Most men would be in heaven if they didn’t have to fight tooth and nail with their wife to get all the electronic gadgets they want. When you live in Hello Kitty Hell, however, things often get turned upside down. While I do like my gadgets, I pray that we don’t get any new ones these days.

I think that the people at Sanrio have purposefully peeked into my Hello Kitty Hell and are having bets among one another whether they can make it worse. Then they sit there high-fiving one another when they see that something that just shouldn’t exist in this world ends up in households like mine. I’m not big on conspiracy theories, but Hello Kitty Hell is moving me in that direction.

Let’s take our DVD for example. While living in Japan I made the mistake mentioning that I would like to get a DVD player. When it comes to gadgets like that, I usually have to negotiate over a long period of time to get the gadget, but on this occasion I received a “what a great idea!” Now, in hindsight, this should have been a glaring clue that something was obscenely going to go wrong, but of course it did not register until I came home that evening to find this monstrosity in our house:

Of course, the DVD nightmare didn’t end there. It wasn’t long after that the portable Hello Kitty DVD player ended up in our house without me even requesting it:

I thought it couldn’t get any worse when the other day we went into a store and saw the US Hello Kitty DVD version for sale.

My wife’s eyes immediately opened wide and I walked us out of there as quickly as possible. It seemed that I’d avoided another escalation in Hello Kitty Hell. I think I did…the problem is that I have this nagging feeling that when I return home from the current trip I’m on, there is going to be another DVD player in our household…