CORONA DEL MAR TODAY

Fake Life

I was looking through a Williams Sonoma catalog this weekend, in the back section where they have thousand-dollar ironing boards and steamers and step ladders and vacuums. The women look so efficient in the photographs, sitting ramrod straight as the run their cotton tablecloths through a mangle. What a joke I must be, running to the cleaners with my linens, when I could be using a $2,000 rotary iron. But clearly they have a market — online, it says that the thousand dollar ironing board is sold out.

Things that make you go hmmm.

I have another beef with the catalog, and it isn’t just W-S who does it. Businesses that sell home organization systems always show a pristine drawer, with special liners and dividers, with each section containing say one pair of scissors or four forks.

No one in real life has drawers and shelves that empty.

Yet we all aspire to be uncluttered, so we buy these Container Store/Solutions/Williams Sonoma/California Closet promises. Get one of their drawer inserts, and you’ll never lose that meat thermometer again. Life will be simple, and peaceful.

I’m not even a kitchen gadget person — I subscribe to the theory that a single-use tool is dumb. I see mango slicers and wonder, Who eats that many mangos that you need a special slicer? I mean really?

They just want you to feel that there’s hope. That if you buy their stuff, you’ll enter a world of order and sanity.

It’s sad, but every time, when I see the pretty pictures, I fall for it, just a little bit.