If It Makes You Happy, Then Why Are You So Sad?
Post a responseBoys from North Dakota don’t go to hair salons, even if they now live in the Chicago suburbs. It’s not manly.
However, there are exceptions, like when you start to bald. You need more than a butcher for a barber. You need someone (a young woman, preferably) who can finesse your hair to lay strategically.
Okay, so I go to a hair salon. And the other day, my salonist told me that she and her boyfriend were buying their first house.
I congratulated her and said, “You’ve got to be excited—your first home together!”
But she hedged: “Well, it’s way out in Plainfield. It’s only a three bedroom in one of those subdivisions. It’s small. We’re going to do the sweat equity thing, where you don’t have to pay as much. You do the painting, you put in the sod. But at least I get to choose the color of the linoleum.”
In what was supposed to be a time of joy, she couldn’t even taste the moment. All she could think about was that the house wasn’t as nice as she had hoped and, in some sense, she was already looking to the time when she and her boyfriend could move up to the next level of house.
I felt sad for her. The suburbs seem to create an environment of chronic discontent. We’re never happy, because what we acquire is never exactly what we envisioned.
February 7th, 2006 at 12:43 pm
…And don’t you come away from an encounter like that with the “salonist”, wishing you had found some way to challenge the acceptedness of just “living together”?
February 7th, 2006 at 6:45 pm
Actually, she was very nervous about that. I asked her when she was going to get married, and she said, “Well, I hope soon.” She was very aware that the sequence was wrong.
I tried to do the old Dr. Phil thing, to ask, “How’s that working for you?”
Great point!
February 21st, 2006 at 2:19 pm
Dave, first off, I’m sitting here cracking up that you go to the salon…give me a minute…whoo…alright, I’m done laughing and I can move on.
I’m wondering what satisfaction she would have received if she would have had sod installed, painted walls, and all of the nuances of the house of her dreams. Sod doesn’t do anything for a person. Paint doesn’t either. (Although, the psychological critic might argue that colors affect moods…irrelevant.) What I’m getting at–and I think you were too–is that the trendy, tidy, professional, shiek, hip, yuppie material does nothing more for its owner than its generic competitors. I take that back. It does create increased responsibility and a heightened sense of awareness of the safety (or lack thereof) of the material.
What this young lady doesn’t realize, I presume, is that she wants those things, not for herself, but for others. And it is not so that others might benefit from these things, but so that others will see the “true” status of who she is. This creates, again, new responsibility to maintain, upkeep and upgrade the material. It invokes either a response of jealousy, equality or superiority of other like-minded observers. If it is jealousy, she feels superior, but has to protect her material. If it is equality, then she feels mediocre. If it is superiority, then the inverse reaction is that she feels inferior. It’s a lose-lose-lose.
Jesus’ view of money/material in Scripture has been like a huge mallet, hitting me over and over again since I entered seminary. I feel inhibited to wear the clothes from my pre-seminary days when I go out, because I may be mistaken as “wealthy.” That is not a good thing to be mistaken as in some neighborhoods. But those observe us are judging us. The litmus test of who we are is, sadly, our material. How our culture has bewitched us!
Talk about a toxin! We are what we wear. We are what we drive. We are where we live and what we live in. We are what church we attend. We are what school district our kids are in. On and on it goes…like me on this blog.
March 16th, 2006 at 8:05 pm
Dave Ramsey (Christian radio host and money “guru”) talks about how young couples get married and society expects them to live at the same quality of life level that their parents took 30 years to achieve. It’s so true. A big house, new furniture, a fancy car….and all of the debt that goes with it. It is so difficult to turn our perspectives around – to be grateful for whatever God has provided us with, not desirous of what He has not. That mind set makes us “weird”, particularly way out here in the suburbs.