Ladies in their own little world

I don't know if you guys know that since the past year I have been interested in the hobby of scrapbooking. I generally enjoy arts and crafts, and I felt that scrapbooking will give me a good outlet to express myself and also a scrapbook makes a great gift. Yesterday I had an opportunity to attend a class at the Windy City Scrapbooking store in Chicago, a store that I love, with one of the very famous people in the scrapbooking business, Teresa Collins (She has her own line of scrapbooking products and teaches classes all around the US and various craft expos). Let me say this, I DID NOT KNOW WHAT I WAS GETTING INTO.

I went into the class with hopes of meeting some friendly people in various age groups from different cultural backgrounds who are interested in scrapbooking or may be have been pursuing it for a bit. I was hoping to learn a lot not only from the instructor, but also from the ladies who would be attending. I was in for a surprise. The class was around 30 women, all of them were over at least 10 years older than me, mostly soccer moms from the burbs. Not only that, but in my opinion all of them were scrapbooking snobs of the first order.

I must say it was kind of irritating for me to watch these women drool over Teresa Collins and how they were sucking up to her. If Teresa would drop something, each one of them would be eager to pick it up from the floor. Teresa would say something like (these are not her exact words), "Oh and we are coming out with a new line of scrapbooking papers, and they will just be a $0.99. Just look at these, are they not awesome?" And all the ladies would be like "Yay!!!!" or "Wow" or "I am so getting this" or even worse "I already bought so many of these". Man! get a life!! They were just trying to out do each other by saying how many scrapbooking tools and latest supplies they had, especially the ones marketed by Teresa Collins.

I really felt that these hoitie toitie women live in their own little worlds where everything revolves around scrapbooking. They were also mean...the ladies sitting on my table made it a point that they did not give me the stuff that was being passed around to me. On two occasions, the things that were passed around our table and was given to other tables when I had not even had the chance to use the things. I had to wait for the supplies to be given to me later on. And yeah, these women don't smile to you unless you are Teresa Collins.

Towards the end of the class I could not wait to get out. I must say that the only person who was friendly was Teresa's assistant. I felt Teresa herself was just marketing her line of products more than teaching the class I paid a decent amount of money for. I could just finish 5 pages out of the 30 pages we were promised that we would be able to finish during the class.

I don't know if I will ever want to attend such a class again. For me its more a means of relaxation and bringing a smile on the other person's face (to whom you are giving the scrapbook). Its not about being petty, sucking up to people or being snobbish of what you know or you possess. Come on, are we still in highschool? I thought that was ages ago.