First of an ongoing holiday series with Susan the Human while Pesky and Janet spend a couple of weeks terrorizing guests and each other at a swanky Napa Valley spa.

By Susan the Human (PTR) – There are two rules of holiday shopping, as I now see it:

1. Everything in the Macy’s kitchen section is now priced at a fraction of its listed price, and the fraction is determined by a formula involving three variables: the current value of the dollar (x); the most recent Consumer Confidence Index (y); and a number representing the quantity of teenage girls recently arrested for shoplifting mascara while the makeup counter ladies are distracted by a People Magazine photo spread of Colin Farrell*.

2. When entering an Apple store, do not, under any circumstances, mistakenly attempt to purchase your item at the “Genius Bar”.

Saturday I slipped across the San Francisco Bay to the sleepy fashion show known as Palo Alto, looking for a few trinkets for the family and friends.  I drove off of El Camino Real into the Stanford Shopping Center, one of the few university-owned shopping malls in our land, and one of the two features of Stanford University that elicits the greatest mocking in pro-Cal households. The other  is that bizarre air freshener tree they use as a mascot (rumored to be the reason why Stanford football players always smell like a fresh spring breeze).

The whole business is deeply wrong.

Anyhow, it’s an open-air shopping center with a sort of fake Italian thing going on. After three obligatory laps around the center in the car, I found a parking space and trotted in through a fake Italian alleyway with fake Italian windows painted on a fake brick wall.  None of this would have bothered me if I hadn’t just been in Italy a couple of weeks ago, where all the Italian stuff is actually Italian.  I began to experience Italian Shock Syndrome, a deadly disease in which a person is exposed to Real Italian Stuff within two weeks of Fake Italian Stuff and goes into some sort of uncontrollable fit.. 

What nearly put me over the edge was a small flower shop a few steps from the parking lot called “Fiori”. Fiori, in Italian, means: Flowers.  What had previously seemed exotic and trendy now seemed, er, really stupid.  Death was imminent.  Either for myself or the owner of “Flowers”. 

I dove into The Discovery Shop instead, which, by the previous logic, should be called “gadgets”.

The Discovery Shop has all the electronics that you can buy more cheaply and better made somewhere else, but it’s still fun to take a browse. They also have lots of massage devices which I would never, ever touch because lord knows what people do with massage devices at the Discovery Store when they think nobody’s looking.

Leaving there, I trotted into the main concourse, past a rather good fake Santa dressed in the Stanford colors. Or perhaps Stanford dresses up like Santa. That would explain the tree.

Into Macy’s. I had a specific item in mind, for a specific person, who will probably read this blog, and therefore I must keep the name of this thing to myself.  But it was on an upper floor, in the kitchen department.  The Macy’s kitchen department is a mathematical fantasy land.  There is always a sale—at least every time I’ve been there in my life—and the sale is always more than you think it should be. This is not an advertisement for Macy’s, whose clothing is overpriced. But I am baffled by the calculations in the kitchen department.

A few years ago, I needed buy a special gift for a friend, and I found an item of about $80. I also needed to purchase a suitcase for myself, at roughly $125. At the cash register, I was asked to pay $60 and given $40 in coupons.   On my next visit to the kitchen department, I purchased an item worth roughly $60, and after handing in my $40 in coupons, was given $5 change.

I am one-hundred percent sure that the current staff of the United States Treasury was recruited from the Macy’s kitchen department.

On Saturday, I bought an item marked $25, with no sale sign, and paid $15. Delighted to discover the Temporal Price Fluctuation Field at Macy’s was still in place, I ran back, grabbed a toaster oven, also not on sale, and mysteriously got 35% off.

Done with the Macy's Kitchen Price Vortex for the year, I trotted back to the car with my toaster oven and then back into Fake Italy for the Apple store. I had this silly idea in my head that I could get one of those iTrip radio transmitters for my little white wonder and I would no longer have to use my tape player adapter in my car, which sounded increasingly like it would explode inside the dashboard in a rain of plastic and obscure Irish pop music.

Apple has this minimalist thing for which they are very well known. Many of their stores are blindingly white, like the inside of a freshly cleaned microwave oven.   The one in San Francisco is two stories, the first one a microwave oven and the second one an alien escape pod for Steve Jobs when he tires of Pixar.

The one at the Stanford Shopping Center is a “mini” store, so its theme is not white but brushed metal.  It looks like an industrial microwave oven, or a maybe a toxic waste processing facility. I found the iTrip and stepped up to the only counter in the entire store. I boldly presented my purchase to an Apple employee standing behind the counter, who appeared to be working on some sort of terminal that in most countries would pass for a cash register.  I looked at him expectantly, hoping he would complete my satisfactory shopping experience and put my little iTrip in a little iBag and send me on myWay.

Instead, he looked at me and said, “do you need technical support?”

“No—“

“Do you want to pay for that?”

“Yes!”

“This is the Genius Bar.”

“What?”

“This is the Genius Bar.”

“I want to pay for this.”

“Oh, over there.” He gestured at a blank brushed metal wall.

“Where?”

“There”

“Where?”

“There.”  And so I went over ‘there’.  Out of nowhere a chipper little student, earning her Stanford lunch money,  asked me for my credit card. Stunned, I gave it to her. She took the card and swiped it through a slot in the metal I hadn’t noticed before. Then she typed on a newfound keyboard, and pointed to an LCD screen in the metal. I signed my signature, and the receipt appeared out of another slot. It was exactly like the sort of store you would find in Woody Allen’s Sleeper.  I looked around quickly for the Orgasmatron, but realized Apple would have put that in a more portable form factor by now.

Shopping day over, on my way back I stopped at Whole Foods Market and defiantly bought two slices of French brie, just because I damned well can.  For a moment I had a little fantasy about driving back to Stanford and running into the Apple store and smearing the brie across the antiseptic walls, but then I went home.

*References to Colin Farrell in this blog in no way imply approval or affection for Colin Farrell, his family, associates, or various and sundry handsome actor friends.

6:37:30 AM