Blustery

It’s a Winnie the Pooh blustery day today, cloudy and gray with little peek-throughs of sun here and there, and stiff winds that make the 60-some degree temperatures feel almost cold. For the first time this fall, I’m seeing lots of leaves on the ground and lots of golden-red color on the trees. It’s October. The mists and mellow fruitfulness lasted a week, and now we’re headed toward full November. It feels like Thanksgiving. 

Today I actually left the house for a work-related thing. I leave the house all the time, of course, but I work completely at home. My CEO, a high-powered tiny dynamo of a female human, bought a table at the Montgomery County Business Hall of Fame luncheon (she is a Hall of Famer) and invited me to attend the event. I arrived late to find a huge room filled with all of the local movers and shakers, and me. My boss knows how introverted I am and I think she wanted to pull me out of my shell a bit. It was fine. Everyone was nice; and thanks to meetings, I arrived too late for the awkward pre-luncheon social hour, and had to leave immediately after the final presentation, so all I really had to do was politely greet everyone at the table, listen to the speeches, applaud as appropriate, and eat my lunch. It was delicious. 

I had to park in a parking garage, and I noted my location as I exited the car, smugly pleased with myself for having remembered not to forget where I parked. It didn’t occur to me until it was time to leave that I should also have remembered what the car looks like. It’s a rental. I remembered that it was a Hyundai, but I couldn’t remember what color it was, and it didn’t beep when I clicked on the key fob. I found it eventually. I’m still a little shaken up from Friday’s mishap, and learning how to drive a new car kept me just busy enough not to think about scraping guardrails and blowing out tires. I drove home without incident, finished my workday, and here I am. I’m going to change out of my luncheon attire so that I can go for a walk. I’ll need a sweater, and maybe even a jacket. Winter is around the corner. 

Body shop

Oh my gosh, where do I even begin? Such a week I am having, and that is all I can say because the bad-week-having is work related and smart people don't write about work on the internet except in the most vague and mysterious language. Anyway, the already-interesting week just got more interesting. I'm waiting for a tow truck to tow away my poor car with its injured side panels and its flat tires and bent rims. Everyone is fine, but the car can’t go anywhere except on a flatbed. 

My younger son is learning to drive. He’s doing reasonably well, except that he tends to veer to the right a bit. I talk to other parents of teenage drivers, and this is a common occurrence. Oncoming traffic is scary to a new driver and they try to stay as far away from it as possible. I've been teaching him to adjust his position on the road, and he’s gotten much better. He’s been driving us back and forth between home and school for a few weeks now, without incident. Until today, when he veered too far to the right to avoid oncoming school buses on a narrow part of Baltimore Road. Just as I started to scream “too far to the right, too far,” I felt the car run the curb and scrape the guardrails on the passenger side, where I was sitting. That is a horrible sound, by the way. Both passenger side tires blew immediately, and we bumped along for the next block or two until we were able to pull into the parking lot of an apartment complex around the first corner. 

Teenage drivers have to have their first accidents, and this was a good one, if there is such a thing. No one was hurt; not physically, anyway. My son, to his credit, remained calm as he followed my instructions to get us off the road and into the parking lot. Only after the car was parked and he saw the damage and the holes in the flattened tires did he break down a bit. I sent him home with my sister-in-law, called the insurance company, and waited for the tow truck. 

It’s Sunday now. My car is in the body shop, the insurance claim is filed, and tomorrow, I’ll pick up a loaner car from Enterprise. My son is ready to drive again. I’m not ready to allow him to drive again, but I’ll have to get over that. I have a few days–he’s not allowed to drive the rental, so I won’t have to allow him behind the wheel again until at least Friday or Saturday. Maybe longer. I’m told that body shops are backed up right now. Something about labor shortages and supply chain issues. It seems that everyone is having a week. The whole world is having a week. 

The Final Frontier

I was working this morning. MSNBC was on in the background, and the top story was a nonegenarian's imminent launch into space aboard a rocket shaped like a penis. 

Hey don't yell at me. I was not part of the design team. I didn't build the penis-shaped rocket. I'm just describing it. Accurately. 

Anyway, I was about to join a meeting, and I walked into the family room to turn off the TV, just as the liftoff countdown passed T minus one minute. OK, I thought, I have a minute. I can watch Captain Kirk cross the final frontier. So I did. 

*****

As a technical achievement, the launch of New Shepard is pretty remarkable. I watched, amazed, as the velocity meter passed 1,000 MPH and the altitude took the rocket out of the Earth's atmosphere, and I imagined the crew watching out the tiny windows, seeing the Earth fall into the distance, ever smaller, just a green and blue orb. I turned off the TV and got on my call just as the Amazon astronauts were about to enjoy their zero g float around the spacecraft.

But you know what they say, right? Well, here's what I say: Just because a thing can be done, doesn't mean that it should be done. 

Just because you can accumulate more money than any other person ever has, doesn't mean that you should. But if you insist on grabbing a huge portion of the world's wealth all for yourself, making it possible to establish your own private little space force, OK, fine, it still doesn't mean that you should. But OK, you're bound and determined to grab everything for yourself and then use your riches to build your own proprietary NASA, making it possible to fire a 90-year-old man out of the Earth's atmosphere, fine. It still doesn't mean that you should. But OK, fine, you have all the money and you have your space fiefdom, and the 90-year-old man really wants to get on the rocket, so just go ahead. Just go ahead now. 

But if you’re asking me and I know you’re not but if you are, then DON’T, I’m telling you, just DON’T build a spaceship that looks so much like a giant penis that when it returns to Earth it appears to be literally screwing the entire world, That’s just plain common sense. 

*****

I’m glad William Shatner is OK, as far as we know. If you can think of another useful or productive thing that came out of this, then you’re a better thinker than I. If you can think of anything else, ANYTHING ELSE AT ALL that billionaires could do with their ill-gotten wealth, be sure to let them know. There has to be something. 

I'll wear your Granddad's clothes

Here’s a thing that I do. I buy a top or a dress or a sweater and I decide that that particular top or dress or sweater is the perfect one for me and that I need to have duplicates. I need to have back-ups. So I buy an extra, in another color if it’s available; or maybe an exact duplicate in the same color, just so that I will always have that perfect dress or top or sweater when I need it. 

On the one hand, this is a perfectly sensible thing to do. Women learn something as we grow older, and that is that we can no longer walk into a store and just buy any garment that looks cute on the hanger. You find that there are a few styles that work on your particular weird body, and you stick with them. Maybe you vary the colors or the patterns. Or maybe you stick with solids. I still like prints, but that’s me. Anyway, knowing as you do that fashion trends change and that certain shapes and silhouettes go in and out of style, you try to stock up on the ones that work when they’re available. As an example, LuLaRoe makes a shirt in a style called Randy (after a person, presumably, like all of their other styles). The Randy top is one of the items that I buy on repeat. 

Side note #1: I make fun of LuLaRoe just like every other right-thinking person. Why would a grown woman wear leggings printed with donuts or cupcakes or kittens? Why would you wear Disney apparel unless you happen to work at Disneyland? These are among the many questions that I have about LuLaRoe clothing. But the Randy is the exception. It's a simple baseball-style t-shirt that comes with solid sleeves and a patterned torso or the reverse, and while some of the patterns are truly hideous (Disney or donuts or the like), some are very nice. And the Randy goes well with pants and skirts and shorts, and it fits me well, and I like it. 

Side note #2: I know all about how problematic LuLaRoe is, even aside from the horrendous pre-K-appropriate prints and sack dresses. In fact, I knew about all of that even before the Amazon documentary. A friend of a friend sold LuLaRoe, and she lost a lot of money on her huge investment. And so I don't buy LuLaRoe products new anymore. I buy my beloved Randy tops secondhand on Thredup or in thrift stores or on Poshmark. 

Side note #3: Anyone else lol-ing at the unmitigated gall of AMAZON airing a documentary exposing corporate greed, shady business practices, and worker exploitation? 

*****

Anyway, if you don’t know about Poshmark and Thredup, they are both online resale stores. Thredup is like a consignment shop. People send in their stuff, and Thredup takes pictures and writes descriptions and sets prices and posts listings. When the items sell, the original owner receives a portion of the proceeds. Poshmark is more like a fashion-focused eBay without the auction-style bidding (although you can bargain over prices). You open a Poshmark account, set up your shop (they call it a closet), write your own descriptions and post your own pictures and set your own prices. Poshmark then keeps a commission on your sales. I’ve purchased items on Thredup but I have never consigned to them, but I do have a Poshmark closet, and I sell stuff every so often. It’s not very much money, but there’s something satisfying about allowing someone else to benefit from a bargain and recouping a little of your investment on an item that you no longer use. 

Both of these sites are very popular. Both of them promote the reduce-reuse-recycle sustainability ethic. Of course, it’s also just cheaper to buy used clothes. But it’s not just thrift and it’s not just environmental consciousness that makes these sites so popular. It’s desperation to get rid of stuff. We all have too much stuff. 

*****

Maybe it’s too broad to say that “we all” have too much stuff. But I certainly have too much stuff and even as I recognize this, I still continue to stockpile Randy tops and shift dresses and pants that fit. And I’ve been thinking about why I do that. I criticized the early pandemic hoarders just like everyone else, and what is stockpiling your favorite clothing types if it’s not hoarding against future shortages and in the process, possibly depriving others of access to the thing that I am hoarding? But the “thing” that I am hoarding is not actually a thing. It’s the feeling of security and ease and lack of self-regard that I feel when I am wearing certain clothing. I like that feeling of freedom. I want to feel that way every day. 

*****

We had a neighborhood garage sale last week. People could set up tables in the pool parking lot, display their items, and sell them to any and all comers. I didn’t go this time, but I’ve been to this annual event many times. We have lots of older people in this neighborhood, so in addition to the usual clothes and toys and household goods, you can often buy vinyl records, Sony Trinitron TV sets, typewriters, or old Trimline or Princess phones. My younger son, now 17, then 11, once bought a huge Clinton-era camcorder. He and his best friend, who had his own giant camcorder, spent the rest of the summer making nuisances of themselves by videotaping everything and everyone that they could point their lenses at. It was like Snapchat for the Stone Age. I have no idea if any of the footage is extant. Maybe they’re saving it for posterity. 

*****

It was a good weekend for garage sales. Everyone and their mom had a table or two set up in their driveway, with little piles of books or collectibles or toys, available for pennies on the original dollar. That made me see the upside to all of this overbuying and over accumulation. Amid the nearly annual political media frenzy over the disastrous impact that a default on the national debt would have on the economy and daily life (Stock market crash! Currency devaluation! Bank failures! Bread lines!) it's reassuring to think that at least we can't run out of stuff. Having more clothes than you need means that if we run out of fuel, we can always wear multiple layers for warmth. Or we can barter for whatever we need. I can trade a Randy or a Le Pliage for some bread and milk or some firewood. I picture a weekly market where people set up tables in their driveways and display everything they have to offer, and we all walk around carrying canvas totes full of sweaters and socks and light bulbs and books and canned food, offering a can of peaches for a pair of double A batteries or a bunch of extra Scrabble tiles for an unopened toothbrush. I figure that we can sustain a cashless neighborhood micro-economy for months--maybe years. 

That solves the problem of what to do with all of our excess stuff. It does not solve the problem of needing stuff in the first place, needing it for reasons other than physical survival. That's a different problem altogether. Maybe it’s a mental health problem. I tell myself that I buy too many similar clothing items because then I’ll always be able to enjoy the freedom that comes with not having to think about what you’re going to wear every day. It’s not really freedom, though, is it, if it depends on a shirt or a dress or a jacket? It’s not really freedom if it requires a thing. That is the thing that I wrestle with. 

Maybe I can find a therapist who accepts payment in books or postcards or Randy tops. Or maybe I should pray for detachment. Freedom demands detachment, and I am far from detached.