7) Bling h2o

A $40 bottle of water really has to be the textbook definition "irony of ironies." It's almost as outdated feeling (sooo 2007) as triumphantly screaming from the rooftop of some urban office building "I'm investing all my retirement savings in Merrill! It feels good!" As much as I hate to play into their loathsome marketing scheme, I'll bite for the sake of my soothsaying integrity: http://www.forbestraveler.com/food-drink/bottled-water-story.html?partner=rss

You know the earth's about to shatter into thousands of tiny fragments when people think it's reasonable to charge $40 plus for a normal size bottle of water. I don't care how good it sounds in theory, there's absolutely no practical reason to decorate a water bottle with Swarovski crystals, to import the water from the South Pacific, to age it for millenia in the skull of some glacier-frozen neanderthal, or to collect it from the condensation that forms on the tiny noses of Ugandan albino children*.

*In case any Ugandans are reading, Sean roundly and categorically condemns the persecution of albinos in Africa. This post was intended for non-Ugandan audiences.

6) Southern California and pathos in the star-spangled state

I don’t want to be too harsh b/c I’m sure there are plenty redeeming qualities that you simply miss in a three day visit to a place, but on the face of it, a preponderance of flat-billed Hurley caps and Ed Hardy muscle shirts does not a utopian society make.

5) The bizarre language on the shampoo bottles in my shower . . .

Apparently, b/c French has all the sensuality we can humanly fit into one language, someone somewhere decided that we would enjoy shampoo much more if foreign words were on the bottles. The ironic part is that, in order to get by with this, they often have to translate "shampoo" into "shampooing" which I think is unusually (but amusingly) clumsy for French.

Another bottle places the word "Rejuvenating" in a seemingly random place on the bottle. Ponce DAY Le-on himself would be mighty disappointed to find out, after all that exploring, that hundreds of years later we so easily and elegantly packaged the Fountain of Youth in a bottle of shampoo. That same bottle is the company's "Asian Pear & Red Tea" line of body care products, despite the fact that these two ingredients are preceded in quantity by Disodium Laureth Sulfosuccinate, Cocamidopropyl Betaine, PEG-120 Methyl Glucose Dioleate, Decyl Glucoside. Call me old-fashioned, but Cocamidopropyl Betaine just doesn't make me feel as exotic as Asian Pear.

And back to the bilingual bottle: "If your hair acts bored . . ." then simply apply "Nature's boredom-banishers, including clarifying Florida Grapefruit and invigorating French Peppermint, giv[ing] ho-hum hair a refreshing burst of enthusiasm, while mounds of frothy lather sweep away the clingy deposits that drag hair down and leave it lifeless. Limp, lazy, lackluster locks get back into the swing of things, shine again, take on a totally fresh, new attitude." Enthusiastic hair? Grapefruit that clarifies? I think you can see where all of this is heading . . .

4) The TSA agent’s question to me after he searched my carry-on. . .

He found four bags of stone-ground grits, two packages of pumpkin seeds, and a medicine bottle full of Madagascar vanilla, and then he said “You’ve got some strange stuff in here; what do you plan to do with all of it?" His question caught me a bit off guard because I don't consider grits, pumpkin seeds, or vanilla the most versatile of materials . . . you can cook with them, you can eat them, and I think that's about it. But who knows what those mad scientists (culinary geniuses?) have thought up while in safe haven on the cavernous border of Pakistan and Afghanistan.