patent Mary Janes). Today, I’m embarrassed to admit, I have three dozen pairs. A ridiculous waste. Not only of money, but also of valuable time. Every morning, I spend at least five minutes trying to decide which shoes to wear —and nine times out of ten I simply don the ones I wore the day before. I’m retired. I don’t have to impress anyone, so what does it matter? Later, if I decide to get some exercise, I have to choose among several pairs of sneakers, some with designer logos (again, I’m ashamed to confess), depending on whether I plan to hike, jog, use my stationary bike, or simply take a leisurely walk; because nowadays, each activity requires different footware. At least that’s what “they” tell us. And we listen. How crazy is that?
Then there’s the whole question of what to put on the rest of my body. My three spacious closets are jammed with pants, skirts, sweaters, shirts and dresses — many of which I haven’t worn in a decade. Others still have price tags from stores that went out of business five years ago. Apparently they lost their appeal on the trip from the shops to home. Why am I keeping them? If I cleared my closets of all that extraneous stuff, I’d finally have someplace to put my vacuum cleaner. Maybe all three of them, in fact. Come to think of it, I haven’t a clue as to why I have three vacuum cleaners. I seldom use any of them (another embarrassing revelation).
Apparently no one believes that less is more. Take automobiles, for instance. When I was a kid (yes, we did have cars then!), it was easy to identify a Ford, a Chevrolet, a Chrysler … No longer. Not only because dozens of foreign cars are also rolling off the assembly lines onto traffic-choked American highways, but also because every manufacturer turns out dozens of models which all look like clones of each other. Not a distinctive design in the bunch.
Shopping for anything is a challenge these days — be it cars, computers, cameras, calculators, cosmetics, cornflakes, cookies … (and many other products starting with “C,” plus the other twenty-five letters of the alphabet). So many brands. So many claims. So many prices. And by the time you finish evaluating all your options, they become obsolete, only to be replaced by an even more confusing assortment.
Meanwhile, meals (in restaurants and most homes) have exploded to super sized portions — as have candy bars, popcorn buckets, and “big gulp” soft drinks at movie theaters. And the theaters themselves have evolved from the one-screen movie houses of my youth to today’s multiplexes offering a choice of twenty or more films.
Excess rules everything these days, including TV. One 12-inch, fuzzy black and white set used to be enough for the entire family. Now 42-inch plasmas in high-definition color are sprouting in every living room, den, bedroom, playroom, kitchen, patio, and even some bathrooms. Furthermore, I can remember when we had only three network channels. To be truthful, I can even remember BTV (before television), when radio was our only in-home entertainment. Today, cable TV offers us hundreds of channels. It’s overwhelming. We can watch only one at a time. But since TIVO enables us to record many others, we soon accumulate a huge backlog of programs that we’ll never find time to see — because we’re too busy checking the dozens of e-mails that pop up on our computers hourly and ridding our mailboxes of hunks of junk, including all those mail-order catalogs I receive every day.
Many moons ago I made the mistake of ordering a couple of items from catalogs, which I now realize was a big mistake because apparently my name and address were distributed to every mail order company in the country — and several overseas — who keep deluging me with their glossy publications, which I don’t even open. They go directly from my mailbox to my recycle bin. Think of the wasted printing costs and postage, to say nothing of the poor mailman’s aching back. More important, it saddens me to think of how many rain forests are being destroyed to supply the paper for all those annoying, unread, unwanted mailings.
Speaking of which, I’ve completely lost patience with all those charity solicitations enclosing sheets of return-address mailing labels, which are meant to guilt me into sending a donation. News flash! It doesn’t work. At least not with me. In fact, these “gift” labels turn me off whichever charity sends them to me. I have accumulated more than I’ll ever need. If they keep coming, I swear I’ll move and not leave a forwarding address. And if that doesn’t work, maybe I can talk myself into the witness protection program and disappear to an undisclosed location where the junk mailers won’t be able to find me.
And what about all those electronic gadgets that we used to get along without very well but which have now become necessities of life — cell phones, Blackberries, GPS systems, digital cameras whose inch-square memory cards hold hundreds of images, and tiny iPods on which you can download thousands of songs (or the noise that passes for music today).
Dealing with all these excesses is exhausting — and time consuming. But maybe that’s a good thing. After all, doctors say that keeping busy is the key to longevity.
If that’s true, at this rate I should live to at least 220, especially with the help of the myriad vitamin supplements and prescription medication available these days. The only problem is that you’re supposed to “call your doctor” before taking them. If we all did that, doctors would have time to do nothing but answer their phones 24/7.
The last time I tried to call mine, I learned that she had joined the newly-formed PPP (Physicians Protection Program) and had moved to an undisclosed location.
©2010 Rose Madeline Mula for SeniorWomen.com
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