Appetites

Hello nobody!

I'm excited about this blog. Something tells me I should give it more of a purpose and structure than I am currently endowing it, but for now whatever content I decide to put on here will just be whatever I deem interesting/important/blog-worthy.

Today, this notion of appetite intrigued me, particularly because one of my suitemates mentioned it in correlation to the desire of the modern woman. She's reading this book called Appetites: Why Women Want for class.
What a great word to succinctly capture the crisis of woman. Appetite: we feed, but don't eat. Literally, there are eating disorders consuming women all over (mainly) the world. We are consumed, too, by consumerism, by sexual desires, in such a way that the "nutritional" value of this ingestion is completely empty, regurgitated. Perhaps it's just a symptom of the modern experience, "the spectacle" - the obsession with materials that do not actually fill anything, only generate vacuous selves. But I think there really is something behind, specifically, the female experience.

I write this because I've recently become consumed by these "binging" reactions to my free time. Yesterday, I shopped online for two or so hours in between classes. It was such an impulsive act, and I am so very often disillusioned with the results of my shopping experience. I remember one time shopping with my best friend and seeing the absurdity of it all: "I will never look as good as the women in the catalogs! What's the point of shopping?" No, this is not me coming out with a confession of my self-esteem issues...but rather, I just want to take a moment and contemplate, where exactly is the satisfaction, especially with a thing like fashion, that so instantaneously becomes obsolete, so "worn." I don't have the time to look like those girls every day (I could if I tried), I can't even bear having to blend eyeshadows and whatever. My roommate commented once on a girl at our school (Yale): "she really doesn't have the right picture," referring to this girl's ott obsession with dressing well every day. Aren't we in an institution solely devoted to intellectual pursuit? Well, no, solely? never. This place is much more. But I guess there's this agreement that we're here to discover not the cosmetic appeal of a person, but rather all the beautiful stuff of their insides.

To bring it back to appetite, so we feed some kind of craving by shopping. We want to feed, what? ...Identity. Clothes, appearances, are so much a part of our identities. Brought this up in Orientalism today -- Lawrence of Arabia changes his garb in order to "be" one of the natives. How much of me is really exposed through my clothing? Today I wore a striped blouse with wing-type sleeves, covered the bottom half with one of my favorite skirts (it was $1!), stockings, my latest flat boots, my roommate's comfy scarf, and a faux leather jacket. What does this say about me? Well if I were to tell people how much the skirt was, they'd be able to tell how frugal I'm always looking to be. Because if I'm to do this fashion thing, I'm going to prove that my obsession is not so great that I need to reproduce the styles in magazines to the very price. I'm proud of my cheap ass, yes. (Haha, not that ass) Also, this faux leather jacket thing probably says I follow fashion trends....yes, those are in. Again, I find myself in emptiness, I am not this. I care about presentation, but I want so much more for people to give a shit about the stuffing of my insides. I'd take an interesting person any day much more than a hot person. This summer, however, I discovered that people are all very shallow. I was approached by several people ...men...this summer, that would not have approached me had I dressed more normally. In fact, they DIDN'T approach me when I was dressed normally. To what extent should I push this notion of "presentation" so that I'm approached by interesting people but not so that I am just the presentation, or a mannequin?

Well, those are some thoughts for today. Excitement hovers over this blog! What are some thoughts out there? You'll find that so much of me is about the recognition of my own contradictions, and a lack of action around them. So it's very idiosyncratic of me to say right now that, for the time being, I'll just keep dressing however I want to, as long as I am an "educated consumer." HA! What a joke.

Oh man, it's so much worse if I were to talk about sex & appetite.

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