project 365 #310: tree reflection

project 365 #310: tree reflection
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

Catalogue season has started and my mailbox floweth over, despite the fact that I haven't ordered anything from a catalogue in about 10 years. I even got another copy of Fingerhut, even though they've been saying that this was going to be my last issue since about, oh, 1988 or so and I've never ordered anything at all, ever, from Fingerhut. Not that I haven't wanted to, because the prospect of paying $7.99 a month for the rest of my life (and well beyond the life of the cheap electronic shit I might buy from them) fills me with glee, but I just haven't gotten around to it. That might change, though, because the current Fingerhut catalogue is peddling these totally insane all bathroom ensembles that I covet. They're so, um, fabulously weird. I mean, I can't imagine much worse - or cooler, maybe, in a very, very strange way - than coating my entire bathroom in tigers, and when they say entire bathroom, boy howdy, they mean entire bathroom. My bathroom isn't very big and what with the tiger shower curtain and the tiger trash can and the tiger toilet seat cover and the 5 piece assorted mysteriously shaped fluffy tiger bathroom rug bits set and the tiger toilet paper cozy and the tiger toilet brush and god only knows what else that goes in a bathroom and can physically have a tiger stamped on its ass, well, it would be quite something. Something that would get major, major bonus points if I could do it while M was at school, so I could hear the outraged shrieks of horror when he came home.

But the tiger thing is too expensive, so I turned to the Oriental Trading Company for kitsch I could afford, half planning to surprise my entire family with Happy Birthday Jesus pencils for Christmas (I can afford them, they're $5 for 12. You might even get one if you're lucky.) and stumbled across the fact that even the Oriental Trading Company has gotten in on the Whole Room ethos currently apparently seizing American discount outlets with horrific things they call Scene Setters which are really sort of bizarr-o world wrapping paper for rooms. Like, if you happen to have a completely empty room in your house, you can now wrap it with one of these lovely things and voila! You are decorated - horrifically. Gee, kids, I know we're too poor for a tree or even, well, furniture or piles of old rags or anything, but hey! We can have a whole room full of cold, cold faux cheer!

I bet I could go stark staring batshitinsane really quickly with a couple of Scene Setters and a bathroom full of tigers. The prospect is actually quite compelling - I love catalogues. And I am going to get the Happy Birthday Jesus pencils anyway, and quite possibly also the Nativity Scene as reenacted by holy rubber duckies. No, I'm not kidding, but I'm not going to link it either. You are going to have to look that travesty up yourself.