Online Shopping

What am I doing? I am shopping online, which is only my favorite thing to do in the whole world. Isn’t that dumb? I am not trying to toot my own horn or fart out a reville or something, but I have done some fairly incredible things in my life. I am able to pursue dreams and actually live them, do them, be them, but what is my true passion? It is deeply embarrassing to admit.

I like to put objects into carts and never check out. I just put imaginary things in imaginary shopping carts and basically imaginary shop. Online shopping isn’t by its nature very satisfying for me, at least not for the money that is spent. Obviously it is awesome to find something you really do need and you are able to order it online and save yourself a trip to the store, but usually I shop for things I don’t need. In fact I would be better off if I had less of these things (i.e. shoes).

I am looking for the perfect shoe that I most likely already have or doesn’t exist in the world except in the glorious glitter universe of my shoe imagination. It’s like the opposite of Cinderella. I’m not looking for the shoe’s owner. I am the owner, looking for the shoe.

I have no fairy godmother. I have a real mother, who also loves shoes and I remember her buying a pair in the 70s for $134.00 which back then for our family might as well have been $1,000,000 and totally feeling justified about the purchase and the pride and entitlement and enjoyment and self esteem that went into her decision to buy them was a terrific example for me growing up. for my mother, and now for me, the spending of money was stating simply, “I matter.” And that felt good. And it still feels good.

I have to go get my own glass slipper – which never seemed practical in my opinion. It seems like glass shoes would hurt a lot, because glass wouldn’t give like leather, and the friction would make them squeak loudly enough to sound like you were farting with every step. So I want a proverbial glass slipper, not an actual one. Also, clear shoes fog up in an unsettling way. I have a bunch of different styles and they all make my feet sweat appallingly and slurp when you take them off.

In my mind, the right shoes will solve all my problems. In the right shoe, I am made whole, entire. Nothing is missing. The shoe will bring me all here. The shoe is what I need. I have a shoe shaped hole in my soul and I want you to step in.

The original shoe wound happened on a visit to Rome. I was moved to tears by Bernini everywhere in the streets, but what truly transformed me was a pair of platform pumps encrusted with rhinestones huge and irregularly shaped and placed, giving the shoe the appearance of a broken mirror. It was a disco ball morphed into a chunky heeled platform pump with a thin buckled ankle strap like a halo on top of this angel of a shoe. I was already late and I had no time to buy them or even try them. I retraced my steps later and I couldn’t find the store again. I wondered if they had been some kind of shoe mirage, a footwear fever dream. Perhaps they were.  I have been in pain ever since I saw those shoes but couldn’t possess them. I have been looking for them ever since.

I want to hunt, stalk, close in on and capture the shoe, so I will order the shoe, but by the time it comes days later in a neat Fed Ex box, the shoe’s appeal has diminished. That delicious moment of wanting could not stretch itself across even next day shipping, so how much do I really need it? Almost every time, I forget that I have ordered the shit, and it arrives as a reminder of my own fickle heart. It comes and I don’t care. And I never return anything because that would require me to have tape which doesn’t exist in my atmosphere. I have none of the real ordinary day to day stuff that everyone has. Yes I may have a pair of handmade and autographed manolo blahnik peacock feather mules that are too precious and holy to wear so instead they straddle the altar above my fireplace, but don’t even ask for scotch tape because I never have that shit. You need to stick something together? Forget it. You have come to the wrong house.

5 thoughts on “Online Shopping

  1. I love to shop online which DH thinks is odd because I am a tactile shopper. When I am out and about I can probably touch thirty things I have no intention of buying before I even get to the one item I am there for.

    Online I tend to load up the cart with things I like then whittle it down before I make a purchase. I wouldn’t say I forget about them b/c I keep the receipt in my inbox until the parcel arrives. But for me there is great excitement on seeing the FedEx truck pull up to my driveway. It can only be diminished if the parcel is addressed to someone else in the house — talk about a downer.

    If I send you some scotch tape will you send me some shoes? 😀

    Cheers!

  2. Wanna know the only thing better than shopping for shoes online? Shopping in person at the online stores (did I blow your mind?). We have a local big name online shipping center here that has set up a store.
    It is filled with all of their returns! Great new shoes at 50% off. Something to think about!

  3. another beautiful day by the beach — i can imagine that happening in rome — it’s a good thing they’re not throwing raw waste out the windows any longer as they did then but now it’s done on-line or streaming bravo as if that isn’t an ironic name for much of their latest programming after people started learning to cook — presumably that came after the stalking and hunting of another sort when some people became incapable of discerning reality from contrived reality and then some became lost in a post-post-modern inertia as the boys of sudan were hopping gator heads, not gator bait, to trek along deserts and circumventing repugnant militia as jonny crack head drunk off his ass could order them on-line as an outdated form of “picture bride” to be a newly minted minute maid, but i want to delete that story as that karma has a price that i reckon some societies don’t even know what they’ve opened. regardless, have a lovely and awesome weekend removed from that kind of thinking. love you.

  4. I take relief in knowing I’m not the only one who does online window shopping. I enjoy the searching and and putting things in my cart and then then at the end, exiting out as if it never happened. The only problem is that I occasionally forget to press “exit” and end up buying the shoes.

    One of my most embarrassing moments was a few weeks after my partner and I moved in together. One night, while I couldn’t sleep, I went online shopping. One week later, 3 giant boxes with a total of 25 pairs of shoes arrived at our door. I had a little bit of explaining and returning to do, but I got some awesome deals!

  5. This is the best blog entry EVER. You keep me on the edge of my seat in stitches girlfriend. Thanks ~ Love Ya! See u in Cleveland 10/5/12!! xoMara

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