clothes call

After holing up for a couple of days, I finally ventured outdoors. Actually, "outdoors" is misleading. I went to the mall.

Shopping is such a different experience in the West. Highly impersonal transactions with minimal human interaction: little chit-chat and no haggling. The plastic does all the talking. When buying on credit, the unpleasant reality that money is being spent - normally triggered by the act of counting and handing over money - is all but obliterated. At least for 28 days.

I tried on about 20 pairs of jeans before finding a pair that fits perfectly. I'm not sure why I focused on jeans. I did give away one of the two pairs that I took with me to Uganda, so perhaps that act of selfless charity left some sort of emptiness in me, a feeling that I'm down 50% in the denim department of my inner being.

Anyhow, finding jeans that fit (especially after trying on 20 pairs) creates an intoxicating euphoria that virtually carries a woman to the cash register. But I resisted the urge. The price tag helped. But more importantly, back in the far recesses of my mind, a small voice whispered. "Pssst... You don't need them!"

As it turned out, that small voice was not the voice of frugality; it was the voice of memory. When I got back to my parents' place, I rummaged through boxes crammed into various closets and crawl spaces and discovered... many pairs of jeans, most of which still fit, a stockpile from days when it seemed absolutely essential to have different pairs of jeans for daytime vs. evening outings, for coordinating with high- vs. mid- vs. low-heeled shoes, for accommodating pre-breakfast vs. post-5-course-meal waistlines, for accentuating vs. minimizing the junk in my trunk. Holy crap! How could I have even considered buying yet another pair of jeans?

Relief washed over me. I felt... saved from that purchase, from my own excess. Mostly, in the aftermath of that near-miss of a purchase, I felt delivered from my own forgetfulness - about what I do and don't need, about all that I already have, about a former life as an active and yet unthinking consumer.