July 19, 2007

Confessions from the Carpool

Jonesing after the Joneses

By Shana McLean Moore
Times Columnist

Keeping up with the Joneses—few expressions sum up our consumer-driven nation better than this one. If it had a thousand-word picture to accompany its text, I can just see a bunch of greedy-eyed humans sprinting like Olympic runners on a hamster wheel, trying to grab the furry butt in front of them by the tail.

Whether our social circle allows our green eye of envy to lust after a friend’s Tiffany tennis bracelet or a Timex she just purchased at Target, the sad reality is that most of us can’t help but Jones for something new whenever a pal drops by for an excited show-and-tell.

Oh, sure, some of you may roll your eyes at such a declaration. Perhaps it’s because you pride yourself in being the bar-raising trendsetter whose cutting edge retail skills make the rest of us poor schlubs look like citizens of Communist Russia. You work the black market while we plebes subsist on our government rations. You’re always the Jones, never the Joneser.

All I can say is thank goodness for your dazzling personality, Mrs. Jonestakov, or you would be mighty hard to like—especially given that our husbands grab their heart with one hand and their 401K with the other whenever we make plans to see you. You really can’t blame them when dinner and drinks suddenly morph from a hundred-dollar date night to a thousand-dollar savings sucking.

In the interest of full disclosure, we do little to foster love for you by starting the ride home with “Honey, don’t you think we should plan our trip to paradise/upgrade the minivan/add a sun room?” It is at this moment that you might hear that infamous ringing in your ear that means someone is talking about you. If the ringing is measured in decibels relative to how your name is being used, it probably sounds a lot like sirens to you.

The others of you who snort with disgust at this American truism are highly evolved humans who make the rest of us still look like our ape-like ancestors. You’re Zen. You’re Decaf. You’re satisfied with exactly what you already have. You might as well move to Canada.

Think what you will, dear upright one, we knuckle draggers have found some very practical applications to the Jones Principle. You see, it doesn’t always have to do with the buying of material goods. Sometimes it’s the rocket propulsion that blasts a girl off her couch and into the orbit of her cluttered drawers, file cabinets and flower beds. In fact, I would go so far as to say that if it weren’t for the Joneses, I’d never get anything done around my house.

Take last weekend for example. I went out to walk the dog and strolled past one of my neighbors who was painting his house. As I praised him for his most recent improvement project, I couldn’t help but notice that his freshly painted walls were right next to the beautiful new fence he had constructed himself a few weeks earlier, and directly behind his flourishing garden, which adorns his house without the help of a professional gardener.

Because I recently graduated from knuckle dragging to fingernail dragging, I was capable of having genuine “Good for you” thoughts for the man. But because my brain is still the size of a simian’s, these thoughts were short lived.

I walked through the front door of my house with an expression seldom seen when I’ve been out enjoying nature and releasing an endorphin or two through exercise, so my husband just had to ask:

“What happened? Did Sunshine poop twice on your walk or something?”

“No, she was fine. Did you know the neighbors are painting their own house? Did you see the new fence and all those purple flowers?” I asked.

“Oh, here we go,” he sighed.

“We never move forward,” I whined. “We wash the same laundry and dishes. Pick up the same toys and poop piles, but we never get any projects done. We need to re-landscape—that tree we have out front looks prehistoric.”

“Well, if you would stop planning things for every single weekend we could…hey, if you hate that tree so much, Australopithecus, why are you swinging from it?”

Well, since misery does love company, I am happy to report that my husband looks just like me now, but I am pretty sure it’s for different reasons. He can’t seem to stand upright because of all of those chores. I just have some evolving to do.

Shana McLean Moore lives in Almaden Valley and is the co-author of “Femail: A Comic Collision in Cyberspace” and the author of “Caffeinated Ponderings on Life, Laughter & Lattes.” For more information visit Moore’s Web site at www.caffeinatedponderings.com.