"I"m a deeply shallow person"
- Andy Warhol
I’m sorry if I’m in a bad mood, but it’s that time of month. By that, I mean - the end of it. The time when my ATM receipt reads “Available Balance: $1.27.” You see, at my new job I only get paid once a month, which is both good and bad. That is, it’s good for local retailers, but bad for me personally. At the beginning of the month, when I have plenty of cash, I go into Barney's and think, "$175 for a jar face cream? Gee, I can't afford not to buy two!" Three and a half weeks later, I go into the grocery store and think, "$1.19 for a can of tuna? Who do they think we are, Rockefellers?" So instead I buy the discount brand tuna that "may contain pork bi-products."
Around the 26th of every month, the ATM becomes my nemesis. I have this whole imaginary conversation with the receipt, which seems to form an origami mouth that hovers in mid-air, talking to me.
Your own fault, you know… the receipt tells me. Its voice is strangely reminiscent of KITT, the surly Trans Am from “Knight Rider.” (Unrelated question: was KITT supposed to be gay? By that, I mean NO offense to the gay Trans Am community - some of my best friends are gay cars. I’m just saying, it just seemed like they gave KITT a bit of an ‘exasperated waiter’ inflection. I was a little kid at the time, so I don’t really remember the premise of the show - clearly thought up by someone inhaling giant piles of blow - but it might have actually been “Can a straight man and a gay car live together in the same apartment?”) Anyway.
Shoulda managed your money better, my receipt says, in a tisk-tisk tone.
What do you know, you’re just a receipt!
There’s really no need to make this personal, the receipt counters. If you don’t like receipts, well, that’s your issue.
That’s not true! I didn’t mean it like that. I don’t – I – you know, some of my best friends are bank receipts.
Anyway ...
I love luxury items. But I mean really love – in that deep-down sense; the simple, unambiguous pleasure that only comes from extremely shallow things. Being shallow gets a bad wrap, because there are people who actually judge others on, say, the kind of shoes they wear or what kind of car they drive. This is of course stupid and wrong. If you have to judge people at all, it should be on the basis of their personal integrity, and/or their handbags. Just kidding, of course. Personal integrity is way overrated.
Okay, even if you don't want to admit it, you've probably felt the blood-lust that comes from wanting a certain stupid, ridiculous item, be it clothing, a car, or, say, a flat-panel 37-inch television so that you can play your video games in HDTV, even though you're almost 34 and your wife would rather have a new bed, which you could have gotten for the same price (love you, honey). For instance, you never want anything in the way you want a specific outfit when you're a teenage girl. She will remember every detail of The Outfit (however ridiculous it will inevitably seem in future decades) long after she’s forgotten the last name of the boy whose attention she hoped to get by wearing it. I was talking with my mother-in-law, Vita, about this during our recent trip to California. She was telling me about a “winter white” wool skirt suit that she got for Christmas when she was 16. That year, winter white was what all the girls had to have. The way she described it, I could feel how much she wanted that suit, and how happy – how relieved she must have been when she finally got it. Although we don’t like to admit it, urgency of the “must have” item du jour applies just as much to the soi-disant "smart" girls (read: no boobs) such as myself who spent their free time in high school writing ironic essays about Ionesco, perhaps to make up for lack of cleavage.
Vita is one of the more intelligent and unpretentious people you’re likely to meet, so it was nice to know that even women like her go ga-ga over clothes as teenagers. I sort of never graduated out of that phase (I think the technical term is "maturity"). The women in my family are all Southern, and hence we all pretty much live for "puttin' on the dog" (getting all gussied up). I think this phrase must have originated when some lady in Georgia, after a few afternoon drinks (it's fo' o'clock somewhah, darlin'), mistook her terrier for a mink stole.
I know it's silly, but I love walking home up Madison Avenue, so that I can press my face up against the windows of the boutiques (no, I don't mean metaphorically), staring at the dazzling, ridiculously expensive clothes. Even though can’t afford them, I’m genuinely glad that somebody can. There’s something comforting about knowing that there are women out there who can go into Bergdorf's and try on that silk and alumninum ball gown - the kind of thing that makes no sense except in a store window - and actually buy it. More importantly, they have somewhere to wear it.
The other day, at Barney’s, I fell in love with a navy blue, see-thru knit sundress. There are many things wrong with this concept, but they were negated by the fact that if you looked closely, you might have noticed that the scallops along the hem of the dress were actually the wings of upside-down dragonflies, woven into the fabric. It would have been the perfect thing to wear at a semi-formal pool party (?) where nobody was actually going in a pool, on an evening that was not too cold (knit, after all) nor too hot (hello, see-thru?), where nobody was offended by partial nudity, in a world where I had much bigger boobs and smaller thighs.
A bargain, really, at $2,000. The thing is, if you can afford that dress, you know where that party is.
Back in the real world, I don’t have anywhere to wear a see-though knit sundress. Nor do I have $2,000. But, hello – dragonflies!
I didn’t buy the dress, of course. But I take comfort in knowing that someone knows where that party is, and she’s going to wear that dress. And she will look out over the shallow pool, among shallow people, and she will know that the bottom of her dress, know that there are dragonflies hiding, upside down ... spinning in infinity, I say hey, hall-e-lu-jah ...
I’m sorry if I’m in a bad mood, but it’s that time of month. By that, I mean - the end of it. The time when my ATM receipt reads “Available Balance: $1.27.” You see, at my new job I only get paid once a month, which is both good and bad. That is, it’s good for local retailers, but bad for me personally. At the beginning of the month, when I have plenty of cash, I go into Barney's and think, "$175 for a jar face cream? Gee, I can't afford not to buy two!" Three and a half weeks later, I go into the grocery store and think, "$1.19 for a can of tuna? Who do they think we are, Rockefellers?" So instead I buy the discount brand tuna that "may contain pork bi-products."
Around the 26th of every month, the ATM becomes my nemesis. I have this whole imaginary conversation with the receipt, which seems to form an origami mouth that hovers in mid-air, talking to me.
Your own fault, you know… the receipt tells me. Its voice is strangely reminiscent of KITT, the surly Trans Am from “Knight Rider.” (Unrelated question: was KITT supposed to be gay? By that, I mean NO offense to the gay Trans Am community - some of my best friends are gay cars. I’m just saying, it just seemed like they gave KITT a bit of an ‘exasperated waiter’ inflection. I was a little kid at the time, so I don’t really remember the premise of the show - clearly thought up by someone inhaling giant piles of blow - but it might have actually been “Can a straight man and a gay car live together in the same apartment?”) Anyway.
Shoulda managed your money better, my receipt says, in a tisk-tisk tone.
What do you know, you’re just a receipt!
There’s really no need to make this personal, the receipt counters. If you don’t like receipts, well, that’s your issue.
That’s not true! I didn’t mean it like that. I don’t – I – you know, some of my best friends are bank receipts.
Anyway ...
I love luxury items. But I mean really love – in that deep-down sense; the simple, unambiguous pleasure that only comes from extremely shallow things. Being shallow gets a bad wrap, because there are people who actually judge others on, say, the kind of shoes they wear or what kind of car they drive. This is of course stupid and wrong. If you have to judge people at all, it should be on the basis of their personal integrity, and/or their handbags. Just kidding, of course. Personal integrity is way overrated.
Okay, even if you don't want to admit it, you've probably felt the blood-lust that comes from wanting a certain stupid, ridiculous item, be it clothing, a car, or, say, a flat-panel 37-inch television so that you can play your video games in HDTV, even though you're almost 34 and your wife would rather have a new bed, which you could have gotten for the same price (love you, honey). For instance, you never want anything in the way you want a specific outfit when you're a teenage girl. She will remember every detail of The Outfit (however ridiculous it will inevitably seem in future decades) long after she’s forgotten the last name of the boy whose attention she hoped to get by wearing it. I was talking with my mother-in-law, Vita, about this during our recent trip to California. She was telling me about a “winter white” wool skirt suit that she got for Christmas when she was 16. That year, winter white was what all the girls had to have. The way she described it, I could feel how much she wanted that suit, and how happy – how relieved she must have been when she finally got it. Although we don’t like to admit it, urgency of the “must have” item du jour applies just as much to the soi-disant "smart" girls (read: no boobs) such as myself who spent their free time in high school writing ironic essays about Ionesco, perhaps to make up for lack of cleavage.
Vita is one of the more intelligent and unpretentious people you’re likely to meet, so it was nice to know that even women like her go ga-ga over clothes as teenagers. I sort of never graduated out of that phase (I think the technical term is "maturity"). The women in my family are all Southern, and hence we all pretty much live for "puttin' on the dog" (getting all gussied up). I think this phrase must have originated when some lady in Georgia, after a few afternoon drinks (it's fo' o'clock somewhah, darlin'), mistook her terrier for a mink stole.
I know it's silly, but I love walking home up Madison Avenue, so that I can press my face up against the windows of the boutiques (no, I don't mean metaphorically), staring at the dazzling, ridiculously expensive clothes. Even though can’t afford them, I’m genuinely glad that somebody can. There’s something comforting about knowing that there are women out there who can go into Bergdorf's and try on that silk and alumninum ball gown - the kind of thing that makes no sense except in a store window - and actually buy it. More importantly, they have somewhere to wear it.
The other day, at Barney’s, I fell in love with a navy blue, see-thru knit sundress. There are many things wrong with this concept, but they were negated by the fact that if you looked closely, you might have noticed that the scallops along the hem of the dress were actually the wings of upside-down dragonflies, woven into the fabric. It would have been the perfect thing to wear at a semi-formal pool party (?) where nobody was actually going in a pool, on an evening that was not too cold (knit, after all) nor too hot (hello, see-thru?), where nobody was offended by partial nudity, in a world where I had much bigger boobs and smaller thighs.
A bargain, really, at $2,000. The thing is, if you can afford that dress, you know where that party is.
Back in the real world, I don’t have anywhere to wear a see-though knit sundress. Nor do I have $2,000. But, hello – dragonflies!
I didn’t buy the dress, of course. But I take comfort in knowing that someone knows where that party is, and she’s going to wear that dress. And she will look out over the shallow pool, among shallow people, and she will know that the bottom of her dress, know that there are dragonflies hiding, upside down ... spinning in infinity, I say hey, hall-e-lu-jah ...
posted by Marguerite at 7:03 AM
9 Comments:
I love the way you write - both the polished style and the self-deprecating honesty. Thanks for dropping by my humble blog. I am getting the feeling that I am not, after all, alone in despising yapping Yorkshire terriers. Regarding money, you need more self control, more planning. Squandering money is crazy - you could use it for travel to far flung places. Let me look after your money for you! Send to Yorkshire Pudding Bank (Holiday Account)!!!
I need to go to New York because somehow I've ended up in this little state that has none of those places you mentioned, nor do we have a Madison Ave. and I think that in another life I must have been a horribly spoiled rich girl and now I'm being punished. What other places are there? Have you been to Tiffany's? Is it as fabulous as in the movies? I went to Tiffany's in Las Vegas, but I have a feeling it isn't even close to being the same.
"You Need More Self Control" - the title of my upcoming memoir. Hopefully Oprah will pick it up, and it will go gangbusters until someone realizes that I never bought that second (or, well, first) jar of $175 face cream, although I do buy any number of equally frivolous items all the time. Then there'll have to be a retraction and I'll have to give back all the money and will end up living on the street, and will turn to drugs and prostitution, and then write ANOTHER memoir, but when I misspell the name of the bridge I was living under, it will all unravel once again.
I think the application for this dress would be riding your bike around some southern university and have the wind blowing; hence the dragonflies would be quite visible for those watching, falling off their bikes or spilling books across red brick walls. Just my best guess.
ok, a) you never cease to freaking slay me with the subtlety of your wit. b) you totally just took me back to the summer before 7th grade, when i had a short stint as the ragdoll misfit friend of a group of popular girls. i begged and pleaded and eventually spent 90% of my alloted back-to-school allowance on one pair of Bongo jeans and this totally green top that looked like the bastard child of a band uniform and a cropped tanktini. it was, by far, the most hideous combination ever, but i loved it like a blood relative. thanks for making me smile at my own dorkishness.
I'm trying to picture "the bastard child of a band uniform and a tankini" ... Sheri, girlfriend, can I just say that is SO much cooler than anything I was wearing at the time? At least your shirt didn't feature "Garfield." (It should go without saying that I didn't have any friends that year.)
Blactaculus - Chris from UF, dude, is that you? I lost your email when I left my old job (the LAN was down my last day). That goes for everyone else who only knew my work email, if you happen to read this! I never got around to sending out a mass email announcing it. It's really not an "I lost your email" thing. It actually happened. It sucked.
Jolynn - NYC has great stores, but it's like wandering around the desert on a hot day, surrounded by beautiful little aquariums made out of unbreakable glass. Tiffany's is cool, but the diamond district is EVEN COOLER. It's an entire street with little vendors who sell diamonds and other jewelry at discount prices (still expensive). It's fantasy land for women, as long as you don't think too much about the horrible wars and such that go on for diamonds in Africa (guilt). Then there's the bead district, where you can buy gemstones and stuff and make your own jewelry. There's even a bric-a-brac district where you can buy wholesale buttons from every corner of the world. I've never bought a wholesale button, and I probably never will, but somehow it comforts me as I fall asleep in my smallish apartment in an inhospitable city - the idea that if I *wanted* to, even now, late in the evening, I could go and buy a crate of wholesale zippers.
Yep yep, I don't mean to fixate on the sun dress/bike crashing issues, but I've seen it happen and I've been there. Though, the worst crash I had at UF was in the tunnel under 34th (from the SW corner of campus). I was sitting smuggly in an easy A military history class and my prof said (southern drawl accentuated even by him):"Mr. Turner I dare ask did you bring your journal to turn in?" at which point I yelled out in a very strong Waukesha Hesh accent: "HOLY FUCK" and ran out of the room. These are 2 hour grueling essay exams of the quantity over quality variety so you have to use every moment to spread ink and dates and post marxist economic determinist rhetoric, the sheer volume you have to write in the short time is so daunting for undergrads that some of my study partners spent hours on the toilet with nerves, but I digress. I got home in minutes, got the journal and rushed back. During the rushing there was a wall of sorority cu.. you get the picture, across the whole tunnel. I said excuse me a few times from one end but they were up inside each other's scamming stories of celullite bubbles on tan legs during softball games and all that and as I tried to snake through, IN THE BIKE LANE, I clipped one of the receptical's pink backpacks and smashed my face into the pipes that ran along it. I got up and they said in unison "are you alright?" and I said "NO" and rode off. Got an A though anyway.
Actually I could live with out diamonds. Well, that's a lie. I would like to have at least one gigantic one. That would be fun. I just love all jewelry. I need to visit New York.
That stupid tunnel on 34th - it's like part of some video game (it's disturbing that I can recognize that). Biking across the UF campus would make a good game, getting points for knocking down sorority cu- you get the picture, but then you'd have to get through that tunnel to get to the next level. However, I still say that the only video game that I'm likely to play is a "first person shooter" (see? I even know the terminology) where you get to violently blow up all of your husband/boyfriend's video game equipment.
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