Moose in the Kitchen

Yesterday I equated owning nice shoes with being the devil incarnate. A devil with dandruff that laughs in the faces of starving tots, melting their eyebrows with a blast of fetid garlic breath before trampling their tiny toes with stiletto heels. There’s no logic in this line of thought, owning a few extra pairs of shoes does not a devil make, but the portion of my brain marked “logic” is astoundingly small. Just ask anyone I’ve ever dated. Or conversed with for more than two minutes.

On my rare trips to Planet Common Sense, I realize that my relative privilege is just that – relative. What I own or don’t own, eat or don’t eat, has very little real effect on the rest of the world. Sure, I could send all the money I don’t spend on shoes to underdeveloped nations, I could consume only food grown within ten square miles of my house to save on fossil fuels, I could hop on the bandwagon of whatever Trendy People With a Cause promote this week. I could volunteer somewhere. That would be nice. But the guilt about shoes is patently insane. (Hi! I’m patently insane!) Besides, no one person can or should assume the weight of the world’s problems. Unless your name is Bush. In which case, Dude! You’re slacking!

For the rest of us, contributing a certain percentage of income to worthy causes and subscribing to the school of Be Nice to People seems a good halfway point between Devil Incarnate and Mother Theresa Rampage.

So what’s with the guilt? I’m not a Catholic, nor have I ever been a Catholic. And the guilt doesn’t stop with my membership to the club of people with a well-stocked fridge and internet access. For your edification, I present:

Things I Have Felt Guilty About Recently

1. The great and magnificent suckage of blogger. (Not my fault.)
2. Insensitive comments relating to lack of height and/or hair. (OK, kind of my fault.)
3. Stepping on ants on the sidewalk.
4. Not understanding the operation of wedding dress train.
5. Ill-advised drunk dials when I was not, in fact, drunk.
6. Easing my conscience by determining that individuals can’t make much of a difference before flouncing off to eat cake.

The completed list could fill its very own blog. And, viewed from Planet Common Sense, a planet most of you inhabit, my list must seem an insipid waste of time. And it is. Some of these points were avoidable. Others, not so much. Either way, there’s no point in feeling guilty about what’s done. But how do you stop feeling guilty when every neuron that fires in your brain insists on a perpetual state of useless agonizing?

As of right now, I am on a quest. A quest to eliminate the guilt. Because we’re all going to die someday and do I really want to realize that I wasted over 753 precious hours tearing my hair out in small clumps when I could have spent that time balancing Cheetos on the dog’s head?

New mantra: Less guilt. More Cheetos.

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