Hello Kitty Hell

I know exactly how he feels…One of the scariest things which I don’t like to even think about (let alone mention in public like this) is that I know far too much about Hello Kitty than is healthy for any grown man (or person for that matter, but being a grown man makes it all that much worse). The information seems to invade your body when you live in a Hello Kitty Hell like an unwanted parasite. I don’t want to know this stuff. I have no interest in this stuff. I don’t want anything to do with it. Yet at the end of the day, it seeps into my memory in the depths of my brain and can’t be purged. Hello Kitty facts sitting up there wasting valuable brain space and not a damn thing I can do about it. 

My wife thinks that this is great. When she needs to know some obscure fact about Hello Kitty that she can’t remember, she’ll call to me and more often than not I’ll know the answer. Can it get any worse than that? Knowing facts that you don’t want to know about Hello Kitty. I’m surprised I haven’t been committed.

For example, the following left my mouth (to my extreme horror) at a get-together of my wife’s friends when one of them mentioned how it was wonderful that Hello Kitty was born in Japan. Any normal person would not have even thought twice about the comment, but the Hello Kitty information invaders in my mind couldn’t let it pass. My response? “While a lot of people assume that Hello Kitty was born in Tokyo, Japan, she was really born in London, England when her father, George, was on transfer there with his company.” These are the things that are stuck in my mind and come out in conversations and there is nothing I can do about it.

I can tell you what Hello Kitty’s last name is (White), how you can tell the difference between her and her sister, Mimmy (they wear their bows on the opposite side – Kitty wears it on her left, Mimmy on her right), the name of the rabbit that Kitty sometimes carries with her (Kathy), Hello Kitty’s height (approx. 5 apples) and weight (approx. 3 apples) and much more so that if I continued on here, I’d really get depressed and slit my wrists (I’m almost at that point just realizing what I have written here…)

The worst part of having this Hello Kitty knowledge is when my friends learn about it and then abuse it. We will be at a gathering of some type with a lot of people I don’t know and they’ll start talking about Hello Kitty and making false statements on purpose knowing that I will have to correct them. Then I look like some type of freak for knowing so much about Hello Kitty and trying to explain why it’s useless by that point. Then they laugh about it for the rest of the evening. I just hope that as a deserved punishment, they one day begin to remember the Hello Kitty stuff too…

So I live with the Hello Kitty Hell both externally and internally waiting in great anticipation for the day when they come out with a device that can erase selective memory because I’ll be first in line…

I took off for the weekend to Las Vegas to meet my business partner, Nate, with whom I’ve worked on a number of websites, but had never met before. I thought that this trip would get me away from my Hello Kitty Hell for at least a weekend, but alas, this was not the case.

You see, when people hear about my Hello Kitty Hell, they think that it’s humorous. Looking at it from the outside, I guess I could see this point of view. Being on the inside, however, the Hello Kitty Hell multiplies with the number of people who learn about what I have to live with because they continually bring it up (as they laugh).

Instead of escaping from Hello Kitty on this trip, Nate made us go into every Hello Kitty shop we came across to try and find a gift for my wife that she didn’t already have. Of course, I would never even consider getting something Hello Kitty for my wife because that might encourage her and make her believe that I actually support her Hello Kitty fanaticism in some way. Actually, it’s pretty much a moot point because there is rarely anything that I ever see that she doesn’t already have.

I am now painfully aware of every Hello Kitty shop in the Las Vegas area. When I explained to my wife what Nate had done to me, she was overjoyed that I could now take her if we go to Vegas in the future. She also wanted to know why Nate was willing to take a photo with Hello Kitty and I always refuse.

I think I have the perfect plan to get back at Nate. The next time we meet, I’ll make sure my wife comes along and since she now thinks that Nate likes Hello Kitty, I’ll let him deal with her Hello Kitty shopping for a day. That should teach him…