A Friday Chat About What We Want
What we really really… yeah, I guess that’s going to be stuck in our heads now.
NICOLE: Happy Friday! It didn’t snow. It’s 38 degrees out and sunny.
MEGAN: Happy Friday to you! I am sorry(?) to hear that it did not snow, though maybe that’s a good thing. It’s an extremely unseasonable 70 degrees here and sunny. People are acting reckless — last night I heard a car blasting “The Circle of Life” outside my bedroom window. It’s February!
NICOLE: Circle of Life is obviously a spring song. It’s about birth! Save it for the end of March.
MEGAN: Agreed. It was very unnerving. What’s on your mind this strange Friday? Aside from buying towels and things?
NICOLE: My friend Marian Call just released her latest album, Standing Stones, so I’m excited about that.
MEGAN: Nice! I’m thinking about nothing other than the weekend, like I am every Friday. Something about this weather makes me want to buy stuff, though I suspect that’s also the influence of our new series too.
NICOLE: I am so excited about our I Want It Now series. I feel like I’m going to buy a lot of the stuff I put on my wants list. We’ll see.
MEGAN: I personally LOVE this series so much!! However, when I was writing my list last night, I found myself really stymied, for some reason? Like, I want so many things all the time, and I want to let myself just buy them if they’re within reason, but I never do. Just like we hold ourselves accountable for buying stuff we need, like your mattress, I’m going to try and hold myself accountable for buying at least one thing off that list.
NICOLE: I wonder how much of the “I don’t let myself buy new things” stuff comes from our families of origin, as the phrase goes. If we lived in families where we didn’t replace old clothes or towels regularly, then we grow up feeling like we shouldn’t. I don’t know.
MEGAN: I think that’s pretty accurate, actually, at least for me. I’m trying to remember the state of our towels and such as a kid and I’m pretty sure we just used them until they were unuseable — full of holes or not fluffy or whatever it is that makes a towel bad? Then they got shuffled off to the rag bin.
NICOLE: My family was in no way poor but we were frugal, so I always got the sense that we should be saving our money for something else. I didn’t follow that line of thinking so much in high school — I would save up my allowance for four weeks, blow it all on one double CD musical theater soundtrack at the Sam Goody, and start saving again — but it kicked in as an adult.
MEGAN: At my mom’s house, we definitely mopped the floors with my stepdad’s old undershirts and very occasionally, his tatty boxers or something — this horrified me as a child and still does as a grown adult, but that line of thinking for me is why I use old t-shirts as hair towels once they’re no longer “wearable.”
NICOLE: I never thought of using old t-shirts as hair towels! I do use them as rags.
MEGAN: T-shrts are the best hair towels because they don’t rough up the hair cuticle or something? So it eliminates frizz? Also they just absorb the water and then your hair is dry-ish AND you can blot your lipstick on them if you’re so inclined and not feel bad about it because it’s just a shirt that you’re wrapping around your head.
NICOLE: Hahahaha my hair has never, in its life, frizzed. It is limp and flat and needs multiple products before it looks like anything.
MEGAN: I’m so jealous of your hair. Mine is…special. And its specialness means I need to buy things for it! So many things. I love products.
NICOLE: Me too. It is funny that I will drop $69 on makeup but not $20 on towels. That comes straight from me, not from my family.
MEGAN: Oh YEP. I am the same way. Please let me loose in Sephora and I will spend so much money on things, but I will stay drying my body with a free, threadbare towel that I got in a swag bag like, 4 jobs ago. Or towels that my ex-boyfriend left when he left New York, like, 7 years ago? I still use those towels and there’s no reason, they’re not nice. They’re from Ikea, one of them has what I think are holes from moths and the cat has eaten like half the towel where it’s fraying.
NICOLE: It could be a public-facing vs. private-facing thing. Like, we’re more likely to invest money in the part of ourselves that other people see? Our actual faces? They don’t see our towels as much. Or our T-shirt rags that we use on the floor.
MEGAN: That is definitely it. I was just having this discussion with a friend, like, I need to buy some goddamn t-shirts BUT I leave the house so rarely these days that it seems dumb. I wear the same gross leggings and sweatshirt combo day in and day out, unless I have to Leave The House. But I put a lot of effort into what I look like when I leave the house, in an attempt to prove that I’m not a cave-dweller, I guess.
NICOLE: I do wear “good clothes” to work from home, which is really just jeans and a sweater or something, but I feel better if I look so-called “presentable.” I’ll iron a shirt if it needs it, even if I’m the only person who will see myself wearing it that day. That kind of thing.
MEGAN: That’s inspiring to me. People who put on real clothes, like “people clothes,” every day when they don’t necessarily HAVE to. I shower when I wake up because if I don’t, I feel heinous, but I’ve been considering moving away from the legging situation and towards something with an actual waistband, just to see if it makes me feel less blergh.
NICOLE: Do it! You inspired me to buy a new mattress and I am going to inspire you to invest in new clothes, if you want. I won’t, like, force inspire you.
MEGAN: I WILL TAKE IT. Gonna go buy some t-shirts now and move the pile of promotional t-shirts that I sleep in sometimes to the rag bin. ACCOUNTABILITY.
NICOLE: This I Want It Now series is going to change our lives. I love it already.
Support The Billfold
The Billfold continues to exist thanks to support from our readers. Help us continue to do our work by making a monthly pledge on Patreon or a one-time-only contribution through PayPal.
Comments