hoist.

On Sunday I did a very American thing: I went to the mall.  For the second time in three days.

It happened like this:  I thought I might like a new T-shirt, so Friday at lunch time I nipped into Old Navy.  A dangerous place at the best of times - look, cheap cute shirts! - they were having a monstrous sale and since I was on a 20 minute limit I threw a load of things onto the counter and went home 187 dollars the worse for the adventure. 

And then at the end of the day I pulled all of it out and thought "Self, you do not need 187 dollars worth of things you didn't have time to try on in the store.  And I went through it all and added, "Self, what were you thinking HERE?" to my mental conversation and sorted it all down to two arguably useful light cotton summer shirts and a really, really cute sundress, because it was adorable, and really I am susceptible to cute summer dress fantasies, I am.  And then I loaded the remaining things back into the shopping bag and put it by the front door and on Sunday afternoon I put it in the car and drove to the mall.

Which is how I came to be thinking about how American the Mall is as a weekend activity.

Net loss of 68 dollars. 

As I was pocketing my debit receipt there came upon me a moment of truth that what I was looking for when I gave into the initial impulse was not a new t-shirt - because I have 12 million t-shirts - but for my existing t-shirts to look better.  Aimless shopping is a manifestation of dissatisfaction, you understand, the trick is to identify the root cause. 
Result: a quick hop over to Kohl's and, for less than my Old Navy return, 5 new bras.  Not interesting bras you understand - I have lots of them, they stay looking great because they only get worn under the three things that demand that particular structural undergarment or neckline, but boring everyday light colored ones that are plain and unpretty and hold everything up very nicely so that my old shirts look great.

As is the way of bras, two will be worn only twice before some quirk of structure makes me reject them with instinctive revulsion when they are the only thing left at the bottom of the drawer of a morning.  They will stay there until the moment two summers from now when they are all that is left and this same scenario plays itself out all over again.

One will be perfect but fall apart immediately.

And two will be perfectly fine and last until they are old and gray and cause a vague unhappiness when I look at myself wearing them under a t shirt.

Same dollars - a few fewer actually.  Very different outcome.  Still a consumer outcome, you understand, which is a separate concern, but purposeful rather than purposeless.  I regard it as an improvement.

(I am aware that spending this much time thinking about, shopping for and discussing the support of my secondary sex traits in order to be attractive - however I define that - has several layers of - is it irony?  Whatever.  I am a tool of the Patriarchy.  No matter how I fight.)

Did some knitting this weekend - visited the Subversive Lace exhibit Saturday which meant 3 hours of train time, which meant a new project.    Kind of an overall meh reaction - not to the knitting, to the museum.  I'm glad I went, I'm very glad that textiles of this nature have been given a serious exhibition and granted some ground in the vernacular of contemporary art.  I wish that the overall content had been higher quality I guess. There were some extraordinary things - a shetland blanket with a knit/purl pattern spelling out "it sucks", a perforated car that left patterns of dirt lace on the floor, a dress bound in I-cord veins.  A set of hand cut panels of muslin coated with gesso and graphite were visually stunning and had a weird organic sense of growth and motion about them.  A couple of three-dimensional pieces that kind of invited you inside them - one felty/cellulose/fiber one with letters that I wished passionately had had text instead, and one that was a tangle of wires and made me think of Dr. Who.  A knitted lead teddy bear that had this marvelous sagging heft to him.   Clothing knit from shredded Financial Times - which actually had some edge as social commentary.

But there were a few things, a few too many, that made me think of middle school art class too.  Leading to some further ruminations on art and craft and where the intersection lies. Or more correctly where one leads into the other..or fails too.  Though.... I used to go to museums and just accept that what I was looking at was art, and perhaps because I have some stake of my own in the textile arts, this was the first time I can remember just staying - uh uh, nope, not buying it. 

But all in all, the MOMA store was more entertainment, plus more Muji recycled cotton socks, always a good thing.  More consumerism I am afraid.  And someone else's Muji sock pictures, as I am too lazy to go upstairs and get them. 

Cast on Candace Eisner Strick's Adagio shawl on the way to New York, to the astonishment of the man across the aisle who kept talking to me despite my earphones, about how I should look into the internet as a means of selling my knitting.  No amount of telling him I had no desire to sell my knitting, or ignoring him, had any influence on his discourse.

Yarn - 100% silk hand-dyed by Judy.  Three minutes later I pulled it out because I misunderstood what CES meant by crochet chain cast on, and in the silk didn't want to deal with sewing down the live stitches.    Is it too, too, TOO that I was sitting on the filthy floor of Penn Station - surely one of the more disgusting places in North America - photographing my error for the blog? 

Note to self - when finished blogging, go put those jeans in the wash.

Fantastically easy to memorize pattern, much more progress on the way home.  I do love me some orange.  Judy does nice work with color, yes?

Now, I must vacuum.  Pray excuse me.

Comments

[donnalee]

You are the second person who had some negative things to say about the MOMA exhibit. Good thing the gift shop is open. I knit on the train into work wearing headphones but that doesn't stop people from talking. I don't want to be rude so I answer. Right on about the unmentionables!

[Sarah]

Yet another reminder that I need to go bra shopping.

[Janet]

Gorgeous shawl, and as for the guy across the aisle? Argh! Earphones, books -- sometimes I think people look at the listener/reader and think, "Oh, they're just doing that because they have no one to talk to! I'll help them out!"

The bra story... I am so jealous. One of my pipe dreams is a breast reduction so I can actually buy bras in stores, instead of having to order horribly expensive ones from specialty places. Seems like you can buy a size-32 blouse at the mall, but an H cup? Not so much...

[kmkat]

My 22-yo son went with me last week to see the Subversive KNitting exhibit. We looked around a bit, mostly "meh" but then we joined a couple women who were listening to and following a docent/guide who was talking about certain exhibits. That turned out to be a really good thing. When we were done son and I said to each other, "That was better than I expected!"