In praise of paranoia

This weekend I am being treated to a day at the races....the day of days, the day that makes all the Phillies flock in all their frippery, yes my dear friends, I am off to Derby Day. Having been an avid dress collector,shopper and wearer for many a decade I find myself to be somewhat discerning in what I want from a good sales assistant. This is heightened by the fact that now that I am mostly at home with a little monster whom I love, I am precluded from actually pounding the pavement and 'shopping' as it were, in a normative sense. My shopping generally consists of perusing page after page of the miraculous interweb to which the yanks refer to as 'going online'; so today when I had a spare ten-child-free minutes I took full advantage of this vortex of 'me time' and had a sneaky shop. I was lured in by tractor beam to a shop that had one particular stand out piece, no doubt directed at Derby day devotees, that sucked me in and nearly had me at hello. I tried it on, prevaricated, pranced, fidgeted and sauntered. I heard appropriately subtle and not overly effusive so as to be insincere compliments from the sales assistant and her buddy sipping a medium latte. I could have made a snap decision and bought it for it was bordering on the perfect dress. Right look. Right price point. Right Race day. Bang. But nooooo, they asked me if I liked the fascinator they had teamed with dress. I responded and informed them I did not 'do fascinators' and that I collected and loved to wear really 'BIG HATS', with a rather ridiculous gesticulation of my arms...and they started giggling. These two ladies, in all their 'it's my shop and I'll laugh if I want to' glory were laughing so much, that the little angel/devil on my shoulder told me concomitantly to 'ignore them its not about me' and 'to get the hell out of there before those beeeartches make one more joke about me'; so I fled said shop and saved myself a juicy sum of cash to splash on Black Caviar. Moral of the story....if the sales assistants had not been laughing their bottoms off at something that, most likely was a private joke and had nothing to do with me and my mad gesticulation, I would have had a rad dress and them a rad sale. Paranoia just saved me a whole lot of cash and I'll probably look pretty good tomorrow anyway. Ladies we really should go shopping when hungover and we'd all be able to put a lot more in our paranoid piggie banks.