Did it fly by for you? In the Goodwill Six-Month Challenge, the Empress undertook to buy only non-profit-benefitting thrift items from Oct. 1, 2009 to March 31, 2010. As usual, the Empress had a mixed motive: (1) to show her subjects how she could spend less and be fashionable (which means "looking better than a hot mess") and (2) to promote her relentless and annoying quest to be "holier than thou" (a quality she had hoped to give up for Lent.) If you do not moonlight as an astronaut, you might not know that re-entry into earth's atmosphere is not pretty: the gases in the lungs and GI tract expand, the moisture in the mouth and eyes quickly boils away, there is severe sunburn, and some parts of the body swell to twice their usual size.
A NASA altitude chamber When the Empress opened the rubber sealed glass door at the indoor mall, she thought she could live with most of those effects: she'd need the expanded gases to breathe deeply, the boiled away mosture meant she could skip bathroom breaks, and the mall was a hermetically sealed chamber so sunburn would be minimal. But SWELLING TO TWICE HER SIZE? How would she buy those True Religion white, stretch jeans with the iPad in their pocket? It was so unfair -- she hadn't even been to Hot Dog on a Stick and she was lurching through the perfume counters like the Sta-Puft Marshmallow Man.
She had to get out, and fast. She gallumphed past the salesclerks, the kiosk barkers, Bloomingdales, Nordstrom, Forever 21 (that was especially painful) and drove to Goodwill, where she found this New-With-Tags Rodarte' dress for her lovely offspring.
*The Empress realized that she needed to summon her patron saint of shopping, St. Elda Erickson, who taught her to thrift, sew, darn, and goshdarnit, look up words she didn't know before using them aloud to embarrass herself. Thank you, Mom.
