Malls

I try to stay away from malls if I can, but when I do need to go to one I inevitably get lost in it. I'm not a label whore -- I don't even buy new clothes that often. I still wear things from college, and most new clothes I get are birthday or Christmas presents so I don't even really know the names of the stores in the malls. On the rare occasion I have to buy new socks, I wander aimlessly through the capitalist mecca, a terrifying (for me) House of Mirrors where everyone is dressed in outfits purchased from previous visits, reflections of the stores lining the main mall concourse which in turn reflect images of everyone back onto themselves. Sometimes it's fun to try and figure out which store's mannequins my own outfit clothed before it was given to me as a present. But usually I just want to find socks.

The parking garage for the mall near my house gives access to the main mall concourse area through one of the bigger department stores, e.g. Mervyn's, Bloomingdale's, J.C. Penny, etc. I have a flaw whereby it is impossible for me to tell the difference between these stores and others like them. So this is problem #1. The second is the mall by my house also is built so that some of the floors are laid out differently than others. I spend a lot of time wandering aimlessly with my bag of socks, trying to figure out which floor I should be on, let alone which store I entered through. This makes me incredibly anxious and I even begin exibiting some signs of low-level claustraphobia. The House of Mirrors becomes even more sinister with my reflections now taunting me, laughing at me cruelly. The reflections are at home here while I am not. Panicking, I usually end up exiting through the food court and walking around the whole outside of the mall, finding my car by tracing the route I took to park.

My extreme discomfort in malls reaches epic proportions at the Beverly Center. Again, I have the usual "forget-which-store-I-came-in" crisis where I do laps on each floor at seven times the speed of the old people mall-walkers in it for the exercise. But here there's an added horror: teenage girls. Now, before you go making any pedophilia inferences from that comment, hear me out. I'm not really that cool a person. I don't dress very hip, mostly because, as I mentioned, I get most of my clothes as presents and god bless my parents but they do NOT know fashion. Meanwhile, most of the people at the Beverly Center seem to have a grasp on things, trendy fashion-wise. So these teenage girls are inevitably more hip than me, more confident as they strut around with their intricate knowledge of the lay of the land. This is their territory, and I am hopelessly lost in it. With a bag of socks. And all I want to do is get out, get out, get out, but I can't because I have absolutely no idea where the car is and any of the dozens of entrances/exits could be the one but chances are it's a different one two levels above me. Or possible one level below me. And I get more and more frantic and nervous and, ergo, less composed and calm and collected (in other words, cool) and that reeks of difference-with-a-capital-D in these here parts. And so the teenage girls are suddenly way more cooler than me, and I am intimidated by them, and this brings me back to junior high school and regular plain ol' high school. Intimidation by a teenage girl with boobs is fine when you're a teenage boy who still talks squeaky, but it is decidedly NOT fine when the boy in question is twenty-five. So I hate malls because I am twenty-five years old, and I am still intimidated by high school girls.

So as I take my sneakers off and put my feet up on the coffee table and look through the V they form at the TV, I start getting nervous, because the nail of my big toe on my left foot is just barely visible through a hole in my sock.