Failed Shopping

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I’ve been having a rough time lately. While I’ve been trying to emotionally get back on my feet, I find that I look in the mirror and I just think, “Yuck!” It’s not the way I look, it’s more my lack of style. I’ve reverted to junk-t-shirts (not hip ones) and jeans (old, not svelte). My shoes are orthopedically comfy. My hair is, well, victim of my telling my stylist to cut it supershort. I got what I asked for, I wanted it, I think it was the right thing to do at the time, but – now I want my long hair back. Yesterday I decided that a little bit of overhaul wouldn’t be a bad thing, and may be worth bringing out the credit card that I’m trying not to use.

I was ready and willing to drop a couple hundred dollars in the name of inexpensive, tasteful fashion. You know what I wanted? Something simple: dark blue jeans, well fit, black knit or button down top, comfortable and stylish black shoes, stylish and functional fall jacket and an eyeliner. If I wanted to *really* go for it, I might have plunked down some money for some foundation garments as well. I figured this was a simple task. Not so simple, though.

1. Dark blue jeans – I could find dark blue jeans, but I couldn’t find ones that did not have that cheap look of too-much spandex.
2. Black or dark neutral button-down shirt – this is simple stuff, right? Go into a men’s department, and there’s tons of button-down shirts, different colors, styles, fits… is this too much to ask for women? I find myself longing for a Thomas Pink boutique, even if it is spendy. You’d think that a low-maintenance knit shirt with some nice details, neckline, etc might be easier, but it’s NOT.
3. Fall jacket – all I want is a tailored, light fall jacket in a dark or neutral color that will work well with a skirt as well as jeans. I don’t want a glorified hoodie or a jacket that belongs at REI.
4. Shoes – form and function. Comfortable for everyday, stylish enough for going out (if I had a social life.) Should be simple, right? Well, I’m tired of Mary Janes and I’ve got bunions that are sensitive. This makes plunking down the cash difficult.
5. Perhaps what should be the easiest item, EYELINER. I’m considering that maybe my current make-up style makes me look too impenetrable, so maybe I’m barking up the wrong tree by wanting a felt tip marker liquid liner. I love Lancome’s Artliner in blueberry, and after scouring online and Sephora, I can’t find the color and type of liner that comes close! At $28, and lasting only 2 months, it’s not quite what I want to spend. There’s great liquid colors ranging from $6.99-$30+, but I don’t have the patients or dexterity in the morning to deal with it.

So I came home, having not purchased anything! The thing I notice the most, shopping in Seattle, is that the mid-line goods are gone. Everything that I would consider work-appropriate seems to have vanished from all but the most expensive brands, and what’s left are chintzy, inexpensive (or inexpensive looking) goods. I’ll keep trying, but I miss the days of fashionable basics. Maybe I don’t know how to shop for my size? Or, maybe I’m just not willing to spend the cash?

Placebos are Awesome

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It’s not that the old meds are getting weaker, drug developers say. It’s as if the placebo effect is somehow getting stronger.

Some of you may have seen this article in wired about the placebo effect, but if not – I highly recommend it.

Now, after 15 years of experimentation, he has succeeded in mapping many of the biochemical reactions responsible for the placebo effect, uncovering a broad repertoire of self-healing responses. Placebo-activated opioids, for example, not only relieve pain; they also modulate heart rate and respiration. The neurotransmitter dopamine, when released by placebo treatment, helps improve motor function in Parkinson’s patients. Mechanisms like these can elevate mood, sharpen cognitive ability, alleviate digestive disorders, relieve insomnia, and limit the secretion of stress-related hormones like insulin and cortisol.

I stand by my previous assertion that placebos are my favorite drugs. It may be nothing but lactose in those little blue Bioron vials, or brandy and water in the Bach Flower Essences, or lumps of rock in a quartz pendant – but if it makes me or anyone else feel better, I’ll take it.

There’s obviously no assurance that homeopathic remedies will work better than allopathic remedies, and when facing life or death, I’ll go for the substance with the most verifiably, scientifically sound data from clinical trials. However, it’s going to be another doozy of a flu season, I’m guessing. I’ll take my FDA approved vaccine with a side of Oscillococcinum.

Magic(k)al Thinking

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Welcome to Monday, folks.

Last Thursday Jon and I went to see Erik Davis (author of Led Zeppelin’s Led Zeppelin IV (33 1/3) and The Visionary State: A Journey Through California’s Spiritual Landscape) speak on Aleister Crowley. It was an interesting lecture which strung together some video clips showing the influence of Aleister Crowley on film, music, and spirituality. It was a compact lecture, and could have gone into greater detail – but what are you going to do with a late night, 2 hour lecture?

I try to be a fairly unsuperstitious person. All supernatural beliefs, in my mind, fall under magical thinking – though a quick Google search shows that others will quickly classify their chosen beliefs as being not magical, but all others being such. My interest in consistency makes me wave my hands, if only because to say that you don’t believe in ridiculous magical thing A but believe strongly in ridiculous magical thing B, for whatever reason, just seems silly.

I know of a few people who have taken Aleister Crowley very seriously, and Erik Davis shared with us some video of a Christian televangelist in the 1980’s warning that Led Zeppelin was more or less trying to invoke the devil in their live shows (not to mention the backwards masking, which we didn’t get into, but I’ve heard tons about over the years.) Years ago, I read The Magick of Thelema: A Handbook of the Rituals of Aleister Crowley, which, more than anything, I got the sense that good ol’ Aleister Crowley was having a laugh. The question seems to be, did he take himself seriously? Was he anything like the rumors of L. Ron Hubbard (who had less than 6 degrees of separation from A.C.)? Was he just doing it to see how much power he could exert over others? Was it the combination of heavy-duty hallucinogens, harsh climates and magical thinking that created the cosmology of Mr. Crowley?

The conclusion I came to, years ago, is that Aleister Crowley was Ha-Ha-Only-Serious. Even if you strip out all the concepts of “real” in the rituals and dismiss the belief that any supernatural creature can be invoked, the role of these ideas in the brain is a powerful one. Rituals and the supernatural have a place in society, and continue to exert power over the masses, regardless of what brand you subscribe to. Even atheists are vulnerable in that their non-belief gives a contrasting tension that gives the believers something to work from. Atheists cannot get away from the impact that magical thinking has on society. I see Aleister Crowley as a brilliant, warped, drug infused, megalomaniacal madman whose only power was granted to him by followers and those who feared him (and I guess, sometimes both.) His influence through the years is what keeps him interesting.

This Friday, Jon and I are scheduled to see Mike Daisey perform his monologue The Last Cargo Cult. Until Jon told me of this monologue, I hadn’t heard about the Cargo Cults. To put it short – when Americans used South Pacific islands as bases in the 20th century, they brought their wealth and technology with them – and when they left, they took it away. The islanders, to summon that wealth back, took to creating meticulously crafting radios, runways, planes, all non-functioning, made of local materials, and holding rituals. The description for Mike Daisey’s work states: “Their religion is explored alongside our own to form a sharp and searing examination of the international financial crisis. Daisey wrestles with the largest questions of what the collapse means, and what it says about our deepest values. Part adventure story and part memoir, he uses each culture to illuminate the other to find, between the seemingly primitive and the achingly modern, a human answer.”

Magical thinking is alive and well in our society today. Mike Daisey’s monologue should prove interesting.

Disclaimer needed?

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I don’t own a TV or listen to commercial radio (though I do watch TV and listen to non-commercial radio, like KEXP.) I also don’t frequently consume magazines except when I’m stuck somewhere with nothing else to do (doctor’s offices, gyms, airports, bathrooms, salons).

This means that while I’m pretty culturally literate (IMHO), I miss out on things that aren’t widely discussed in my corner of the Internet.

This means that I miss out on televised news unless I bother to watch a YouTube video. And I admit, I really don’t care to given the little that I see in my 60 minutes at the gym. I mean, from what I understand, people are going to town hall meetings, yelling crazy, nonsensical and dissonant things that stem from blatant lies being told by other people? What more do I need to know?

So yeah – I watch my TV without commercials thanks to DVD, Blu-Ray and download, get my news from news websites and blogs, get my entertainment news from the check-out lanes at the grocery store, and read magazines when I’m in purgatory. I like my way of life. It allows me to spend time with my husband cooking dinner and getting 8 hours of sleep.

Of course, YMMV.

“It’s like reality television, but for books!”

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Going to the gym is indulging in irony. Any gym you go to there will be thumping music, television and magazines. Unless you’re lucky enough to remember to bring your book or your iPod, you’re in a situation where you can spend an hour or more staring at other people or at the equipment, or pass your gaze over cable TV or a magazine, or sometimes switching between the two. The content of both cable television and the magazines is guaranteed to be interspersed with commercials and content that might as well be a commercial, all driving you to a vague sense of unease that can only be cured by purchasing or indulging in the flashing images and the ads in the sidebar. I get hungry for specific and unhealthy pseudofood while at the gym, while images of Ore-Ida frozen potatoes, Haagen-Dazs ice cream and Tyson frozen chicken nuggets tempt me.

Yesterday I picked my poison in the form of Real Simple magazine, which was nicely provided by my gym for my distraction. Flitting my gaze between Wolf Blitzer and faux simplification, I eventually found an article that seemed worth reading by A.J. Jacobs (author of The Year of Living Biblically. ) Of course, I didn’t realize he was also the author of The Year of Living Biblically, I only knew that he was the author of the upcoming book The Guinea Pig Diaries, whose title I discarded due to me not particularly caring until now.

The article was an abridged excerpt from his new book, focusing on the actual effort to simplify and organize life by unitasking. It turns out, in case you didn’t know, that any feelings of increased productivity by multitasking is a lie. We actually lose productivity when we try to multitask, and I would argue, lose some intimacy with our surroundings making multitasking at best a time sucker and at worst downright dangerous (eg. talking on a cellphone + doing anything else.) The excerpt read like an article in the Shambala Sun: unitasking as a conscious effort of mindfulness and full experience of a singular action. There were elements in the excerpt that included contemplations on patience and the hard work that is bringing your mind back from distraction. All good lessons, and a great reminder to me, as a chronic multitasker, that I should take this lesson to heart.

I found myself a little disappointed, though, when I found out just who the author of this piece was. This is based solely on the fact that A.J. Jacobs is a writer who basically logs a portion of his life, then packages it into a book. It’s what happens when you turn a blog into a book. It’s reality television, with the pretense of being unscripted, but packaged into a book giving a more virtuous veneer to a genre that I’m not sure deserves attention. I’m not saying that A.J. Jacobs is a bad writer – in fact, I enjoyed reading the excerpt and think that he made some valid points, however, this is just one book in a string of books where he sets off on a quest for the purpose of his own self-discovery and then writes about it.

Maybe I’m jealous. I’m a blogger (though, if not for Google Analytics, I would not believe anyone read this thing), and I’d love to be published some day – but not for the content of my blog. I do have to wonder, though – what makes these bloggers-turned-published authors more deserving of royalties than the next guy? A.J. Jacob’s schtick seems to be putting himself in awkward situations and writing about it. Julie Powell, author of Julie and Julia, turned her blog into a best selling book, and now a well-received Hollywood film starring Amy Adams and Meryl Streep. Why shouldn’t any person’s mundane life be profitable?

I aspire to high art. I can only believe that my art background before college, and the two years at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago infected me with this idea that there is good art, and there is bad art (or non-art, if it’s really bad), and I know the difference. Maybe we, as a culture, have reached a state of media saturation, of too many choices, leading us to consume junk food for our brains as well as our bodies. It’s not that junk food is bad necessarily, it’s just in the quantities that we’re consuming it.

You know, necessitating us to buy our gym memberships to balance the chicken nuggets and fries we had for lunch.