Shopping

We’re buying a car for my son today. His very old car’s last legs are wearing out, and it’s probably better for us to bite the bullet and hand over our savings for a new car than to keep sinking money into the old one.

My son is very excited, as well he should be. My husband and I grew up poor and I don't know what we find most amazing: that an 18-year-old will be pretty much handed a new(ish) car (he's contributing $1000), or that we are now the kind of people who can go out on a Sunday afternoon and buy our child a car. Amazing.

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Now we're test-driving; rather, he is test-driving, and I’m sitting in the back. He's a good driver, enough that the salesman complimented him. Getting into cars with strangers all day long must be the hardest thing about selling cars for a living.

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Car buying is much faster than it used to be. We walked in to Carmax about 2.5 hours ago, and now we have paperwork in hand, and we're just waiting for the staff to put the tags on the new car and to make it even cleaner than it already was. We bought a 2016 Nissan Rogue, black exterior and interior. It's very nice looking. My son loves it and if he's happy, then I'm happy.

He looks happy, doesn't he? 

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That was Sunday, and today is Monday. It’s actually my birthday. It feels like a slightly more festive than normal regular day. And that’s pretty good.

I went clothes-shopping on Saturday, and I bought some things. There are fashion moments when the prevailing look matches my aesthetic and my body type and my idea of how to live in clothes, and when those moments arise, I stock up. It might be too soon to tell, though, if this is really one of those moments. Because I’m going out to dinner soon, as nice middle-aged ladies tend to do on their birthdays; and I just perused my very well-stocked closet, but I can’t find anything to wear. It’s partly a weather thing. I’m terrible at the dreaded “transitional” seasons, when you have to balance the appropriate seasonal mood with the actual temperature. But it’s partly because I’m very bad at shopping and I keep buying the wrong things. I should stick with handbags.

Most of my clothes come from one store. I had a bad experience there on Saturday and instead of just letting it go, I told the company’s customer service department that I’d never shop there again. I know. I’m ridiculous. In my defense, it was a really bad experience and it’s their fault and they were utterly indifferent to my very valid concerns. But now I’m committed to this thing and I have to either find a new store, or find a way to shop there without them ever finding out. All cash, I suppose. Completely ridiculous, that's what I am. Fortunately, I have lots of company in the rest of the entire human race.

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It was a good birthday. I'm a year older. That’s better, as they say, than the alternative

Meanwhile it's going to be hot for another week or so, and the transitional clothing dilemma persists. The store that so upset me has my favorite kind of mid-calf length print rayon skirts because it’s apparently 1995 again. Those skirts will be just the thing to carry me through the warm days of the final transition from summer to fall. So I borrowed my husband’s Visa, set up a new online account with the store, and had the skirts shipped to my mother-in-law’s house. I get my skirts, and my boycott continues, as far as they know. Everyone wins.

I used to think that car-shopping was difficult, It’s nothing compared to buying a skirt.