If you're like me, you have a hard time shopping. If you're like me, you're also 25 years old and have not yet managed to accrue any credit because you are yet to own your first real big-person credit card, so if you are like me, I'm sorry. But, at any rate. If you're like me, shopping is an ambivalent endeavor, at once gratifying and horrible. Gratifying, because living in this country and stepping into a supermarket instantly makes you feel so incredibly wealthy. Just behold this subsidized bounty! A few measly dollars for age-defying greasepaint guaranteed to smooth, tone, enrich, and take years off your complexion! A handful of coin for a cellophane packet of brightly-colored undergarments! Mere pocket change for a variety of sugared waters, overflowing with sucralose, electrolytes, and B vitamins! What do I need B vitamins for? Who knows! The bottle assures me they're part of a "hydration trifecta," and in my sandpaper-lipped, feverish state -- which takes hold of me whenever I step foot in any kind of store and is only slightly aggravated by the mischievous rhinoviri currently replicating in my body -- I snatch up three 32 ounce bottles. Here, in this moment, pressing the molded plastic to my chest, I have at last shattered the fairy ring of direct deposits, credit transfers, and online bank statements. Here, as I clutch this screaming purple liquid, the ethereal wealth that has been floating in cipher form through some cosmically immaterial realm, anchored to me only through easily-forgotten passcodes and PINs, is materialized. Here is the glory of the transubstantiation.
And then I get to the makeup aisle.
Shopping for sustenance (sustenance? screaming purple energy drink in "grape and other natural flavors" is sustenance now?) is one thing. But shopping for any personal accoutrement, be it liquid, gas, or solid, is another beast entirely. Here I can stand for twenty minutes staring in despair at a collection of shimmery eye makeup, wondering with infinite seriousness which one of these miniature palettes best reflects my inner being, my soul, my eternally Platonic glassy essence. This is where the creeping horror comes in, slowly washing over my body in the layer of sweat that results from standing too long under fluorescent lighting in a heavy coat and assorted winter knittery. All of these diminutive plastic vials, tubes, hinged compacts, bottles, and jars cast their reflective glare at me, novice and amateur that I am, as I make my way timidly down the infinitely long beauty aisle. And that feeling of triumph, of satisfaction with the cornucopia of the world that just came from my impending purchase of sickness-dispelling energy drink, it's all seeped out of me. Because here is death staring me square in the face. She is smiling, radiant, illuminated through a complex triangulation of airbrush, floodlight, and Photoshop. Like the embittered middle-aged director in Synechdoche, New York, she is telling me that I am young now and only playing the part of someone who knows about the despair and decay of the flesh, but that the real irony is that I'm on my way to knowing that lesson all too well. No amount of B vitamins will save me. No amount of Visa Power Rewards Pointstm will save me. No amount of Revlon Perle 011 Lilac ShimmerNEW! NOUVEAU! NUEVO! slathered on my rapidly aging corpse will save me. Like my short-lived rhinovirus companion, I am doomed to an inglorious end. After a brief stint of tormenting my biosphere, my energy will wither like a paralyzed spirochete's, and all that frenetic motion and dreaming of conquest will have been for naught.
Okay, "post to blog!!" checked off today's lengthy planner to-do list. Now, uh... on to reading the entirety of Les Mots et Les Choses? I don't think I've quite gotten the hang of this parceling thing.
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