Reasons I am a Bad American

#1: I hate to shop.

Toward the end of the summer, after our travels to the east coast, the west coast, and points between, we realized that O. had only two pairs of socks left. (“Two pairs” is putting it generously, since one of those “pairs” consisted of one grey sock and one tan sock.) But it was summer, sandal season, so it really wasn’t a crisis. I put “buy socks for O.” on my list of things to do eventually.

O. started preschool at the beginning of September, and the weather started cooling down. We also lost the tan half of his second pair of socks. He was down to one pair, white socks that grew dingy around the ankles as the week wore on, then came clean in the weekend load of whites. Good thing O. is a sweet young thing and his feet don’t stink (yet). Still, I knew he needed socks, and I planned to get him some new ones. Eventually.

Now it’s October, and I still have not bought my little son his socks. What kind of a mother am I? A mother who hates, really fucking hates to shop. I walk into a mall, and my mouth gets dry, my eyes itch, and my head begins to throb. I am immediately irritated, an irritation that grows every minute I am in the mall. Normally an easygoing and fairly social creature, I feel annoyance and resentment toward the throngs of people milling around me. I feel overwhelmed by the morass of colors and sounds assaulting me. Waves of nausea come over me as half-dressed, well-muscled aryans in the window posters of the Abercrombie and Fitch store eye me smugly.

It’s not that I’m pure, free of all materialistic desire. I like to have shopped. I love my two-tone grey suede and black leather Sketchers sneakers, which I bought in the spring of ’03 and still wear all the time. But I had to suffer to procure them, spending a disorienting and distressing hour in the deepest circle of my personal hell.

I can’t fully account for why I hate the mall so much. I can come up with good, logical reasons. The mall is aesthetically appalling, true, too bright and too loud. I think American consumer culture is excessive, and nowhere is that excess more on display than the mall. But it’s more than that, something ineffable that revolts me in a completely irrational way.

Thift stores are another matter entirely. I feel at ease in a thrift store, where shopping is less like drowning in a sea of colors and styles and more like a scavenger hunt. Maybe part of what bugs me about the mall is the rack upon rack of identical items in a range of colors and sizes. It’s overwhelming. At a thrift store, each item is unique. I can rule out 90% of a store's stock with a quick once-over. I know immediately if I have an affinity with a particular item, and then it’s just a matter of a quick try-on to make sure it fits. Plus, it’s low risk. Even fairly nice thrift stores usually don’t ask too much of you, price-wise, and if you end up sending a particular item on to the Goodwill, you need not feel too guilty – after all, it only set you back eight bucks.

That’s why 70% of my personal wardrobe is “pre-owned,” originating either at a thrift store or in an eBay auction. (Ah, eBay, where you can get anything, even if the gods of fashion have deemed it outré this season.) The rest mostly comes from catalogues or from those rare, painful trips to the mall.

And among the things I must get at the mall are underwear and socks. And that brings me back to O. and his one pair of increasingly off-white socks. I actually went to our local kids’ thrift store yesterday to get O. some cool weather clothes, dropping a whopping sixty bucks for more than a dozen very cute items. I had intended to brave the mall on my way home in order to procure for my boy – at long last – some socks. But as I was leaving the thrift store with my sack o’ boys’ clothes, feeling less and less up to the dreadful journey ahead of me, I had a thought. “Um, you don’t happen to sell… socks?” I ventured to the clerk. “Well, not usually, but when we do, they’re in that basket down there.” In among whimsical headbands and mittens I found two pairs of little teeny socks, in the 0-6 months range. Oh, well, it was worth a try.

You may be judging me. You may be asking “would you buy used socks for yourself?” Well, I don’t know. I’ve never had the opportunity to consider that question. But it doesn’t really matter, because they didn’t have any damn used socks anyway. In my defense, I would never buy my kid used underwear, so let the record state that I do draw the line somewhere. And soon, very soon, I promise, I will go to the mall and buy the poor kid some brand new socks.

Unless I can find some on eBay.