Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand
You sit down and promise to write all this week and then you get distracted by food and television and work and sleep and suddenly it’s friday and you’ve got one post to show for all of your trouble and you already forget everything you had meant to say this week other than “i’m tired” or “i’m bored” so you just head back to work for another few hours until you can go home.
The primary reason that malls bother me is that i don’t think so much pop culture and watered down fashion should exist and commingle in one place. I cannot bare to look at another Lord of the Rings cross-promotion. I cannot watch my girlfriend try on jeans every fifty feet for three hours anywhere but a mall. I almost cannot stand the ability to comparison shop for video games, Magic cards, stretch jeans, and Pat Benatar cds all at once.anywhere but a mall.
New Jersey, for those of you not in the know, has almost reached mall saturation-point. Really. And, when Elise asked me if i wanted to go shopping today, i had no idea that it would be a multiple store, multiple mall, multiple highway endeavor. NJ needs its malls, because they represent a commercially and spatially sound means of starting up a highly visited business venture in a state that all but refrains from imitating the metro Philadelphia and New York settings that it exists as a suburb to. However, i don’t think that i need them.
There is something distasteful about obviously thirteen year old girls in tube tops and capri pants with little wicker purses trying to catch peoples eye. There is something gut-wrenching about the Disney characters pressed onto black cotton shirts in startling standard alternative store Hot Topic, whose should-be motto was on sale as a witty Tee. Express is hedging their bets heavily on pin stripes and retro-hemmed skirts, while Wet Seal is leading the pack of outlets selling peasant-style blouses in ridiculously busy prints. Aeropostale seems to be convinced that terrycloth, baby animals, and sparkles are the undeniable keys to fashion success – and are willing to offer you an obscenely cheap PDA with your $50 purchase to prove it. And don’t even get me started on how hard i laughed when i looked inside the store that was (nearly fictionally) titled Rave Girl, or about the swimsuit at the Macy’s entrance that appeared to be depicting a 9/11 memorial somewhere just above the crotch.
It’s not that the existence of malls bothers me so much as the ways in which people rely and depend on them. At a time when everything from the songs you hear on the radio to the fashions you see on campus are dictated just as much by brute force marketing as by public opinion, how can a mall be anything other than a virtual cesspool of what corporate America thinks you should buy? Of course they only have a handful of independent albums, of course their size six jeans wouldn’t have ever fit me in my anorexic heyday, and of course the price of Neverwinter Nights is nearly the same at every store we visit. It is not a coincidence, it is a calculation, and every striped polo shirt that you buy means that everything added up just as planned.
If my Communications degree means anything to me, it is the ability to see through corporate curtains to the strings being pulled, even if it also means Elise might never take me shopping again.
After much deliberation i have decided that i can only pull this off because i am so incredibly sexy.
I’ll share some of my other sleep-deprived conclusions with you later this week.
The way things were headed i seemed due for either a complete mental breakdown or halfway shaved head. And, having just had a complete mental breakdown two weeks ago, i decided that looking like half-hearted punk rocker was better than lying in the middle of my curled up floor sobbing and speaking gibberish.
Subtract half an hour. I was sitting on the stairs averting my eyes from the television because Nicodemus has always scared me. As her hair fluttered down to a white trash bag spread out on the linoleum one razor-sized strip at a time Kate said that none of us had ever seen her natural hair color before. Grinning, she stood up and and walked out of the too fluorescent bathroom as Ross turned to me and asked if we were just trimming up the back.
Add twenty minutes, and i was attacking it with scissors while he shaved off the back with a half-inch blade, pulling at my thick hair so hard that i was crying. Tears carried shards of hair down my face like tiny rivers as we all laughed out loud. I wish that i could blame our hysterical laughter on being drunk or stoned, but we had all stopped drinking hours beforehand. They were laughing heartily, rolling around on the floor outside the bathroom, and i was laughing at myself.
Subtract fifteen minutes. They voted five to one for my haircut, but add twenty-five to that and they all drifted away. Bored with me, though i played the comedian as i tried to get Ross to pay attention to how short my hair should be. Elise won’t like this, i said, and they all laughed at my antics as i complained about the hair that was in my eyes and how much it all hurt. She won’t like, i thought, because i’ll hate it. I will never be able to convince her.
Plus thirty minutes. Standing in front of the mirror with the clippers wielded like a dagger, and it was almost perfect. Ross had left, Kate was in the shower. The top was excellent, the back was a little shaggy, but the sides were all wrong. They needed to blend from the top, and loop around my ears. The left side slowly conformed to my wishes, but on the right i came too close in front of my ear and was left with a tiny bald spot when i pulled away. It just won’t do, i thought.
They had joked earlier about giving me a mohawk.
Six months ago today was the third night Elise and i slept beside each other in the same bed. Six months before that i was packing up what there was of my life and wondering if it meant anything at all. Six months before that i was already saying what i refused to let myself figure out. And i don’t remember what happened six months before that, other than that it was a week before i started using blogger.
After Ross left, Kate wanted a shower, Lindsay wanted me to sweep up the hair in the bathroom, and Erika wanted to go to sleep. I just wanted my curls back, to save them for winter when i can be pretty again, and now i am just teary and wide awake waiting for the train to take me away from here in the morning.
I will not forget this feeling.
Well, it’s not quite a mohawk, but the clippers are still in the bathroom.