The more things you take personally, the less enjoyable your life is going to be.  

Your Emotional Guidance System…exaggerates how much other people’s choices actually affect you.…I am reminded of the wife who prayed when leaving the house with her husband driving…that their car would at no time be behind a woman in an SUV talking on a cell phone….Because, should Fate be so unkind…the tone of the outing would be sacrificed to a rant on the downfall of society.

Your Thinking Guidance System is able to distinguish between events passing over your life like puffy clouds in the clear blue sky…and events truly affecting you….such as a piano falling on your car.

Dateline: Dallas, Hilton International Headquarters…Substation

The next Jessica LeFave mystery will include inside travel tips, Mysteryshrink style, on how to enjoy yourself in Las Vegas.  Someone should benefit from all the mistakes I’ve bumbled into.  ….Not that I would complain.  Not for a second.  

Here’s an early bonus travel tip:  When people show up for breakfast in the hotel dining room dressed in their pajamas….you might want to bump up what you’re willing to pay per night.  Now, I’m the first to say, I wish I were more flexible.  Having no standards would be absolutely yummy.  I wish I could be as cheery as the wife and mother of the Pajama Family…who appeared perfectly okay with her husband trotting across the dining room in flip-flops and a kid’s discarded Winnie the Pooh bathrobe cinched over…but, not quite concealing…his boxers…. Who knows what kind of trauma I caused the children requiring them to give up the jammies and comb their bed hair before eating in restaurants.  And, no matter how much my Thinking Guidance System repeats that a negligee and fuzzy slippers shouldn’t be an issue….I don’t know that I could test out the proposition. 

At this sub-genre of Hilton products, the Pajama family parades back and forth from the far wall to the buffet…buffet to the wall table…occasionally yelling out orders to whichever of the clan is elbow deep sorting through the bacon bin.

Bonus Pre-view Travel Tip:  When a hotel-like facility promises a ‘complimentary hot breakfast’ and your fellow diners show up in pajamas, you can expect two things for sure.  One:  When a restaurant feels a need to add the word ‘hot’ to the term ‘breakfast’ this is best translated as—“Stuff will be defrosted and micro-waved for you.” And, “No room service, but feel free to roll out of bed and schlep to the breakfast table without any concern regarding whether or not the sight of you in your makeshift coverings is killing the appetites of the other guests.”

I know.  The ads spin these issues, saying that such places are ‘homey’; that when you stay with them you are ‘one of the family’.   Well, this is not an appealing concept to someone who’s played Omaha in the summer and made last minute reservations.  

This concept would perhaps work, if the guests treating the hotel as ‘home’ was a set of those constantly recurring young couples making romantic comedies…and the perky pair trotted in all trim, modeling European designer pajama ensembles.  But, alas, most of us aren’t haunted by either the paparazzi or modeling contracts…thus ’pajama casual’ isn’t likely to take off.

Speaking for my family’s likelihood of being welcomed in public in our pj’s, I’ll quote my sister regarding the time a cousin, lost in a back-to-nature illusion….an illusion based on her experience living in a tent during a lengthy stretch of unemployment….The cousin informed us that a nude wedding was planned and we were invited.  My sister responded:  “No, thanks.  I see my family members in clothes on a regular basis….and, given what I’ve seen so far, I have no desire to see any of them naked.”

Yes, whatever we pay attention to grows larger. 

What you notice and focus on in the world…and ‘yes’ you do have a choice…grows bigger and what you leave alone…doesn’t.  The next entry, “Texas Psychologist Freaks Out in Oklahoma Motel Incident,” will fill in a few details on how to trash an evening and frighten farm folks in town for the rodeo by focusing on the less than perfect features of a festive motel room…