A day at the mall

I have never cared much for shopping, especially clothes shopping.  I find all that taking off and putting on of garments tiresome, and I'm oddly insecure about choosing well.  Gift shopping also makes me anxious.  I have a history of buying people presents they don't like.  The only shopping I'm comfortable with and good at is grocery shopping.

This dislike intensified when I moved away from Los Angeles after 26 years.  Because I wasn't sure at the time where I would land, I divested myself of pretty much everything I owned, except for computer, some clothes, and irreplaceables such as photo albums.  When I finally settled into an apartment in Seattle, I didn't have furniture, a pan to cook in, a plate to eat off of, a fork to eat with, or a bed to sleep on.  And I didn't mind it at all.  In fact, I enjoyed that spare living.  I found that stores made me feel itchy and oppressed.  All that stuff stuff stuff stuff stuff.  So much to choose from, so much that's unnecessary, so much that's all about looking fashionable and sexy, which, as anyone who knows me can confirm, is not what I aspire to.

So it really was new for me to decide to spend an entire day at a big shopping mall.  I didn't have plans to buy anything.  I didn't really have plans at all, although I knew at some point I'd have lunch and see a movie.  I figured I would just show up and walk around, even going into stores selling things I had no interest in (such as one store devoted to computer games), just to notice whatever I noticed and feel whatever I felt.

Because I went straight to the mall after a doctor appointment, I was too early for most stores to be open, so I finished reading the short stories of Ernest Hemingway.  Then began the exploration.

There was one store devoted entirely to small models, mostly of cars and trucks, some boats.  Not the kind of models one puts together as a hobby, but the tiny tinny ones, matchbook vehicles I guess they're called.  This is a fairly high end mall.  How can such a specialized store possibly stay in business?

There were quite a few stores clearly designed for, and probably owned by, Asian people, both Chinese and Japanese.  For example, a little café-type store offering things like red bean soup with taro balls, and two stores called Japanese Style.

I finally know what a Lululemon product is.

In Nordstrom's, a generic-looking pair of walking shoes/sneakers cost $238!!!  Who buys these shoes, when there's a Sketchers nearby, at which I bought two pairs of nice sturdy shoes for less than $150?  I should mention that I do feel confident buying shoes and underwear, the only garments I always get new.  Shoes at Sketchers, underwear at Penney's.

Observation: No guy looks tough while eating an ice cream cone.

The cool part is that, when I had my lunch (crispy chicken sandwich with cole slaw, excellent fries, and terribly bitter iced tea), I was also able to get some really good writing done on my current full length play-in-progress.

The movie I saw was "Bullet Train", which gets a rather poor critics' rating on Rotten Tomatoes but is quite fun, wonderful characters.  It goes off the rails at the end (pun intended), but the story is engagingly complex.

And that was it, my day at the mall.  It's not a kind of day I need to repeat, but hey, how do we grow if we don't do something new?