Shopping continues to grow weirder and more alien for me...

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Summary: I am becoming the sort of person who doesn't handle shopping in stores very well. At least some stores. I wonder if it is just me?

BLOT: (02 Feb 2013 - 07:19:55 PM)

Shopping continues to grow weirder and more alien for me...

Bought Area11's All The Lights in the Sky as a cheery soundtrack to a dreary day, then went out with Sarah to do some Saturday fun shopping. It started well, despite the gray, but quickly soured as we pulled into the Target shopping center to eat at Zoe's Kitchen and found the traffic thick and spastic. It was thinner near MovieStop, and she wanted to look in Dick's for some new "Barefoot" shoes, so we parked near the former and split into our respective shopping cliques. Except while traffic was thin in terms of cars near MovieStop, the inside was packed with unwatched kids and unfocused browsers and the sort of people who stand at the counter and talk too long with cashiers.

I was going to jokingly tweet about how shopping in a movie store was like streaming movies online except there was 1/100 the selection at twice the price, all the best ones were used and beat up, and annoying people kept shoving in the way as I forced to rely on blurb text to try and make a selection. Then I didn't tweet it, because it was far too long, and it sounded whiny, but, in retrospect, simply has too much of the truth.

I did pick up Phantasm II (they did not have III) and apparently Godzilla vs Biollante is out on DVD so I'm glad I went, especially since my taste in movies is running to the cheap and unwanted now. Virtually everything that cost more than $10 was the kind of thing I would rather rent, excepting maybe The Qatsi Trilogy, which is currently high enough to be effectively cost prohibitive until some time mid-March-ish, when all my free money is not used by power-bills and tag-renewals and tax-payments.

With Zoe's out due to the social signal-to-noise ratio being horrible, we hit up China House for a couple of tofu dishes and got our spirits back. Only a couple of tables taken up besides ours, one by the staff that was relaxing post-lunch, and we thought maybe the day was turning better, but afterwards at Bridgestreet, it went back to the annoying.

Even on a murky, rainy day, the stores were packed with the sort of people who consider spending money to be a sign of wellbeing, and nearly every store required forethought and luck just to move around without having to wade through crowds. I had neither today, and was especially unlucky in finding any of the books that I wanted—including David Wong's This Book is Full of Spiders—and every time I would stop to look at something, I would have people show up and act like I was in their way, then I would move somewhere else and treat someone like they were in my way, and the whole thing was a parody of civilization. The final straw was when the guy at the Apple Store tried to talk me into getting a $80 item I couldn't afford nor really wanted with the promise that I could bring it back if I didn't want it. I saved us both time and skipped the middle step.

Back at home, just listening to music and writing a couple of more poems (accidentally skipped yesterday) and talking to my friend Niko about setting design has helped. Now Sarah and I might watch some Godzilla or some Sword Art Online or maybe rent True Lies [don't know, just have had a hankering] from Vudu or Amazon, and really this is the shopper I know I've become: Ok with streaming stuff through subscription services or paying $2.99 to rent a digital copy for a day or two, but less ok with wandering through crowds on a weekly basis just for the off-chance I might find something that I did not know about and being glad for the serendipity of being in that store and looking at that shelf on that day. Which has served me well in the past but no longer seems to match my spending habits. I have a big DVD collection, and the two I bought today go hand-in-hand with it, but shopping for books and movies and music, now, is largely a digital, lonesome thing for me. I kind of wish I could do something like combine the two, the equivalent of maybe checking out a digital book from a local library so that the community and the technology both grow and expand, but I have to choose and for now I prefer signal to noise and am not terribly concerned with permanence. And I don't even have a smart phone. How weird is that‽

PS: At least the mildly wasted Barnes & Noble outing did allow me to overhear the genesis of this tweet:

PPS: I think it is more complicated than agoraphobia (I work in a fairly patron-facing library position with lots of crowded interactions) or cheapness (I am actually ok with paying more for the digital assuming I get a complete product). At its core, I think this is issue has to do with the information exchange portion of the purchase. I like to be able to dip toes into webs of info and description, to dilly dally and act unsure, to alternate between rapid decisions and slow meanderings, moving toward a goal of finding things I truly enjoy in the sea of things I might find merely worth some of my time. Most movie purchases for me (or "purchases" if you prefer, since I am talking about leasing the right to watch a digital stream of a movie forever or five years, whichever comes first), for example, only come after visiting IMDB and Amazon and Wikipedia and talking to friends and Googling past movies from the director and looking up books that the movie references and so forth. Movies, books, and CDs, to me, are more like gateways to information intersections. For stores, especially the corporate franchise sorts, they just don't seem to cater to people like me. I take too long and ask weird questions. C'est la vie.

Me in 2013

OTHER BLOTS THIS MONTH: February 2013


Written by Doug Bolden

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