Category: Deliberate Consumption

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?

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.

Five face creams as a base, then a couple layers of make-up…

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A couple weeks ago I dragged my sister-in-law to the Lancome counter at Nordstrom in downtown Seattle. I had scheduled it about a month before when I had let myself be dragged from the main aisle to the Lancome counter, where an exuberant woman put make-up on my face and invited me to pay $15 to sign up for when their world-class make-up artist was going to be doing faces in a special event at the store. I was spending $60 of Nordstrom notes (ie. free money), so I didn’t think anything of the sign-up price and loved the little baggie of freebies.

It turns out the artists that did our faces only had the vaguest of supervision by the well-known artist (whose name escapes me, so he’s well-known somewhere, right?) It started with me telling them my skin-problems and ended with being coated with five different face creams and ointments, a “light” coverage of make-up (which was heavier than my daily make-up), and in the end, being asked if I wanted to put on more. There was some hard-selling involved, and my $15 credit towards the purchase of some of the products didn’t go very far when a lip gloss costs $25 by itself. I walked out with paying more than I wanted to spend for product that I only kinda wanted.

I realized a couple weeks ago that I’ve done this before, and actually left with a little more satisfaction than I walked out with at Lancome. My previous experience was at a chic little boutique in Wicker Park, Chicago that had Sue Devitt cosmetics. Unlike the zoo that was Nordstrom, this was a bit more sedate and felt a little less frantic. The artist didn’t quite give me exactly what I wanted as far as the make-up job, and my $30 sitting fee that was credited to purchase didn’t go far either, but I did end up walking out with a few products that I still feel are the best eyeliners I’ve ever had. I just wish I could find them so easily in Seattle!

I can’t say I’m so impressed with Lancome, though I do love their mascaras. (Though seriously, vibrating mascara? That’s just silly.)

So remember, when they ask you if you want to sign up for a low price for 30-60 min of make-over fun – say no, unless you want to spend at least $50 on stuff you probably don’t need. I found myself overwhelmed just with the face wash and cream regimen. It may promise eternally youthful skin, but at a cost of 15 extra minutes per morning that I could spend, I don’t know, blogging about face creams. 🙂 It’s also a good time to remember – youthful looking skin won’t help you cheat death. It won’t stop a car from crashing into you or prevent cancer (not even with a high SPF). I’m going to work on learning to love this long line stretching across my forehead. Now to work on loving my grey hairs.

Lifestyle Fashion

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In the past year or so, I’ve gotten into some activities that require “active wear.” First off, I started scuba diving – so I ended up getting the full scuba outfitting gear, thanks to GirlDiver being a Mares representative. Granted, this is mainly only fashionable on my way in or out of the water – but the SheDives line of gear is nicely fitted and smartly fashionable in a world where there’s not enough girl-friendly gear.

Then there was running. This had a whole separate gear requirement. The basics are simple, sports bra, shorts, shirt. If you want to get fancy, you want to get stuff that reduces chafing, like moisture wicking, form-fitting socks and tops. Nice breezy shorts help too. Thanks to a few clearance sales (REI and Title Nine) I was outfitted in no time.

Finally, there was yoga. I’m happy to do yoga at home in my pajamas, however, that doesn’t work so well when going to a studio. So, I bought a couple of outfits (one on clearance) at Lucy, which has cute, yet overpriced yoga wear.

The thing is about running and yoga – or at least, when I was doing them more often – is that the clothing I used for those activities were used solely for those activities. I just don’t get people wearing the fashion of active lifestyles (or things that look like they’re great for such activities, but really aren’t) when they don’t do those activities, or aren’t on their way to do so.

The New York Times has an article here that looks at Lululemon, the yoga lifestyle apparel company, and how they’re selling a feeling. It’s not unlike what I experienced at the vendor tables when I went to see Pema Chodron a few weeks ago. People will buy the books, the CDs, the inspirational cards and purses hand made by whoever … but owning those things won’t do the meditation for you. Your yoga clothes won’t make you more limber any more than your Nike running shorts will make you fit to run a marathon all by themselves.

I admit, the pretty active fashions are captivating, but do I really need a t-shirt to prove that I’m more enlightened than you?