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December
21, 2005. I took another trip into the wilds of the Magnificent Mile tonight, wrestling buses and tourists for the sake of precious, precious DVDs. The holidays are going to be very, very quiet this year, I am betting, so I would like to be prepared. I've got Netflix, I've got video games I still have not finished. There are naps to be taken, and even a few books to be read. The weather was a sweaty, tropical 26 degrees F tonight. I found myself strolling slowly along the wide sidewalks, sometimes keeping pace with the crowd, but also OK with dropping behind the pack. There's a patina of commercialization to the ornate architecture and trimmings of Michigan Avenue, but I find myself charmed by the overall effect, nonetheless. I started laughing to myself when I passed Pottery Barn, though. A few years back, I became subsumed into a committee organizing a small convention of web/internet peeps, and one of the typical things that happens is that you often have people who pipe up and raise their hands and go, "oo! oo! me! meeeee!" because they want to help out so damned much, and you are just touched by it and you think, "Ah, that means less work for me!" Perhaps I shouldn't turn this into a cautionary tale, but I will say that in a city like Chicago, it is to laugh when someone offers to be a Shopping Guide, replete with suggestions about what order to take the stores in, etc. Beyond a very few select boutiques and some very distinct and historically relevant architectural facades for these stores, most of what constitutes shopping on the Magnificent Mile translates successfully with a .com attached to the end of it. If you want to shop, that's all well and good, but maybe it's just the frugal stingy bastard in me that smirks and thinks: for those blisters you sport, you could've wrangled free shipping from Vicky's Secret Dot Com. For the three hours you spent dodging crowds of teenagers and navigating slow, lumbering buses, you could've gotten that bulky-yet-fashonable chrome thingamabob that slices, dices, and and organizes your shoes by slouching in one's chair and clicking over to Restoration Hardware Dot Com. There's really no need for a guide, I think. I'd think that even more than half of the magic of heading down that wide, busy avenue is not knowing where you will want to drop in next. It's probably just me. The not-even-sordid-at-all ending to the story is that this very helpful shopper wasn't so helpful after all. She dropped out of sight, and most certainly out of mind. It was almost as if she had expended all of her helpfulness in telling us how helpful she would like to be. But
hey, I own Serenity, now. I got it
from Virgin Megastore Dot Com, doncha know. go
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