Michelle Goes Shopping

It’s been two days of shameless self-indulgence, and I feel goooood. (Note: what follows, especially for Tuesday, is extremely frivolous and is basically Michelle Goes Shopping. I’ll save quantum physics for another day.)

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Monday was four hours of surfing to make up for last week, bak chang for lunch and a lazy afternoon snuggled under blankets in air-conditioning with The Unbearable Lightness Of Being in hand, peppermint green tea nearby, and Amnesiac on the speakers.

Amnesiac was picked up on Saturday at Tower Records, Suntec City, after the CAP council had dispersed for home and much-needed rest. S$21.99 (divide by 2.5 to convert into pounds) for the limited edition version packaged in a book, and the book’s very Radiohead and very cool. The book’s reference number is F heit 451. Steal #1.

A quick note on the album: right now I like it so much I’m trying to force myself to listen to it no more than once a day, in fear of the Odelay! phenomenon. Amnesiac seems more immediate than Kid A, which could be a bad thing, because the longer I take to like music, the more I end up liking it eventually, and vice versa. We’ll see.

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On Tuesday I woke up early to listen to Solid Steel, went out for lunch with Pei Ee (old and dear friend) at Suntec City, where we shopped, and I bought two cheap cheesy tops from the ultimate cheap cheesy Singaporean shopper’s paradise, This Fashion.

Shopping there is such a trip. You paw through crammed rack upon crammed rack of clothes, and finally you think you spy something that looks promising from what you can see of it. Appealing colour. Good pattern. You pull it out…and there’s a giant panda embroidered on the front. It’s fluorescent pink, and it proclaims “I aM nAtUrE bAmBoO gAl”. You reel back, crushed.

Despite such hazards to mental health, I pop in there from time to time because I sometimes find gems, or otherwise, I find extremely bizarre items of clothing that take my fancy.

Take what I call my Dadaist Japglish T-shirt for example. Written on it are the following words:
“Coning Witere
Greel Lomala hing
we know what fashion is…….
1999-2000
fovely millealum…….
KING TOMATO”

I love this shirt. You sort of know what they were trying to say, but not quite.

So anyway, there were two cheap cheesy tops (steals #2 and #3) at This Fashion, unsuccessful shoe-shopping, jeans (steal #4) at 30% off at Giordano (another cheap clothing mecca, as long as you don’t buy the T-shirts with GIORDANO emblazoned across the chest) and then we hit Marina Square for bubble tea and good conversation.

Final destination: CD Warehouse at Capitol Centre, for parallel-imported CD bargains, where 5 CDs were quickly clutched in my clammy hands before I exercised some admirable restraint and discarded Reveal, Miss E…So Addictive, 10 000 Hz Legend and a Nascente Best of Ladysmith Black Mambazo compilation, emerging only with Stereo MCs’ Deep Down And Dirty for S$16.99 (steal #5).

I’ll probably end up getting all of the above discards at some later date, but I just keep telling myself it’s not the absolute expenditure that counts, it’s the spreading out.

5 steals. I’m a happy kleptomaniac.