shopping

I skipped yoga tonight to go shopping for something to wear to John's premiere on saturday. Yes - I went shopping.

What once was a happy-go-lucky past-time has become an arduous task, tainted with much tag-reading, eye-rolling, mental-justifying and, of course, guilt.

In an effort to keep this short, I'll spare everyone a mouth-full of angry ranting about why I shouldn't have to be a detective when I'm at the store. And I'll leave out my tirade against the FDA, whom are so completely ineffectual that I have to read the label of EVERY product I buy (after which I am usually still uncertain if it's safe to eat).

What I want to focus on, instead, is my departure from consumerist tendencies. It has been a slow, gradual decline from my shopping heyday... I remember it quite clearly. Having grown up in a nearly-poor family and having spent the first twelve years of my life going school shopping at the thrift store, I remember quite vividly the first Christmas after my mom finally scored a great job at the Post Office. There were boxes and boxes of brand new clothes - tags still on! - under the tree. My sister and I went back to school after Christmas break in s-t-y-l-e. It felt great. And I remember the following years, when we stopped shopping for clothes at Good Will and Wal-Mart and graduated to the MALL. Yes, heaven for a teenage American girl with a part-time job and fresh cash.

It's not surprising to me that I was perfect bait for a college credit card. They snagged me in the fall of my freshman year, and all it took was a free t-shirt. Six years later, I was a newlywed applying for a debt consolidation program to reign in my $18,000 of credit card debt.

And since I've been forking out almost $500 a month to the debt gods, I've had much time to ponder the never-ending cycle of useless spending that exists in this society. I look at things in a whole new light. A $3.00 shirt on the clearance rack is designed to fall apart after four washes, despite the fact that someone in a far-off land got paid peanuts to make it. And I am mystified, especially, by the proliferation of useless, destined-for-a-landfill crap that is sold pretty much everywhere. Plastic junk in gum-ball machines, novelty toys, even greeting cards, gift bags, ribbons and wrapping paper... all tossed out eventually.

The scary thing is that living in this society has made the lines blur between need and want. Every so often I catch myself saying that I need something. But to need a new dress shirt because my old ones are out of style, or slightly faded, or a few years old, is not real need. In fact, I venture to say that no one truly needs a dress shirt at all. You could live quite happily without one, let alone a variety. I try to apply this principal when I get it in my head that I need something... be it shoes, an appliance, a haircut.

Tonight I bought a shirt. After trying on dresses and skirts and shoes that I would rarely wear, I settled on a crisp, well-made, will-be-in-style-for-at-least-three-more-years, $100-marked-down-to-$20 dress shirt. I can wear it Saturday with shoes and pants I already own, and I can wear it to work for meetings.

Too bad it's made in China.
*sigh*