When I was in high school, the running joke was that I would catch the most beads during Mardi Gras. I’m fairly modest, yet I’ve experienced first-hand how bead collecting can become an obsession.

At my first Mardi Gras parade, I went prepared to catch as many beads as possible. After the first parade, I decided to be more selective with which beads to keep after developing a huge headache from enduring neck pain. The biggest, most colorful and most elaborate beads made the cut. Clearly, these do not lessen the pain factor, but at least I had room for the best ones.

After several parades I was sick of beads. It’s inevitable. When my neck had literally no space for anything else, I gave up on beads altogether.

Especially after entire packages of beads were thrown at me at full speed, smacked and bruised several parts of my body. Some beads are thrown with such enthusiasm (or anger?) that it’s best to just let them fly by.

Yet, bead-fever returns. Squeezing down Bourbon, I always see the best and most elaborate beads. During that first Mardi Gras, my favorite beads were about the size of tennis balls or had characters like rubber duckies.

The only challenge: men on balconies possess these beads and demand to see something in return for them. This, I refuse to do.

Though it’s easy to forget during Mardi Gras, these beads are only a couple bucks in every shop in the French Quarter. Obviously, store-bought beads aren’t as special, so I resort to the next best thing to self-exposure: pleading.

I hate pleading, but the fixation on these beads is insatiable. Drunken men are unbelievably stubborn — and it doesn’t help that the whole street is packed with competing women who are willing to do more to attain beads than me. It’s like survival of the most willing.

 If any worthy beads were to escape the deathly grasp of these women, then it’s likely to land in the toxic soup of beer, mud and other unidentifiable liquids on Bourbon. Ew. I simply accept my limitations.

To this day, I’ve never been able to obtain beads the size of tennis balls. But this Mardi Gras, I must obtain the big beads I’ve longed for, though they just may have to come from a French Quarter shop.