My retail therapy isn't working.

I've found that the best way to deal with holiday lines in popular discount stores, when you're forced to set foot in them to buy dog food, when people have two cartloads of things and at least four of them need price checks and the cashiers would clearly rather be anywhere else but standing behind that register (and who can blame them?), is to stand in line and daydream. That way, when the guy in front of you has talked his way through the line and then the checkout process and refuses to get off the phone even when the cashier has a question for him, your brain doesn't collapse in on itself like a dying star from sheer rage, you just think about how you're going to arrange the new picture frames on your wall.

Hypothetically speaking. (Although the frames do look kind of pretty, if I do say so myself.) Today's meditation wasn't about frames, it was about why I love imperfect things. Because I do, you know. I used to have this car, for example, a ten-year-old Nissan. It was one of those talking cars, remember them? Except by the time that I inherited it (from my baby brother), the car had long since stopped talking when it was supposed to talk, and had taken to introducing conversational non sequiturs at random times. I kind of loved that car for its fucked-up-ness, and also the fact that I understood it, that I knew what how to stop it from telling me ten times in a row that my door was ajar when it was actually firmly closed, that I knew how to tell when the blinking Check Engine light was kidding and when it wasn't. It was a car which would've made most people homicidal, but I actually missed it when it was gone. I still remember it with an exasperated kind of affection, take pleasure in the oddnesses that only I appreciated. My secretly fabulous car.

I pretty much love everything and everyone I love in this way, am as fascinated by the flaws as by the beauties. I wish that more people were like me, because I'd kind of like for people to see me this way. Not to think, ho-hum, now here's a woman with nothing to recommend her, but take a little time to let me get comfortable and discover that the extra effort was somehow worth it. That I'm smarter than I look, maybe, or not quite as ludicrously ordinary as I seem. I mean, I don't know that those things are true. But there must be something unique about me, some combination of beauties and flaws that makes me worthwhile in a one-of-a-kind way, mustn't there? If I can see that in pretty much everyone else, it must be in me too, even if I don't know exactly what it is.

Because you know what? I've reached the point, as I do sometimes, where I'm tired of being a factory second. I'm grateful for the one or two people in my life who understand me well enough to think I'm worth spending time on, don't get me wrong. But. But. I wish people would listen to me. I wish people would ask me questions, and think, when I answer them, that the answers were worth the asking. I don't know how to make people notice me, don't know how to step up and demand to be heard -- I'm not wired that way -- but I wish I did; I wish I knew how to live my life on the surface so that people thought immediately, wow, there's someone worth knowing.

Well. Anyway, it was a long line. And even though I got back into my car depressed, at least I didn't lose my temper. Right?