Oh I feel like a little moo cow coming down the road.
This post will be a salute to all things arbitrary.

I want to start out with a brief confession: Most of the things I initially disparage, I end up married to. For example:

• Todd. Couldn’t stand him. Literally married him. Love him.
• The iPod Nano. Publicly decried Apple, all Apple products, and Apple product owners. Now I belong to a family of Apple product owners and the children all have nanos.
• Bunko. Thought the whole game was stupid. Now I play it like a crazed old goose. Monthly. With other crazed old geese.
• TiVO. Belittled the technology greatly. Called it a “classic waste of money.” Then I discovered taping episodes of Little House on the Prairie. Oh, the joy of watching that show on my lunch break in the quiet of my home. And one day the TiVO broke. I called Todd in a cold sweat and asked him to get a new unit on the way home from work. The end.

I could go on, but why? You get the point.The nano is a very real obsession of mine, though. And that’s where this post is headed. I bought myself a little iPod nano through Craigslist a couple of years ago. Got myself a good little deal. And when I held that tiny baby in the palm of my hand, I fell hard. And I petted it and petted it. And gave it the occasional peck on the forehead. Then I started buying them for others. My children. My mother-in-law. My dad. My friends. My friends’ kids. It became a real problem. And if the house is dark and quiet and I can’t sleep, sometimes I can be found in the glow of my laptop, shopping for nanos.

And in that pursuit, just last week, this little gem of an ad turned up:

5th gen i-pod radio cam and all already loaded with variety of new country and classic rock call Skully any time make offer reasonable please call anytime retired and always up seem to be up. text anytime for sure. or will trade for a hand raised small parrot will pay boot on rehome fee.

WHAT? Huh? Skully? And Skully wants to trade his nano for a small hand raised parrot? What does that even mean? And what in the world is “pay boot on rehome fee?” Honestly, I feel trapped in a bad scene from Forrest Gump.

Really. I wonder if reading that ad was the marketing equivalent of sitting through a Jimi Hendrix concert in 1969.

I could go on, but I’m tired and this could get old fast. Oh wait. We are way past that already. So here are a few of my favorite, non-electronic, things: