Productive Consumption

We just got back from a very successful shopping trip in Dartmouth with Krista, wherein I got a bunch of new (to me) clothes and a couple of books I've been itching to read for months. Value Village was playing all new wave hits, which made the whole experience about 40 times better than it usually is. I'm not much of a shopper, I'll admit. I'd kind of rather stick my hand into a blender set to "puree" than try on clothes most days. But today was painless and actually kind of fun, and at least a quarter of the things I'd picked out actually fit and didn't have holes or permanent stains. And there was an old guy outside my changing booth having fun telling his wife whether the clothes she was trying on were any good.

"... why don't they/ do what they say/ say what they mean..."

"Yup, fits great. Next."

"...me on/ I'll be gone/ in a day or..."

"How much? Four bucks? Put it back."

"...just like a poem/out of synch..."

"Wow. Get two of those."

He went a little overboard when he told Alison that the jeans she'd worn into the store fit her perfectly, but I couldn't really blame him. It was pretty exciting to be having a good time in a clothing store.

After Old VaVi we headed over to Chapters for Starbuck's (boo!) coffee (yay!) and literary browsing. There was a table set up in the middle of the store with a DJ spinning loud rock music. Seemed like kind of a strange choice for a bookstore that encourages people to sit and read, but I found out the Trailer Park Boys were going to be arriving any minute to sign copies of "their" new book about the TV show. Whatever keeps people reading, I guess.

I looked for Douglas Hofstadter's new book, I Am a Strange Loop, which I'd heard was coming out around now, and lo and behold, there it was in the Science section (which is a subsection of the larger Arts section, puzzlingly). Hofstadter's been my intellectual hero since I was about fourteen years old, and his 1979 magnum opus, Gödel, Escher, Bach, has probably been the most character-influencing book of my life thus far (unless you count the Bible's inverse influence), and I just have one appendix left to read in his buddy Daniel Dennet's rear-end-kicker, Breaking the Spell, so I'm pretty psyched to sit down and devour this new one. It's about the seeming incompatibility of consciousness and materialism. Yum.

Of course, I would have been happy to leave with just that, but on a whim I decided to check whether Joshua Ferris's first novel, Then We Came to the End, ever came out. I'd read a more than glowing review of it by Nick Hornby in The Believer about a year ago now, and have been wanting to read it ever since. It's about people working in an ad agency and is told entirely in the first person plural, so that the agency itself is more the main character than any of its particular employees. Sounds pretty interesting, right? Plus, it's apparently gut-bustingly hilarious. Unfortunately, the review, which I read on the plane to Cuba (and I'm still embarassingly less than a quarter of the way through Infinite Jest), turned out to be an advance one and the book has taken its time actually seeing the fluorescent light of Chapters' ceiling. But slap my cranium and toss me in a tar pit if it wasn't in too. I swear the shopping gods were watching out for me today. So now I've got two brand new, expensive, hard cover books to drool over, fondle, and maybe even read if I get some time.

Sweeeeet!

- Andrew