This is a picture I took from the bus window on Friday as I was leaving downtown and heading back to the Valley. I forgot about it until I hooked my camera up this morning, but you can see the double rainbow if you look real close, and also kind of squint.

Yesterday I meant to clean my house and do laundry and so on and so forth. Instead, I spent almost an hour browsing the aisles of a big new CVS in the Valley, which is a pharmacy/convenience store/purveyor of lipgloss. The drugstore is my safe haven. My harbor in hellish times. My retail therapy, rows and rows of yummy items just waiting for me to discover on my lunch break or on the weekend when I mean to buy vitamins and antibac-wipes and instead end up with hair products, blemish creme and eyeshadow.

I love the aisles of glittery nail polish (Dries in thirty seconds! Guaranteed glamorous! Stays on for seven days!) and the neat little rows of eye shadow in their pots and tubs. The packaging genius of it all. The lipsticks, oh, the lipsticks. From gloss to stick to pencil to plumper, the selection never ends.

I don't actually wear a lot of makeup, but I own an embarrassingly large amount of it. I can't pass up a golden glitter pencil or a shimmery nail polish. There's a big-haired Texan Glamour Queen from 1984 living inside my nondescript skin. Some people have an inner child ... I sold mine on ebay and used the profits to buy a hairspray that has real gold glitter in it. I was born with an inner shopper, and she says: "Only $1.99? That's a bargain at any price! I'd be practically wasting money if I didn't buy that!"

Browsing the Clinique and Mac counters at Bloomingdale's isn't nearly as satisfying as spending an hour poking around at the local Rite Aid or Walgreens or CVS. That’s because you can’t feasibly leave Bloomies with a bag of goodies under $50, but you know at Walgreens you can buy long-lash mascara, a People magazine, two tubes of lip gloss and a Snickers bar and still have money left over for gas.

Have ya'll noticed that really tacky makeup is coming back in style? I have waited many agonizing years for blue shimmer eyeshadow to be back in vogue, and finally my time has come. Yesterday I bought a Wet'n'Wild eyeshadow stick in frosty denim blue and a little pot of Loreal baby blue shimmer cream. It sat in my bag for three hours while I fidgeted, anxious, needing to go home and play make-up.

(Interject long pause here to contemplate my pathetic feminine streak.)

At last, I freed myself of responsibilities, ran home and locked myself in the bathroom with my purchases. Twenty minutes later I looked like a Smurf had thrown up on my face.

Wash, rinse, repeat.

In the final analysis, I have concluded that perhaps we're not yet ready for blue eyeshadow to come back. But when it does, dammit, I'll be ready. Tubs and pots and sticks of ready.