What should I buy?
What did Mom and Dad give me for Easter instead of candy? . . . They gave me exactly what I asked for: a gift certificate! Now, some would argue that this is cheating, asking for a gift card so I could buy clothes, but nowhere in my New Year’s resolution does it say that I cannot accept gifts. If it did, I would be plunging into frozen water right now.
So, you are probably thinking that I skipped the queenly Easter feast my mother had prepared and sped to JcPenny and immediately eliminated that $25 gift to a balance of nada. Nope, I actually didn’t step inside the store until three weeks later after hanging out with my friend Carolyn one night at a sushi restaurant downtown for Brady’s birthday.
“Do you see those?” I asked, Jon, pointing toward Carolyn.
“See what?” he asked.
I just about yanked his arm off, trying to pull him around the birthday crowd, so he could get a better view. “Those are the shoes I want. Carolyn has them on.”
“Oh,” he said. (Obviously, he wasn’t excited about them as I was.)
Carolyn had on the cutest pair of tan boat shoes. They were of the professional, trendy, yet laid back flavor—translation, they would be appropriate to wear to work, and I was tired of all my same old same old boring flats that stunk like something fierce. No matter how much powder I shake in them, they still smell like something died in them. And when you can smell your own feet, you are wondering if others can too. Can you, smell my feet that is?
“Where did you get those? Please tell me JcPenny,” I begged her.
“No, Famous Footwear.”
Of course, that would make this too easy. However, I wasn’t going to give up hope. Perhaps, I thought, I could find something similar there. Women always have this thought and the turnout is always the same: we don’t want similar; we want the exact one. We just try and convince ourselves that similar is a synonym for same. It’s not.
What did I find at JcPenny? I didn’t even find anything that remotely fell into the “s-sounding” category, not unless I wanted Velcro cream shoes similar to my grandma’s. (I love you, Grandma, but I do want to get married someday, and if a man saw me walking around in those, he’d run away and probably in a cute pair of boat shoes.)
Disappointed, I didn’t even roam around the rest of the store, browsing as I usually did. I just walked out. I didn’t want to waste $25 dollars on something I wasn’t obsessed with. After all, how many opportunities would I get to feed my clothing addiction? I have over eight months to go. . . . Carolyn’s shoes are super cute though!
the Clothing Fast Project 
