My Ketchum Epic

I recently returned from the wonderful, wonderful city of Ketchum, Idaho. I had a wonderful, wonderful time, and bought wonderful, wonderful sweaters. There is surprisingly much to be said about this trip. I say surprisingly because Ketchum is just the kind of small-time town you'd expect to be shy and have nothing to say. However, this is untrue. Ketchum has a population of oh, a few, and I like to think of it as the small and unassuming little sister of Sun Valley, who is the bitchy older sister that wears designer clothes and stinks up the bathroom with her perfume. (But that's not saying I don't enjoy Sun Valley. When I was last there, I found it to be a very... pleasant place. It's very quiet, though, and I always get the feeling that I shouldn't be there, like a servant girl stumbled upon the master's bedroom.) Ketchum is my preferred town. It has some very nice restaurants and some very nice galleries, and the people there don't seem condescending.

There is one thing I disagree with, however, and that is the price tag on seemingly everything. Call me crazy, but I think that nine dollars is too much to pay for a plate of corned beef hash. Plus, I've always been uncomfortable with money issues. I grew up ordering the $1.99 kids' meal every Sunday night. I did not grow up thinking that anything over six dollars for a meal was reasonable. And I also did not grow up thinking that sixty dollars for a hoodie was reasonable, let alone two hundred.

The four of us were waiting in the Baldy Mountain lodge, acquiring our fifteen-dollars-apiece tickets for the chair lift up to the tippity top, and Dobbl spotted a jacket with peacock feather printing up the sides of the arms. We went closer for further inspection and discovered the jacket to be indeed, quite nice, very detailed and pretty. The jacket was twenty percent off. And so Dobbl alerted her mother of the jacket's fine quality in hopes of purchase, until the price tag was revealed, and that small hoodie, that cotton jacket, with designs we could have drawn ourselves, was two hundred dollars. Fuck. No. Even Dobbl was startled. So then we went down to the items with further discounts, like sixty and seventy percent. There was a puffa jacket, one of those snowboard coats by a skater brand, with an admittedly nice design, that cost eight hundred dollars. Eight. Hundred. Even with the fifty percent discount on its' head, such a thing is inconceivable.

This is why I do not like Sun Valley. Too many things cost much more than they're worth, when you can get the same sweater with the same quality at such a wonderful store as the Gold Mine, a Ketchum secret. This store was the best thing I have encountered in my thrift store journeys. Much like the Deseret [that's mormon for desert] Industries here in uneventful Salt Lake, the Gold Mine offers shirts for only three dollars. You heard me correctly, three dollars! They also had a sale going on sweaters, half price, which I was not aware of until at the checkout line with my three sweaters! I could have spent much more time in the Gold Mine if it hadn't been for my full arms and constant reoccuring need to only look at striped things. Plus I know my own limits. You can have too many gray striped shirts. But you can never have too many saddle shoes, which I found the perfect pair of, at the Gold Mine.

I was just browsing through the kids' clothing section, since it was more likely to fit me, when I caught a glimpse of a black and white pair of saddle shoes, innocently placed with other childrens' shoes, and I decided I had to pick them up. They were perfect. A size six, only a tad bit loose, and they felt so stiff that they would be the absolute topper on my dapper uniform. And so, I did not care how much they would be priced as, I simply had to buy them. Now please don't go assuming that I go kajagoogoo over just any kind of shoe. I'm not the girl to take shoe shopping, because I don't care. I don't like to try on shoes. I don't like to look at shoes. I know which shoes I want to get and then I get them. For instance, if I were to be in the mood to get a new pair of "kicks," I wouldn't just pick up and hit the mall until I found something, I would go online and look first, and then I'd buy them. I'm not that kind of girl. Anyway.

After this eventful shopping spree at the Gold Mine, we went to the gallery stroll. I do believe that this is just about the time the Third Wheel Syndrome took a hold of my neck. It was tracing fingers around my skin, not quite strangling yet, and that was hard. I wanted very much to just step back and let Dobbl and Chelsie talk and be together, but at the same time, whenever I did that, I felt very alone. In those situations I always blame myself. And I did blame myself. I agreed to come along. And this was not the Ander and Dobbl Power Hour, this was supposed to be for Chelsie. This feeling only intensified from then on.

Here is where I struggle to decide what I can and cannot say. I really would like to tell you everything, to tell you just what was done or not done, and how everyone acted afterwards, but I don't want anyone to get hurt. This is, after all, the Internet. And while I don't believe this blog to be in any way well-read or distributed, you never know what can leak onto Google or what can be stumbled upon. I promised those involved that I would not tell certain people, and I hardly think it fair to break that promise for the Internet. So I don't know what to say. We all pushed some limits those last two nights that we didn't think we would push. We discovered new things about each other, like just how insecure Chelsie can get, or how surprisingly conservative I can be on some things. I learned that when the time comes, I can carry on a very long and in-depth conversation with someone nearly thirty-five years older than me, and I can sound just as educated as someone nearly thirty-five years older than I am. I can be extremely empathic when needed. I can set aside all the bad feelings I've had about a person, just so I can reassure them that I could never hate them, just so I can give what little help I can. And I am glad for this.

All in all, I am glad I went. There were times of regret, times of deep depression, times when I felt the same anger burning in my chest as I'd felt many times before. But then there were the good times, when all three of us could live in harmony, and that is what I'll remember, the amazing jokes and deep laughter. The snorts and the taboo. The happiness reserved from a speech like "would you feed it to me?" and "there's the one black man, and he's a bus driver. fuck america." And there's nothing more I could say.

End of story.