You Get What You Pay For

I'm sure all of you have heard that old adage, "You get what you pay for". I've always been a big proponent of that one because, well, it's true about 95% of the time. I've spent the last (nearly) 7 years of my married life trying to fully convince my amazing wife of that fact with moderate success. For the most part she's learned from experience that it holds true.

For example, you can spend $4.99 for a box of the real "Drumstick" ice cream cones or you can spend $3.99 for the generic version. The difference? Well, at the beginning there isn't much of one. The first thing you get to on a Drumstick are the peanuts and bits of peanuts are just bits of peanuts. There's not much quality to be concerned with there. It's either a peanut or it isn't and both the Drumstick and it's generic knock-off have it covered...literally. Even the chocolate between the two isn't that far off, although I'm sure that the generic version doesn't have any real chocolate in it. If the item is labeled, "chocolate flavored" it's not chocolate. That's about where the similarities end however because once you hit the cone it's all down hill from there. The Drumstick crunches. The knock-off? Well it sort of rips and tears into a long bubble-tape like strand. I think the closest comparison is that the knock-off cone is the consistency of a fruit roll up. It's terrible!

I say all that to illustrate the point that after years of work, my wife and I are on pretty much the same page. Now we spend the extra dollar and get a good ice cream cone. It's worth it. However, we're not all the way there yet. I bring you exhibit A: Feather Pillow.

I've used a feather pillow (two in fact) for as long as I can remember. They're amazing. So soft and fluffy. They stay nice and cool and cradle your head with comforty goodness like, what I imagine, a well-fitted space helmet would, but without the pesky no oxygen, no gravity environment. Truly, they're fantastic.

That's not to say that there aren't down sides. If you've ever used one you know that over time they start to lose that heavenly fluffiness and the feathers slowly escape one by one. Poking their way through the pillow case until one night you realize your pillow is only about 2 inches thick.

Not too long ago one of my pillows was getting to that point and my amazing, wonderful, lovely wife decided to get me a new one. You may be asking, "What's the big deal? Why didn't you just go get a pillow?" Well, smarty pants the reason I didn't was because a good feather pillow can set you back $60 and I wasn't about to plunk down that kind of cash for a pillow.

Anywho, I come home one day and my wife tells me, "I got you a new feather pillow!" And me being the ever-thankful husband, well, I thanked her. That's what you do when you're "ever-thankful". That night I plopped my head down on the nice cloud of softness and fell sound asleep. At least temporarily until our son decided a midnight snack would be amazing, but that's another story.

Anyway, the joy lasted all of about 2 nights. I started noticing that the feathers had a tendency to push off to one side or the other. Like the pillow case was only half full. Oh well, I can work around that, I'll just fold it up into a tighter ball. Not ideal but whatever. Then I started having dreams about acupuncture treatments only to wake up to pokey little feather barbs jabbing me in the face in the middle of the night. Over and over and over and over. It was starting to get a bit infuriating. I also noticed that the feathers weren't white like a typical feather pillow would have. These were tan, off-white, dark brown. All kinds of random colors. What are these things seagull feathers? What the heck is going on here? That wasn't all either. I took a look at the fabric of this "pillow" and it's practically see-through! No wonder I'm getting Chinese acupuncture treatments from these seagull feathers every night! What did they use to cover this thing tulle?

(side note, I'm not exactly sure if I know what tulle is but I'm pretty sure you wouldn't want to use it to encase a pile of feathers. I'm sure all my fashion blogging friends can clarify that for me if I'm wrong. By the way, I have some really great fashion blogging friends that you should check out. I don't know what they're talking about half the time, I mean, it's about fashion, what do I know about that? But they're wonderful people so check them out: Kerrin Chance, Tabitha Lowder, Shannon & Courtney)

Back to my story. So I'm currently sleeping on what appears to be a half filled sack of seagull feathers wrapped in some sort of "gauze" masquerading as a pillow case. With this in mind I say to my wife, "Where did you get this thing anyway?" She looks at me and says, "It was on sale at Target for $10!"

Ten dollars!?! Have we learned nothing in 7 years?

So, the lesson is: if you see a feather pillow for $10, a pillow that should normally run about $60, just know that you get what you pay for. In this case a sack of seagull feathers. Or perhaps they're pigeon, I can't tell.

On a side note I've recently developed a taste for sunflower seeds and I'm easily distracted by bits of shiny paper blowing along the ground. I think I've been infected by some sort of bird flu from those acupuncture needles called "feathers". I really don't want to spend the money on some expensive vitamin C pills though. I think WalMart has a knock-off version called "Bitamin See". I'm sure that will work just as well.