Does it ever occur to you that your life is extremely small? That isn’t a threat. I met a girl the other day whose father was a diplomat, moved them round various exciting countries every three years and kept an extensive household staff. But it didn’t take that to make me realise that fame, fortune and groundbreaking political events aren’t exactly popping out from under my tea cozy. Allow me to illustrate.
1. We’re going to the dump this week and I am eagerly looking forward to it. I’m not sure why. By all accounts the shop at the dump is just like your common-or-garden op shop, no more likely to be dripping with pearls and silver (or, more to my tastes, antique Singer sewing machine tables) than the average Salvation Army thrift store. Perhaps it was watching The Iron Giant which conjured up images of futuristic piles of (tasteful, sombrely-hued and appropriately sanitary) junk… or maybe it was WALL-E with its bleached-out images of peace and rest. Not that “peace and rest” was probably what the Pixar bods were trying to convey, post-apocalyptic dystopia and all… but then, they aren’t Aspie. Or are they? It’d be odd if they weren’t, sort of, but they always seem so darn social on the Making-Ofs. Anyhoo. When my excellent mother asked me where I wanted to go for the day trip that is her birthday present and I said “Oo, the dump”, she sort of snorted and said we could do that as a freebie. So woot. I wonder if I’ll find a pianola?
2. I was out running errands today for four hours and it nearly killed me. At barely twenty-three I have reached the age where half a day’s shopping causes me to take to my bed with lumbago and eau de cologne. “Young mothers have more energy”, pish.
3. During said errands I went into an op shop and bought a fairly unpleasant pillowcase so I could cut the wooden buttons off it. For $2. I was proud.
You see how it is?
I also went to the library and borrowed a bunch of books, having finished Middlemarch and not being able to muster up the requisite enthusiasm for the Road Code. I was sitting on a bench in town noisily slurping a thickshake and sniffling over Queen Victoria’s letters to her daughter when my mother-in-law surprised me from behind. Why does she never come across me in town when I am successfully negotiating peace treaties or being hailed for saving a dog from a taxidermist. I’ll tell you why. Actually, we had quite a pleasant chat, even if I did little to re-establish my street cred by announcing in response to her “What’s up?”, “I’M going to the dump!”. Turns out her mother has been, but that was to dump things, which I imagine is an entirely different experience.
Hokay, so, conundrum. Would you rather keep your current wardrobe (the clothes, you clot, not the lion-the-witch-and-the), or have the monetary value (market price) of all the clothes in it so you could buy more, but not get to keep any of your current clothes? And you had to spend the money on clothes, you couldn’t do cunning things with op shops and buy a golf cart.
I think, upon reflection, I’d rather keep my current clothes. Which is nice to know. As lacklustre as much of my wardrobe is, I do have a few bits of clothing I’d sadly miss. Two hats, a skirt and a coat, at least; and they are not nothing, they are something. Plus, rebuilding one’s wardrobe from scratch would probably require a vasty deal of mental effort, like building your own house. Think of T-shirts as doorknobs - the ones you have might not be ideal, but they serve the purpose and if faced with an immense catalogue of them and the pressure to choose the perfect ones, you might develop a stress bunion behind your eye and have to undergo a horrible lancing procedure. Plus, buying all your clothes at once makes you run the risk of getting a whole lot of super-trendy items which quickly become dated and miserable, or of letting a brief fashion fad influence your clothing choices unduly. (F’rinstance, if I had to rebuild my wardrobe from scratch now pretty much everything would be dark chocolate brown and/or steampunk. Which would be super, actually, but I imagine limiting in the long run.)
Then again, if you chose an entire wardrobe at once you could probably do arty matchy things with ensembles and actually get your colours done and work the whole thing out scientifically, which has a certain OCD appeal. So I leave it to your conscience.
Mother Says:
