the year of no clothes

becoming a better person, one unbought sweater at a time

[theyearofnoclothes]

day five hundred and forty-three - stop doing bad things

It’s become increasingly easy to forget to write on this blog, just like it’s become increasingly easy to forget about the pandemic the world is still in. Over 603,000 Americans have died to date, with 312 dying just yesterday. Yet this “end” of the pandemic looks a lot like the beginning of what would become a pandemic, with daily case counts at mid-March 2020 levels, which is to say, certainly not zero. I’m trying to avoid a similar habituation and amnesia with shopping.

If you’ve read the blog you know I went a whole year without buying clothes except for that one magical New Mexico coat. And that I said I had Learned My Lesson and would shop differently when I decided to officially shop again. And that I confessed to buying a blazer on eBay in February and a pair of shearling sandals in March and ordering coats to try on in my last post. And now I’m trying to stop that drip from becoming a flood.

First, I will say I did return one of the two pre-owned coats, but second I will say that with one of them I also ordered two pre-owned sweaters that I did not return. And that I spent a ton of time browsing The RealReal for even more sweaters after that. And that I spent even more time looking for a new ethical/sustainable/unproblematic bralette and then had not one but two shipped from Net-A-Porter in London because they were sold out here. And that I then ordered the same Freda Salvador sandal in two different colors during a flash Bloomingdales sale. This, my friends, is not not shopping.

I am trying very hard to not slip back into the all-or-nothing thinking that has served me so poorly throughout life, either to swear off buying clothes forever or to give up and wild out - one is not realistic, and the other isn’t affordable. I’m writing this post not because I have some great wisdom about how to resist the temptation of new shit, but to acknowledge that it’s real, and cop to succumbing to it. There is a very not quiet part of my brain that says if one is good, two is better, and it turns out I have to learn to live with that part of me instead of denying it exists.

So, how to make this post actionable? By sharing my new shopping process, or the best possible version of it. 

1. Confirm you’re filling a need

Ask yourself why you’re trying to buy the thing you’re trying to buy. Did you identify an actual gap in your wardrobe, or are you just browsing? Do you know how many of that thing you already have? Do you have plans to wear that thing within 30 days?

2. Sleep on that need

This is an important step! Put some distance between deciding you need something and acting on that decision. If you’re reading a blog about trying not to buy clothes for a year, you probably don’t “need” any new article of clothing, so give yourself at least a day but preferably more to see what happens when you continue not having that thing. Could you find something else in your closet to fill the gap? Could you borrow something from a friend? Could you discover that you’ve gone this long without it and been totally fine?

3. Shop pre-owned first

If you gave yourself satisfactory answers to the need questions and are determined and ready to go find the thing, see if you can find it at a vintage/resale/consignment shop, either in-person or online. You already know how environmentally damaging it is to produce clothes, so by buying pre-owned you’re not creating net-new waste and you’re also extending the life of something that could otherwise become waste. You can also play up the one-of-a-kind aspect to yourself if you don’t like associating this shiny new-to-you thing with waste.

4. Shop Good On You second

If you’re convinced your thing has to be new production, it’s pretty hard to know what brands are actually doing things the “right” way. Good On You is the best shortcut I’ve found, as it rates brands on a host of sustainability metrics. It’s certainly not perfect (there being no real regulation in what brands have to report), but it’s a good jumping off point, and can satisfy that itch to browse.

5. Shop small always

No matter what you’re buying, it is always always better to purchase from a small business or designer than a major retailer (she says, after admitting to buying from Bloomingdales). We do weird shit in America, like expect the things we financially support the least (teachers, mom and pop restaurants, the cute corner shop) to always be there for us. If you buy everything on Amazon, all that will be left is Amazon, so maybe divert some of your spending to, say, Garmentory instead, to get that Amazon feel with the boutique support. They have many of the brands that Good On You gives high marks to :)

5. Make sure you can afford it

So you’ve found the thing and know where you want to buy it from, awesome! Could you pay for it in cash? Before you huff about your salary being sufficient, this step is not meant to shame anyone but to break a cycle that credit cards, those harbingers of American prosperity, started. We are very used to putting something on our cards and paying for it later, which means we separate the act of buying from the consequence of bearing the cost. Asking yourself if your checking account could handle the purchase should also encourage you to consider the consequences on your overall budget - did you plan for this purchase, and, if not, are you prepared to give something else up for it? (Note: This section is not intended to question how much things cost. Well made, sustainably made, ethically made items cost more than fast fashion, but that does not make them a luxury. Remember who subsidizes cheaply made products - those being cheaply paid to make them.)

6. Make sure you can return it

This step is maybe the hardest for me, and the one that requires the most between the lines reading. I firmly believe you should never buy anything final sale that you haven’t tried on. I also firmly believe that you should buy pre-owned, where trying on isn’t always possible. The absolute best case scenario is going to a physical store to try something on before purchasing it (from that store or elsewhere), but if that’s not possible then getting the measurements of the item is key. It’s much easier to measure something you already have to compare to what you’re trying to buy than to look at how something has been styled in a photograph and guess how it will fit. This step is designed both to save you money and to prevent unloved and unworn stuff from collecting in your closet - let’s not let the sunk cost fallacy sink your wardrobe spirits.

7. Make sure you *won’t* return it

This step goes back to the first step but could also have been written as “Wear it!” If you’ve done the research, paid the cost and brought that new thing home, take it out for multiple spins! Don’t find yourself reaching for it? Return it! Despite what consumerism says, buying clothes to have and not hold does not make us happier. If you’re not excited to wear the thing you just bought, you didn’t actually need it, and now you know for the next time you have a jonesing to start the shopping process all over again.

So yeah, this is an incredibly long, thoughtful, and arduous way to go about shopping, but the entire point is to interrupt the habits that lead us to browse, buy, repeat. I spent forever looking for a coat to fill a need, but then was like “well what else should I buy to justify the shipping cost” and wound up with two sweaters - this is a bad habit!! But this is a loving blog, so instead of passing judgment on your (or my) shopping lapses, embrace the mindful shopping method above and prepare for self-actualized consumerist bliss. Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk. Namaste.

[theyearofnoclothes]

day five hundred and twenty-seven - having to get dressed again

Despite the fact that over 598,000 of my fellow Americans were killed by covid, that nearly 450,000 covid cases were reported globally yesterday, and that only 29 out of every 100 people on this planet have been vaccinated, the show (that is, the way we were) must apparently go on.

California is getting rid of all covid-era regulations on June 15th, despite the fact that we are undeniably still in the covid era, herd immunity in our tiny slice of the world notwithstanding. And what that means (among many other things) is that people are starting to wear non-spandex clothes again.

I have admitted before that it wasn’t terribly hard to not buy clothes in the lockdown days of the pandemic, and even this week I got dressed in workout clothes more days than not. But when I found myself at a picnic wearing the yoga pants and sweatshirt I had put on to take my dog to the beach, one particularly well done outfit forced me to take a hard look at if I was presenting myself the way I wanted.

To be clear, people should be able to wear whatever the fuck they want and many, many people don’t even have the luxury of choice. I, however, do, and I even like the ‘real’ clothes that I have. I am fully here for putting in effort, if only to dress up the background of other people’s lives. It’s just that the San Francisco weather doesn’t support this effort.

It turns out that my wardrobe has grown to mirror the climate it found itself in, and despite living in the Bay Area for over five years I have no idea how to dress for 55 and windy in June, especially after my Texan year. People joke about puffer jackets here, but I have spent hours this week browsing for an acceptably warm replacement and mostly come up short. Add to that my cold feet and need to walk multiple miles, and suddenly I have dozens of outfits with impractical coats and shoes - I have now gone on multiple dates in turtlenecks and Keds.

This post doesn’t have some sweeping moral, but I wrote it to acknowledge that getting dressed in 2021 can feel fraught, and it’s probably true that even the girl with the long suit coat and shorts outfit I could never pull off had to change out of sweatpants to make that ‘fit happen. I also wrote it to acknowledge that I’ve ordered not one but two (preowned) coats to fill the gap between my standard issue black puffer and my laughably thin green coat. I may return both of them, say to hell with it, and wear a pea coat through the summer, which would be much truer to the purpose of this blog, but if not then I’m ok with the thinking, waiting, and sourcing that went into that purchase. And I would also be ok with someone suggesting a sustainable and ethical walking shoe that doesn’t scream orthopedic - does it exist??

I couldn’t end the post without some rah rah something, so take this season of reopening/proving we’ve learned nothing as an opportunity to reacquaint yourself with your closet and try combinations you wouldn’t have thought of in the beforetimes, like Travis and Kourtney. The world we knew has ended, and there are no rules! 

[theyearofnoclothes]

day five hundred and six - languishing

Despite the new CDC mask rules, the predictions of a ‘waxed and vaxxed summer,’ and employers deciding people should go back to the office, the pandemic in the US is still killing over 500 people a day. Over 588,000 Americans have died to date, and India reported half that many cases just yesterday. Yes, the great equalizer continues to do its unequal work, but we’re all over here talking about being so seen by a New York Times article (YES I KNOW I AM LATE).

I let a few weeks slip without writing because as snotty as I was about that article, the last few weeks have been particularly bleak, wherein we returned to a normal of slaughtering civilians, whitewashing history and wasting the little time we have left to stop climate change. So yes, I might’ve been languishing as this cycle of destruction repeated itself, but today I want you to read about a more virtuous cycle - the circular economy.

National Geographic did a much better job of explaining the concept than I have in my past references to it, so I highly recommend this article on how a circular economy could save the world from their March issue (recently promoted on Instagram, because lets be real, I do not get physical magazines). The article features people in varied industries trying to close the ‘circularity gap’ that is the billions of pounds of waste we produce along with all the stuff we make - 67 billion pounds in 2015 alone - and get closer to the waste-free natural order.

If you’re in an ‘everything is terrible’ place and don’t want to read about food waste, metal waste, or companies trying to use each other’s waste, I at least recommend the clothes section (that, ostensibly, being why you read this blog). A sample passage? “From 2000 to 2015, while the world population grew by a fifth, clothing production doubled, according to an Ellen MacArthur Foundation report, thanks to the explosion of “fast fashion.” With so many cheap clothes, the report estimated, the average item was worn a third fewer times by 2015. That year, the world threw away more than $450 billion worth of clothes.”

The article goes on to interview someone who owns clothing recycling plants across Europe, touch on the industry of wool recycling in Prato, Italy, and quote our girl Elizabeth Cline in a 2019 Elle article on renting clothing: “Wearing what’s already in your closet is the most sustainable way to get dressed.” Give it a read and maybe pledge to buy one less thing this week, or, do something rad like figuring out a way to prolong the life of clothes without shipping them to countries that don’t want them. 

[theyearofnoclothes]

day four hundred and eighty-seven - 11%

576,337 total reported covid deaths to date in the US. 400,000 reported covid cases today in India. The global we are nowhere done with this pandemic, but in the US, life goes on, unless it didn’t, and today I’m going to write about what I’ve been doing instead of writing. Spoiler: beyond just generally despairing, it has to do with clothes.

It’s been just over a month since I got my stuff back after it spent 11 months in storage, and I have to say, it is WILD how much time I spend dealing with my belongings. From unpacking them to organizing them to deciding which of them to get rid of to researching where to get rid of them to listing them for sale to coordinating pickups or trips to the post office, it’s all been adding up, and that doesn’t include time spent just maintaining them (washing, folding, dusting, etc). I feel like I had so much more time when I was Airbnbing, and that feeling led me to write a few weeks ago that I was committing to getting rid of 100 things. I’m at 11...by one count.

I started a spreadsheet to keep track of the things I’ve sold and at what price to remind myself, again, that material goods aren’t good investments. The very first thing I sold was a Ring doorbell cam and chime, which is technically two things but I’m counting as one, and which I priced at $60 despite paying $190 (which I only just looked up and now am sad about). Then I sold two curtain rods that I’m again counting as one thing and made back a whopping $15 of the $56 they cost. I probably put in more than $15 worth of effort into photographing and listing them, but selling directly feels like the only way to guarantee they live on in a circular economy.

It would have been way easier to just donate the curtain rods, or the giant flamingo floatie I only made $12 on because Poshmark, or the Crate + Barrel metal placemats that netted me $20, but I’ve gotten it into my brain that I am responsible for whatever items come into my possession, which means I’m responsible for where they go when they leave my possession. Remember that post about malamutes? Or the one from before that where I also recapped what I recouped in resale? I hate that I’m back doing the same thing, but do feel that I’ve learned some things in the intervening 400-some days!

Take my ink jet printer, for example (and get ready, cause it’s a meta example). I plugged in my printer for the first time in a year to print the shipping label for the flamingo floatie (meta!) and got hit with an error message that it didn’t detect any cartridges, despite the cartridges that I meticulously had sealed up in a ziplock for the movers definitely being there. I did a ton of googling, cleared the error with a YouTube tutorial, but only got the printer to print blank pages (helpful!) and felt absurdly resistant to spending $50 on cartridges for a maybe busted printer. When I couldn’t find a place that would service an 8ish year old printer, I said no to a $50 cartridge test, declared it broken, bought a more earthy friendly laser jet, and then set about deciding what to do with a broken printer, because I knew I could absolutely not just throw it in the trash. 

This entailed more googling, and learning both that San Francisco has an e-waste program and that Goodwill has partnered with Dell on their own e-waste solution, which is what I decided on because I clung to the probably false hope that some parts in my no longer trusty printer could be reused or melted down or somesuch. My alternate plan was to post a broken printer on Marketplace, which would’ve likely been better for the environment but worse for my mental health - I’ve learned in the last month that I hate having things I don’t need or want in my apartment. Which is a real bitch with the 20ish things I have listed for sale and stored in a built-in bookshelf where they taunt me with their existence.

The printer is not one of the 11 things because I make arbitrary decisions, like that things donated don’t count toward the get rid of goal because it’s too easy to throw things in a bag and drop them at Goodwill and also that things replaced are not truly gotten rid of - there is no “replace” in the Reduce! Re-Use! Recycle! mantra and also, peep that word order!

Reducing consumption is way better for the planet than getting rid of stuff you already consumped (probably only I will think that sentence is funny and not a typo, but I’m keeping it). I am proud to say that in this year 2 of no clothes, I’m still pretty much not buying clothes (just the blazer in February and those shearling sandals in March, for those who keep score). I’m also not really buying other “things,” despite moving into a new place with new “needs” (please ignore: my plant habit, but please see: me buying a tension rod on Marketplace). I’m summing this post up (badly) in this manner just as a reminder that I wouldn’t have to be getting rid of this stuff if I hadn’t bought it in the first place and that is the whole lesson of this whole project - don’t buy stuff! K byeeeee.

[theyearofnoclothes]

day four hundred and seventy-six - what we call progress

Today’s post won’t be long, but the events of the day called for reflection. Because on this day, where more than 700 people died of coronavirus and the US slid past 568,000 deaths to date, a jury decided to hold someone accountable for arguably the most public pandemic-era death. And for once a jury didn’t let a badge shield a murderer from consequences.

George Floyd should be alive. There is no justice in charging his killer with murder, only the basest level of accountability. But the fact that the President of United States hailed this verdict and spoke to its rareness in an equally unprecedented statement underscores just how frighteningly unjust our justice system is. 

It’s hard to celebrate a criminal being punished when the victim was one of 1,100 people killed by police in 2020. It’s harder still to think that the nationwide backlash to the murder changed anything when just 9 days ago Duante Wright was murdered by police a handful of miles from where George Floyd was murdered by police. But it’s also hard not to hope that this guilty verdict is the start of a wave and not a blip, and that the daily body cam footage of state-sponsored murders has finally crossed into the realm of things we will not accept.

When people quote Dr. King saying the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice, they’re actually quoting him paraphrasing the minister Theodore Parker, who died in 1860, a year before the Civil War began. 160 years later, we're still waiting for that justice, and for anyone who uses that quote to realize the irony of assuring the inevitability of justice by quoting a minister who was not implausibly slain by his own government. 

To bring it back, ie, prove my unshakeable theory that every single thing is connected, the people who blithely use that quote might be decision makers at Target, who refuse to take the 15% Pledge despite posturing support and potentially outright copying its look and feel. Or they might be Danielle Bernstein, who stole yet another design from a small Black business and howled that she would never despite having done. Or they might be whoever decided Lena Dunham should represent plus-sized celebrities in the year of someone’s lord 2021. Put not obliquely, they’re the kind of person that says they want change, but only if someone else is doing the changing and the changing doesn’t inconvenience them.

It feels very cringey to end this on a ‘be the change’ note, but if you want the moral arc to bend, reach out and grab it. Demand a world without militarized police, without qualified immunity, without quotidian terror in communities of color.  We don’t have that much time left.

[theyearofnoclothes]

day four hundred and sixty-four - things I bought in transit

It’s the second week of the second April of the pandemic, and how close we are to the end depends on where you’re standing. Almost 20% of adults in the US have been vaccinated, but cases are rising and over 554,000 have died. While no country comes close to the US death toll, countries around the world are setting their own records, and citizens of Western countries make up a disproportionate percentage of the vaccinated. All to say, the pandemic won’t be truly over anytime soon. And for anyone who lost a job, or a business, or a loved one, even today is too late.

Obviously that list of things carries varying degrees of loss, but any loss is incomparable to the one holding it, which I thought about while reading today that my favorite yoga studio in Madison was closing. Wisconsin is one of the better vaccinated states, and reopening is within sight, but the funding ran out, the landlord grew impatient, and the place I learned to chill the fuck out is no more. And I didn’t do enough to stop it.

In the early days of the pandemic I was singlehandedly trying to save Austin’s restaurants and justified buying a ring because I wanted the jeweler to stay in business. I did some online drop-in yoga classes at this faraway but treasured studio, but didn’t sign up for a membership, both because I wasn’t doing a ton of yoga and because I wanted to do a little bit for all my favorite studios instead of a lot for one I could only visit once or twice a year. I don’t think that just me buying a membership would’ve made a difference, but if everyone who loved the studio and could afford it had, perhaps it would be a different story.

Alas I didn’t, and they didn’t, and another small business went under. I will carry the closing as a reminder to spend in line with my values, and try to pivot to lightheartedness with the rest of this post, where I tell you how my values manifested into physical items I hauled around the country...or not. So after much ado, I bring you: things I bought in transit, because consumerism is hard to shake.

art

You know what someone with no walls needs? Two paintings and a screen print! All from different female artists of different ages in different states and bought at different times, I actually only carried the screen print with me and had lovely friends in California hold onto the paintings. I’ve only retrieved one of them - we’ll see when I get around to hanging it!

ceramics

Ceramics may also be considered art, but the two vases and three pots I bought demanded their own section. All handmade, one vase I had to pounce during an online shop drop for, the other I bought at Mojave Flea, two pots I purchased from Kachina House in Sedona, and the other pot I impulse purchased from Santa Fe Vintage Outpost with the notorious jacket. Because clearly I make rational decisions.

plant pots

Not made of clay! I started my drive west with four new planters in the car and ended it with three new planters and six new plants. The one old plant in one old planter miraculously also survived the drive. Now to get plants that actually fit the planters...

candles

I do not in fact know how many candles I purchased because I gifted some, but the Black-owned candle shops I found had just too great of scents (looking at you, Torch and Bright Black). Two candles made their way from Wisconsin with me, nestled into the spare wheel well in my trunk.

books

Another must have for a person on the go! Fiction books, nonfiction books, cookbooks, I bought a few of each, all from Semicolon in Chicago (except a book on RBG I bought at Women and Children First, and that knitting book/kit from Pom Pom...sigh). I also gifted some, but wound up packing at least six tomes into my trunk. Books are important!

rug

I think I wrote about this, but I bought a vintage Moroccan rug from my friend, who happens to be a Moroccan rug seller - go figure. I did not open the package for six months or take it out of my trunk until I got to my new apartment. I now know what it looks like but still have nowhere to put it. Probably don’t buy a rug you don’t have a room for.

electronics

I bought a new pair of wireless headphones because my existing pair was in a box in a storage unit in another state. This was not a necessary purchase and didn’t help any businesses I care about, but it felt like I would need it to survive working at my dad’s. I also bought a Theragun when I got to my corporate housing because I do things like spend hours writing blog posts hunched on the couch. I haven’t used it in the two weeks I’ve been in my own place. It definitely didn’t help a small business.

slippers

I bought house slippers in Chicago I never really wore, not to support a specific business but to save my feet from Airbnbs. When I got to San Francisco I doubled down on this and bough shearling-lined sandals I also haven’t really worn, but prided myself on going to the woman-owned store to try on before buying. I should definitely wear them tomorrow.

toiletries

Already documented (post 1 and 2), I replaced pretty much my entire routine with Black-owned skincare and beauty products and in the end only overdid it with the lip balm. Everything else I used up or am currently using! Will hopefully never again be a traveling self care aisle though.

kitchen things

I’m ending with this category because a) I told myself I wasn’t going to include consumable items but also drove around with jam and caramel and hot sauce, and b) the two knives and one measuring cup I bought felt like actual necessities for four months of mystery kitchens, unlike every single other thing in this roundup. Thank god I returned those roller skates though!

[theyearofnoclothes]

day four hundred and fifty-eight - an adolescent elephant

I’ve been delayed in writing because I’ve had some life stuff happening, but funnily feel like the busyness has bred some relevant topics that I hope I don’t forget! Today I’ll be writing about the small elephant in my rooms, which is the 3,880 pounds of stuff that finally came out of storage and into my new home, but first, the other numbers. Over 554,000 Americans have died to date from the coronavirus, and cases are no longer falling - the number reported today was 20% higher than yesterday. This is blamed partially on new variants but also on people (and governors) rushing back to normalcy, or, as...maybe Fauci or someone else said, spiking the football before we’re in the end zone. I’d really, really like to get to the end zone.

To intercept that analogy and run it back to my elephant, I feel so far from the end zone as to be scoring for the other team (that team being capitalism, or something, I will end the analogy now). I am completely and totally overwhelmed by the sheer amount of stuff that I have, but also went and bought a few things I “needed” for the new apartment. Which actually were needs (garbage can, tension rod, drain cover) but still sent me such in a tizzy that I pledged to buy everything household-y on Craigslist or Marketplace from here on out.

Not only did the movers bring in over 100 stickered objects (ranging from a box with a few hundred things to a couch to a Swiffer) but I also fully unpacked my car for the first time since October, the contents of which will likely be my next post. I went from having a trunk’s worth of stuff to an aforementioned young elephant’s worth of stuff, and I was just not ready.

Why do I have three suitcases and four duffel bags? How did I wind up with seven jars of honey? Six area rugs? More shoes than I am comfortable counting right now? I was so overcome with shame of the excess that I pledged to purge, and landed on 100 things as a challenge (because apparently I cannot do anything that isn’t a competition). But before I came to that number, I had a meltdown over a cracked, 15 year old neon green suitcase - my “this definitely can go!” turned into “but Dad bought that for you for your trip to France and don’t you remember going to the mall and picking it out and also no one else has that suitcase except that one woman that flew into Milwaukee when you did at Christmas who almost accidentally made off with your bag but that happened exactly one time in fifteen years so why would you get rid of it?”

This is the same ‘get rid but never run out’ conundrum I have, and what’s funny is I did try to get serious about getting rid of stuff before the movers packed up my house in Texas. I made what I thought were some cutthroat decisions, contributed things to my sister’s garage sale, put things on Craigslist, and valiantly tried to make a Buffalo Exchange run happen last April when we still all cared about the pandemic. After all that, somehow I established that everything that got packed up was worth packing up and carrying into the next part of my life.

What happened instead is obviously that the next part of my life was a magical mystery tour where for once I was deprived of “necessities” like a jacket for every 5 degree temperature difference. And while I am thrilled to be back in my micro puffer and out of my leather bomber, nothing terrible happened without it.

I admit that it does not feel realistic for me to pare my belongings down to what fits in a trunk, as romantic as that sounds. But I also don’t want that experience to have been a blip. It is incredibly easy to slip back into a bad habit, and for me, owning a dizzying amount of material goods feels like my worst one. I am truly thrilled I bought only that jacket in 2020 and so far only the blazer in 2021, but I did ask for a few clothing/shoe items for Christmas and my birthday, so added more than I intended to the already too big pot. I should probably institute a one in, one out rule once I finish the 100 things, so more to come on that. In the meantime, I’ll be scouring the resale market for a lock for a storage unit and curtains for a kitchen window, because I am certainly not the first apartment dweller to have their “needs” change with their address. Hit me up if you need a random curtain rod!

[theyearofnoclothes]

day four hundred and forty-seven - nothing changes, again

A warning that this post is going to be messy and mad, and I’m not even going to try to tie it back to fashion (read this article if you want that). The covid death toll is up to 542,500+ with cases continuing to decline (for now), but the real story is the white supremacy death toll, which is not even calculable, plus eight.

While the police, politicians, and media outlets trip over themselves to not label the shooting deaths of six Asian-American women and two others a hate crime, racially motivated, or even motivated at all, another cohort is screaming at the top of its lungs: this was not isolated. this was not new. this was preventable. this was America. {See: The Boulder shooting that occurred less than a week later, this very night, before I finished this post, which I started a few days ago but wanted to process more before publishing.}

The first mass shooting I can remember was Columbine. I had just turned eight, and despite not having cable, or Facebook, or smart phones, it felt like everyone knew at once, and something irrevocable had happened. I distinctly remember being in the basement with my sister and mother, and one or all of us sobbing. Though we’re now 22 years and hundreds of mass shootings later, the Atlanta shootings last week brought that feeling right back.

That a white gunman could walk into not one but three establishments and murder at whim and then be arrested without a scratch is surprising to no one. That that gunman would target Asian businesses after a year-plus of the highest authorities in the land blaming a country for a virus that wreaked havoc on the world was both feared and predicted. That that gunman would be only 21 and so secure in his misogyny that news reports explain away his racist, murdering tendencies as the outcome of a sex addiction? That’s that part I should’ve seen coming but was blindsided by.

How do you even begin to address such intergenerational hate? How do you build community with neighbors that hear “1900% increase in hate crimes against Asian Americans” and shrug? How do you reckon with a populace that stigmatizes and criminalizes sex work to the point where even acknowledging sex workers as human, or individual humans as sex workers, is verboten? How do you, as it were, heed the hashtag?

After George Floyd was murdered last summer, my dad expressed helplessness - the problem was so big, what could he do? I of course got mad, seething that a contemporary of Emmett Till made it that far without “doing” anything, and pushed him to use his position on the school board to make sure the district’s curriculum included Black history, authors, and art, and later got into a full blown fight about the acceptability of protests that result in property damage (“I don’t give a fuck about a car dealership!” being one choice barb). Now only 8ish months later, I can empathize with his paralyzing despair.

I have not done enough to make America the place that I want it to be for the millions of Asian Americans I live here with, and part of that was sheer, privileged ignorance. I learned more about the realities of the Asian American experience in Daniel Dae Kim’s five minute address to Congress than I had in the preceding five months, and realized part of my initial uncertainty over how best to help the AAPI community was due to this country acting as if that community was monolithic. 

I had seen graphics that showed Asian women earning more than white women and nearly as much as white men, seen headlines about the rise in AAPI-owned businesses, and knew that Asian Americans represented less than 2% of the US incarcerated population despite being 5.6% of the total population. It is unclear why I thought that the economic success of the average was a proxy for acceptance of the whole, or that lack of news about hate crimes against Asian Americans prior to the pandemic meant there weren’t any. In fact, the same progressive state that boasts the only majority Asian American congressional district in the country also boasts the highest number of hate crimes against Asian Americans. And that didn’t start with 45.

We live in a country where white supremacy is so ingrained that its leadership can blast China for humans rights abuses the day after a sheriff calls the slaughter of Asian Americans the consequences of a white guy having a bad day. One where everyone Asian is ‘from China’ and stripped of both nationality and individuality, but white people stake their identity down to their block. Where the city with eponymous liberal values overlooks an island that interned hundreds of Japanese Americans not even 100 years ago, and an 83-year-old Asian American man and 75-year-old Asian American woman were attacked, bloodied, and bruised by a 39-year-old white man five days ago.

So how does one more deadly incident in a two hundred year story of rejection, abasement, caricaturization and racist abuse bring me to Columbine? Well, to me both shootings tore the national blindfold and revealed an ugly truth we had all pretended away. The difference (I hope) is that Columbine was a first.

I don’t have a tidy way to end this post, and know there’s a lot more that has to be addressed - how the ‘woke’ media failed spectacularly to acknowledge the intersectionality of the shooting victims, the audacity of a white worldview and ignorance of global populations, the fact we know about but do nothing about the major public health hazard that is misogyny, the history of US-backed murder in Asia. There is so much ugliness in the past and present of this country that only the perpetrators of that ugliness have the privilege of forgetting. 

This is unquestionably who we are as a country, but it doesn’t have to be who we will be. How you contribute to the America you want is up to you (donate! volunteer! support Asian-owned businesses! get dumplings in Chinatown! canvas for an AAPI candidate!), just make sure you have something to say when you’re asked what you did when.

[theyearofnoclothes]

day four hundred and forty - nothing changes if nothing changes

I know I ended the last post on an aphorism and then slapped one on as this post’s title, but sometimes the obvious is the best thing to state. And what is obvious today is that the pandemic is still not over - 535,000 deaths and counting - but the daily death chart has sloped downwards for the last 9 weeks. Or: things are still terrible, but they’ve also been worse. 

That’s also an alternate headline for this NYTimes article that came out earlier this month about diversity in the fashion industry. It is part data analysis, part narrative, and all worth a read, but a quick takeaway is that though things *look* better (all fashion magazines surveyed featured a Black model on their September 2020 issue, for example) they are not structurally better (”Of the 64 brands we contacted, only Off-White has a Black chief executive — and that man, Virgil Abloh, is also the founder.”)

I listen to a podcast called Resistance about the continuing fight for Black lives, and its most recent episode questioned if any of the policies that were enacted in New York in the wake of the George Floyd protests had actually done anything - the answer was pretty much no. A large chunk of the legislation banned things that were already banned, or lacked an enforcement mechanism, or otherwise postured as revolutionary while keeping all systems firmly in place. That’s the same read I got from the NYTimes piece. Which isn’t to say that there’s no value in increased representation or demand for Black-owned or designed products, but is to say that there’s a real danger of this change being performative instead of lasting.

Fashion is obviously different from policing, but in a way, both industries are rooted in self-preservation. While the police will do anything to stay unpoliceable, fashion will do anything to remain relevant, so the two diverge in that one needs to appease the masses to survive. People do have a choice about where to spend their money, so businesses in fashion must at least pretend to care about the people they serve. I think what we see in the NYTimes article is how many of them really are just pretending.

It’s been almost 300 days since I pledged to support Black businesses and two weeks less than that since I wrote about the proliferation of lists helping people do just that. I have not bought exclusively Black in that time, but through sustained effort have come pretty close. I’d love for someone to do an analysis of some of the brands that found themselves on those lists to see if the collective consciousness-raising led to a spike or a step change, and if the consumer did a better job at shaking things up than the fashion industry. I’d also love it if just one time a business did more than “look into” becoming a better, more equitable version of itself, and if everyone I knew committed to buying differently for a lifetime and not just a news cycle. Hope springs eternal?

[theyearofnoclothes]

day four hundred and thirty - the last drop

Well it’s been a spell since my last post and in that time we crossed the 500,000 death mark and are today sitting at almost 521,000 deaths. And by “a spell” I mean 15 days, so that’s almost 28,000 people killed in just over two weeks. And yet we’re calling the pandemic over because it’s no longer 4,000 deaths a day. Pretty f*cked up, America!

It is wild that we can carry around inconsistent reactions to the same thing, apply our values and invoke our standards only when we feel like, and maintain that we’re rational beings. I know I’ve written before about how we can get used to things (see: our spot at #1 for global covid deaths), and I’ve probably written about being inconsistent before too, but I can’t remember so I’m going to do it again today but in at least a new context. And I’m going to do that because I recently realized that I both love using things up and hate being out of things - I love both having and not having the same things.

This came up for me last weekend when I was packing up my Airbnb for my second to last move. I was staring at the nearly empty bottles of face wash, body wash, body butter and olive oil in my cupboards and cursing their size. I was seized by the need to bring them and the need to get rid of them, and split the difference by putting the olive oil in an empty hot sauce jar, the body butter in one of those tiny takeout dressing containers, and using the face wash for both morning and night washing to use up all but a film (the body wash I had no solution for, so it came too, too-big container and all). “These things cost money,” I justified as I rooted through my recycling for small containers. “Not using every last drop leads to buying more over the long term, which means more packaging and more waste!” And when I got to my next Airbnb I pulled out the replacement face wash, body wash and olive oil I’d been driving around with since November.

I was so worried about running out of my preferred toiletries while on the road that I had an entire box of unopened products in my trunk. I expedited shipping on a body wash to make sure I’d get it before I left Wisconsin. I texted a friend asking how many tubes of toothpaste was too many to order at one time (four). And that very same person that drove across the country with her own personal care pantry found unmitigated joy in rinsing out her now-empty body butter jar. 

Maybe you’re thinking using things up is just being tidy, or fastidious, and tidiness isn’t in conflict with being prepared or exulting in abundance or whatever you want to call that neurosis. But when you realize that you’ve been carrying around things for months that you did not need, that you would not need until a date in the future that isn’t promised, that those things took space away from things you maybe did need, well, you begin to question the compatibility!

I have (re)learned that I am bad with limits (see: the seven plants I bought last month). I have become more aware that “preparedness” is almost inextricably linked with “stuff” in my brain. And after 4,500 miles I have discovered that you can either travel light or not, but not travel light and not. At least not at the same time.

I would like to get much closer to traveling light through life, not for minimalism’s sake, but probably something approximating the phrase “take what you can carry.” And that’s probably enough aphorisms for one post so I will wrap it up by expressing genuine gratitude that I was able to have this journey of self-discovery and reflection in the middle of a pandemic. Which is also f*cked up, but hey, it’s America.

[theyearofnoclothes]

day four hundred and fifteen - plans

This is my hundredth post! Not quite the frequency I planned but lolol at plans. 493,000 Americans certainly didn’t plan on dying of covid and 10 million people didn’t plan on losing their job. Scientists didn’t plan on being pilloried and nurses didn’t plan on being gaslighted. But here we are!

At the end/beginning of the year I had a vague notion of detailing my plans, hopes, or intentions for the year when it came to not buying clothes, and I think “vague” is as close as I got. I told you I didn’t want to start buying clothes again but then that I bought roller skates (which I returned), and that I wanted to do a no-buy month but then that I bought *the* blazer (which I did not return). I wrote about being kind to yourself or at least not rigid, and I guess now I’m going to write about how I might have to be rigid after all. To wit: 

Way back in the beforetimes I made myself a budget for my return to the Bay. I think I even wrote about it, and explained that this budget had no room for clothes and helped inspire the challenge. Well I hate to tell you but when I pulled that budget back out for my now actually imminent return, there was still no room for clothes. Or food.

That last one is half a joke, but I filled out the budget thinking I’d be spending 40 hours a week on a tech company campus, eating free food to my heart’s content and being shuttled to a fro. I therefore budgeted $50 for groceries and $200 for restaurant meals a month and some minimal amount for gas. But when I checked Mint to find more realistic budgets, I discovered I spent an average of $700 a month on food last year. Which is absurd. But I’m not entirely mad at it. But it certainly will not work when half my take home pay is going to rent.

I was pretty devastated to confront the reality of my job change after getting to avoid it for a year, and doubly so when I saw that I’d likely have to increase my rent budget to account for the whole ‘not even close to going back to the office’ situation. I sat there slashing the travel budget, adjusting the grocery budget, and staring at my charitable contribution and savings budget, wondering which thing was going to have to give. And then I called my dad.

Yes, I am a grown woman with just weeks left in her twenties, but sometimes you need a parent’s advice and I only have one parent. Luckily for me mine always seems wise and it’s your lucky day because I’m about to share some of that wisdom! Because to the question of “what would you do, stop saving or sacrifice apartment amenities,” he said two smart things: One, that it didn’t have to be all or nothing, and two, to take care of today first.

So now yes, ok, those might sound banal to you, but I really needed to be reminded that saving anything more than $0 is a win, and was similarly shellshocked by the notion that there are more important things than planning for the future, which is hilarious because I do not believe I will ever get to retire or that the planet will be worth inhabiting in my golden years. I’m not saying those bon mots should be read as permission to go on a spending spree, but instead permission to slow down the hamster wheel for a beat.

I was so caught up in the notion that I should be saving a certain dollar amount that I didn’t take into account my new lower. I was so afraid of falling behind on a five year plan that I was willing to contractually obligate myself to be miserable for a quarter of it. Basically, I was incapable of assessing what I already had because I was fixated on what I didn’t. Ah, the moral!!

I’ve established that clothing isn’t an asset, but I had some similar attitudes to my clothing and my assets, where the goal was accumulation for accumulation’s sake. I am fortunate enough to have saved enough for that emergency fund and started that 401k, so while it goes against American ideals and feminism to say I don’t need any more money, I’m in a position to take a break from lavish saving, for, I don’t know, a year?

I’m really torturing that metaphor, but the same desires that led me to stop buying clothes for a year (to value what I have, to redefine enough, to get intentional about what I’m spending on) are making it ok for me to shift from investing in the future to investing in the present. That doesn’t mean I’m going to go ham on a penthouse, but it does mean I’m not deleting restaurants from my budget - I have to find joy somewhere.

There are conflicting lessons from covid - to enjoy life while you can but also to plan for all your plans to implode - and I know that I am extremely lucky to even have choices about how to spend or save. I am not pleased with all of the decision making that got me to this point of still not really having money for clothes, but I am pleased that I’ve learned to think before I swipe (except at those damn restaurants). And I suppose in hindsight all those choices I made were ok - I got off the fashion treadmill, and Ted Cruz is no longer my senator.

[theyearofnoclothes]

day four hundred and five - breaking expectations

Well, we’re eight days into Black History Month aka February, and things seem to be...not terrible? Or at least could be and have been worse? Case counts are trending down and the vaccine rollout continues (albeit at a very...slow...crawl). Economic recovery is actually on the horizon, as is school reopening. None of these things help the 465k+ that have died to date, but 11 months after the pandemic was declared it seems like there might be reason to hope - as long as your expectations aren’t too high!

Expectations are kind of the topic of today’s post, but keep them low for that too because I don’t have a real agenda, just a sense of guilt over not writing for a bit. So let’s go!

A few weeks ago I wrote that I planned on using this month as a no-buy month with the exception of food. Even before the month started I regretted it, as I reallllly wanted to buy a bottle of whiskey with Kamala artwork on it, and beyond that felt weird taking a break from supporting Black-owned businesses (and all other businesses) during Black History Month. But I was facing several realities: Everything I have has to fit in my car, I need to reign in some spending, and I’m literally driving around with ceramics and artwork I’d been buying despite not having an address for 10 months. As I’ve learned, stuff will still be there once your buying break is over.

Except I failed (maybe). Because three days ago a friend sent me a link to an eBay listing. And it was the green velvet blazer I agonized over last year, new with tags, my size, 85% off MSRP, with 30 day returns. And it would not be there once my buying break was over. So I bought it.

It’s possible that the blazer comes and I don’t love it the way I used to, or it doesn’t fit right, or I decide that it wasn’t worth breaking my streak (that I already broke with that jacket in November because apparently I have an outer layer problem). But you know, it’s hard to make the world work on your timeline.

This isn’t where I justify my behavior - I am 100% certain I don’t need a velvet blazer and that the only part of the buying process that aligned with the future of buying I laid out for myself was getting it on eBay. It wasn’t made in the US or with sustainable materials, and the brand is run by a white man. However, to be still thinking about the blazer a year later, and have it be literally thrust into my consciousness at the price it’s probably worth? It felt like an ok chance to take.

I probably don’t have a point with this post other to trot out some form of not letting perfect be the enemy of good, which is funny because I think good intentions can be far worse than bad ones and have worked hard to reorient myself in the world of clothing retail by tapping out of it. But despite my black and white thinking, the world has far more shades of gray (multi-layered valentine’s joke?) and maybe I was trying to retain some messy humanity in an ever-more polarized world. Or maybe I was just trying to look fly at a party in the far off future - if the shoe [blazer] fits!

[theyearofnoclothes]

day three hundred ninety-five - Reddit and Goliath

I gotta say, 2021 is coming in HOT. On one hand, we’re up to ~435,000 covid deaths. On the other, it’s been 9 days without a presidential scandal! Republicans don’t think there should be political consequences for nearly tearing apart the government that gives them their power, but there’s a new vaccine contender! There are 10 million fewer jobs in the US than there were before the pandemic, but Reddit took down Wall Street!...?

There are a bajillion “explainers” over what went down in the stock market this week with GameStop, AMC, and BlackBerry, but whether it was a proletariat uprising or bored boys being boys, America saw once again what happens when regular folx try to take something the ruling class considers theirs (but in the 2021 version, Ted Cruz thinks he can join team regular folx).

Right before this all went down I watched “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” a documentary based on the book by economist Thomas Piketty, which, dry title aside, had extremely high aesthetic value for 100 years worth of economic history. A few days before that, I listened to a podcast about “good” rich people. A week or so before that, I watched a documentary about inequality called The Great American Lie. And yesterday I virtually attended a National Consortium of Public Interest Law Schools dean’s roundtable where topics ranged from the percentage of people without access to counsel (80) to the ability to pay off a law degree on a public interest attorney salary (0). So it would be fair to say the topic of wealth and income inequality has been on my mind!

The capital documentary centered on the premise/fear that we’re returning to the 1700s in terms of haves and have nots (which...yes). The podcast touched on people’s reticence to label themselves as rich, and what some of them are doing to spread their wealth. The inequality documentary showed real people living with the consequences of both gendered and racial income inequality. This media plus the GameStop news cumulated to make me A) Despise Reagan more than is healthy for someone born after he left office and B) Re-evaluate my role in this fucked up economy.

I wrote in June about how I pulled my money out of Chase and into OneUnited, a Black-owned bank, and per a press release from October, I wasn’t alone. OneUnited said that they gained tens of thousands of customers last year, and reported that they, the largest Black-owned bank, had reached 100,000 customers. Chase bank has 51 million.

I bring up that post because in it I also wrote that I wanted to follow in Netflix’s footsteps and find Black-run funds or other investment opportunities. While I wasn’t quite in a position to follow Flix to Hope Credit Union, whose Transformational Deposits earn 0.1% APY, I did start investing in Community Development Financial Institutions through C-Note and make my probably one and only foray into WeFunder by investing in a Black-owned cookie shop in San Francisco.

Why am I talking about this? Well, a friend texted saying she kind of wanted to get in on the AMC stock blitz, and it reminded me that millions of people risk their savings on the stock market, which is largely run by and for the wealthy, but may balk at the “risk” of investing in communities, if they even realize it’s an option. 

Now, as already stated, I don’t have a financial advisor, and I’d rather set my money on fire than day trade, so my investment strategy isn’t optimized for a maximum return. I have a 401k from my employer in a target retirement fund I have no control over, a Roth IRA I can’t even contribute to in a similar state, and this year bought into an Ellevest Impact Portfolio that I’m only 50% sure doesn’t invest in guns. I don’t feel great about my money doing unknown things for unknown companies, but I’ve somehow been taught that this unsecured strategy is the de facto one for building wealth - or, rather, compounding it. (I was going to launch into the twin ‘takes money to make money’ and ‘takes money to save money’ realities here but suggest you find more educated authorities on generational wealth and economic barriers - learning is fun!)

I think our shareholder economy is bullshit and have said in utter seriousness that I would make abolishing the stock market a presidential campaign promise, risk of sounding ignorant be damned. I know I’m just starting out in my community investing journey and have a lot more to learn (what up, microloans!), but thought it was worth writing about for anyone else hoping to stick it to the man (and I absolutely do mean man) - I unfortunately think the market will have its revenge on the Redditors that tried to best it, but am confident there are other slingshots still taking aim.

[theyearofnoclothes]

day three hundred and ninety - on supermarkets and superegos

The United States has a new president and also 25 million coronavirus cases. A pledge to turn the pandemic around but not in time for the 420,000 who have died. An administration intent on uniting and a populace hell bent on warring. All to say, just another day in America.

Today’s post is not about clothes, but about another sector of retail - grocery. This week I finished a book called “The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of The American Supermarket,” and even just a few chapters in I had recommended it to seemingly everyone I know. Yes, I was the target audience for the book - penchant for muckraking, already interested in grocery, annoyingly curious about commerce - but it wasn’t so much a supply chain exposé as a peer deep into the soul (or lack thereof) of capitalism.

I won’t give the book away because I really, truly want everyone to read it, but between charting the rise of Trader Joe’s, following a fledgling product to market, and getting a first hand account of the slavery that powered the Thai shrimp trade, the book goes far beyond the industrial mechanics and into the why of it all. 

The supermarket is a uniquely American invention, taking the otherwise boring and precarious business of feeding oneself and turning it into an always-accessible avenue for surprise, delight, and self expression: Instead of getting sugar from the same barrel as the rest of your town, you now have dozens if not hundreds of options, with different brands, sizes, shapes, and substitutes to choose from. And if you’ve never thought of the sugar you buy as a form of self expression, you may also not have thought that food, beverage, and candy manufacturers spent $6.7 billion on advertising in the US in 2019 alone. Why did you buy Sugar In The Raw?

The book turned a nagging wisp of a thought I had into more a fully realized fear, which is that we truly use products as proxy for personality in this country - we are what we eat, right? From the grocery stores we shop at to the type of chips we throw in our carts to the restaurants we patronize when we don’t cook, every aspect of the experience of buying food has been groomed to say something about us.

A section of the book that really struck me was in regards to the completely flawed certification process for labels like “organic” and “free range” - per the author, those labels “allow us to purchase our ideals from others without ever having to enact them on our own.” 

I did a disservice to that passage by only including that one line, but to me a big takeaway from the book is that we’re trying to buy our way to things - to a cleaner environment, to a more just global trade, to a hipper persona or higher caliber life. The rub is that we throw around phrases like “vote with your dollars” while burning gasoline and drinking out of green plastic straws and considering ourselves immune from advertising as we scroll through content from brands we followed freely. We oscillate between knowing nothing about where the things we buy came from and extolling the virtues of the hand-thrown ceramic we just got from a local small biz. We (me) pledge to stop buying things with palm oil ‘for the rainforest’ but blithely continue buying chocolate. I’m getting stuck on the clash between virtue signaling and vice-level ignorance, but what I really want to do is remove this significance from capitalism altogether! 

It isn’t a revelation to say that grocery severed products from production, so much so that I didn’t even use the term “food.” When you go to a grocery store, you see bananas next to blueberries, milk labeled with smiling cows, and row upon row filled with shiny plastic packages hiding what lies within. Growing season? Not a concern in a global economy! Conditions at the dairy farm? Who’s to say! Wages of workers harvesting ingredients? You want low prices, don’t you??

I’m losing the thread a bit, but: we’re at a point in time where every purchase we make tacitly endorses that thing - how it was made and where and how it was sold. For most things in a grocery store, the supply chain runs so deep that it’s impossible to track every step, much less endorse them all, and that’s if you even cared to look. But this push to do research and become more aware of what you’re buying masks the bigger problem, which is that we limit our influence to our purchasing power.

Me vowing to only buy Tony’s Chocolate doesn’t really do anything to end trafficking in the chocolate industry. I have never written a letter to, say, Nestlé, asking them why they still use child labor. I have never volunteered with an NGO tackling the issue, or donated to a campaign for workers recently freed from their bondage. If my only action is to continue buying chocolate, just from this one specific manufacturer that has pledged to tackle the problem “from within,” well. Sounds like purchasing an ideal.

The last part of the book I want to reference is the intro to a chapter on “The Retail Experience,” which is a quote from sociologist Zygmunt Bauman the year before I was born: “What does it mean to have and display a consumer attitude? It means first perceiving life as a series of problems, which can be specified, more or less defined, singled out, dealt with... It means secondly believing that dealing with such problems, solving them, is one’s duty... It means, thirdly, that for every problem, already known, or as may still arise in the future, there is a solution - a special object or recipe, prepared by specialists, by people with superior know-how, and one’s task is to find it...”

May I humbly propose that the solution for the problems wrought by capitalism is not more, or even slightly different, capitalism.

[theyearofnoclothes]

day three hundred and eighty-three - what’s changed

It’s been 11 days since the Capitol was stormed, four days since Trump’s second impeachment, and only three days remain until inauguration. The coup hasn’t failed until the 46th president has been sworn in, and even that doesn’t guarantee the American experiment will survive until 2024 - almost 35,000 Americans didn’t even survive to see this blog post since my last one, with the covid death toll now over 396,000. We just keep adding unprecedented things to the unprecedented year(+), but it’s hard to say if we’re in an ending, a beginning, or a never-ending loop.

While the answer is probably mostly the loop with some variations thrown in, I wanted to take a beat to focus on how today is different than a year ago. I’ve written before about how we can become habituated to pretty much anything, and about how contrast is crucial to understanding (honestly those might’ve been the same post but I can’t remember, which feels apt). But while I was feeling gutted about America’s uncanny inability to change, I noticed some changes in what I thought might be my unchangeable self. I’ll explain.

If it feels like 2020 has lasted a lifetime, let me remind you that on January 17th of 2020, America was doing regular America things. Looking up the headlines was actually hilarious and devastating, as on this day a year ago the Senate was opening Trump’s first impeachment, the FBI arrested Neo-Nazis in advance of a rally at the Virginia statehouse, the science desk reported that rich people live longer and have more healthy years, and Paul Krugman penned an op-ed entitled “Why does America hate its children?” So yeah, nothing’s changed and that day was oddly prescient!

HOWEVER! Despite all that foreshadowing, a year ago we were working from wherever we worked, traveling wherever we wanted, doing things indoors with friends and strangers. We were joking about the novel coronavirus, if we had heard of it at all, and 0% aware that our days of ignorant normalcy were numbered.

For my part, January 17th was the first day I failed to write a post for this blog and the end of my ‘write every day!’ thinking. Extra funny for this post is the next day I wrote that I hadn’t turned into a different person in 18 days, but prepare to learn how I turned into a different person 365 days later!

1. I don’t want the challenge to end I started this challenge by counting days, wondering how I’d be able to stop a behavior for a whole year. I’ve now traded the desire to buy clothes with a desire to not buy clothes, and honestly feel kind of sick to my stomach when I think about buying that jacket. There are a handful of things that would actually be very useful to own (workout leggings with a pocket for my weekly hikes, for example) but I’m now so anxious about re-entering the world of clothing consumption that I’ve pushed the challenge to ‘whenever it is my stuff comes out of storage.’

2. I don’t want to even look at a store Back when I was booking my nomadic Airbnbs, I was jazzed to come to LA in part because they have a Freda Salvador storefront. This is a woman-owned brand I’d be happy to support, and several times throughout the challenge very nearly did support (marketing emails work!). They make several styles of ankle boots that look like a dream but that I wanted to try on, as I was not blessed with size 7 feet, but now that I am here, six miles from the store, I have no desire to see them in person. This is partially because I know I have boots in storage, and partially because I really only leave the house to hike, but ‘need’ and ‘practicality’ were never limiting factors before this challenge.

3. I am overwhelmed by choice When I left my dad’s this fall, I divided my clothes into a duffel for short stays and a suitcase for longer stays, but only pulled out the suitcase once in two months and didn’t unpack it. I got so used to my duffel-sized wardrobe that I left my suitcase in my trunk for the first week of this LA month, and now that all my clothes are unpacked in one place I’m annoyed at having to choose from a stack. And that’s just choosing from my “1-2 months of pandemic but maybe work” clothes - when I was making a Christmas list I spent hours online researching socks, trying to shop for longevity. (Did you know people write reviews for socks? What a time.)

4. I want to sell all my luxury goods On day one hundred and thirty-four, I wrote about the high value item inventory I had to fill out for my move, and mentioned that I may want to sell a few items from it when I unpacked. I couldn’t right now rattle off everything that was on the list, but I’m pretty sure I want to sell it all. I’ve become increasingly convinced that luxury, at least of the monogram variety, is a trick - it seems like you’re either chasing after something you’ll never really have, being given something you could already afford, or being arrested for trying to make the whole business more attainable, depending on your place on the socio-economic ladder. I don’t live a Gucci life - I don’t own a home, trust fund, financial advisor or sugar daddy. Why do I think a handbag with two interlocking Gs will get me closer to those things? If anything it just got me a few gs further. Be gone, emblems of conspicuous consumption!

When I start writing vaguely Elizabethan sentences I know it’s time to wrap the post up, but these feel like not insignificant changes. I’m no longer counting down the days until I can buy again, mourning that I can’t try things on, getting thrilled by the hunt, or wondering what my next luxury purchase will be. Instead I’m writing really long blog posts for an audience of one and practicing the knit stitch over and over. Here’s to change!

[theyearofnoclothes]

day three hundred and seventy-four - doing something

I both feel compelled to start this post the usual way and disgusted that anything is ‘the usual way’ in the wake of this week. I remember writing a post this summer where I lamented that we were averaging a thousand deaths a day and the pain of those families. Somehow this week we topped 4,000 deaths in a day, and sit today with over 365,000 deaths. How did we get there? Well, probably the same way we got from “fine people on both sides” to a mob murdering a cop, a cop shooting one of the mob dead, and no consequences for the instigator of said mob. It is a terribly sad and terribly predictable thing that has happened.

I’m certain that this will be included in history books but uncertain how much space America will allow it to take up in her collective conscience - she is quite good at burying anything unflattering while carrying on as if she was still the height of moral authority. Perhaps the only good thing to come of January 6th, 2021 was the very public, very global reveal of our centuries-long hypocrisy, but it’s really too soon to tell if even that will change anything. Or if the results of the other battle fought that day, the one for Senate control, will change anything either. We can only hope.

This isn’t actually a reaction piece to a foretold American tragedy, but I haven’t been able to get the oft-repeated and misattributed quote about good men doing nothing out of my head. I don’t yet know what I want to do to force America to live up to her ideals (other than donating to/volunteering for Ted Cruz, Matt Gaetz, Josh Hawley and Ron Johnson’s opponents [RoJo not being the actual worst in this instance, but my home state deserves better]), but I do know that doing nothing can result in more than state collapse!

A new climate model came out this week that predicts that by 2100, cities across the world could warm by 4.4 degrees Celsius. This is despite decades of alarm-sounding by scientists and chest-puffing multi-national pacts and pledges. I cannot singlehandedly change this, but nor can I in good conscience do nothing, and I hope that you can’t either. So here’s a random assortment of small things I’m doing right now.

1) Still not buying clothes (honestly you could try this for a week and it would help - the average American buys more articles of clothing in a year than there are weeks!)

2) Checking out ebooks from the library instead of buying new paper ones

3) Trying to figure out if charcoal sticks actually filter water and if so, where I can buy some locally

4) Bringing my own plastic and cloth bags to the farmers market (YOU DO NOT HAVE TO BUY AN ECO-FRIENDLY MARKET BAG TO BE ECO-FRIENDLY)

5) Planning a no-buy month for February (linked to Geico because I find it funny, but will still be buying food because...produce?)

6) Researching if compostable = good when it comes to garbage bags (spoiler alert, seems like no)

7) Barely showering (perks of living alone during a pandemic!)

8) Not shopping at Amazon. Like, ever.

These are not big things, and some of them are actually no-things. The past year has taught me that those are maybe the best things - as a sweeping generalization, it’s better to stop doing a bad thing than to start doing an unrelated good thing, and it’s better to use what you already have than to buy anything new. Which I was all proud of myself for sticking to when I got to my current Airbnb and discovered there were no hot pads or measuring spoons. My first instinct was to run out and buy those things as a “need” (I even spent an hour scouring the websites of local BIPOC-owned small businesses to see if they carried any) before realizing I could just use a thick hand towel for a hot pad and my eyes for measuring spoons - I’m not baking anything so don’t actually need precision, which I means I don’t actually need anything!

So I started this post with an American travesty and ended it with an American trope - everything you need is already inside you(r house)! Good luck out there!

[theyearofnoclothes]

day three hundred and sixty-six - roll out

We did it! We made it to the last day of the (debatably) worst year in living memory! Only 345,000ish of our fellow Americans died from the novel coronavirus, Republicans are waiting until 2021 to finish off democracy, and we got a vaccine! It’ll take five years to reach everyone who needs it at the current rollout rate, but, details!

It is important to reflect on the past so we can learn from it, but we’re still in the beginning-to-middle of much of the terror of 2020, so reflection feels premature. There’s also nothing actually significant about the unit of time we call a year, but the fact this was ‘the year of no clothes’ made me feel some wrap up was in order, so...let’s say that was my last post!

To honor the year where there was no time, I will both probably continue to write this blog at least until I break my clothes fast and dedicate this last post of the year to... roller skates.

I missed the roller skate rush this summer, where people snapped up entire product lines in an attempt to change up their workout routine or become the next TikTok star, but after following Oumi Janta on Instagram for a few months it turns out that I was not immune, and the fact that I will spend January in the Venice of Venice Boardwalk fame pushed me over the edge - I needed roller skates, and I needed them now.

Now, that may seem like a ridiculous thing for a blog dedicated to not buying things to admit, but the point of sharing this process is to be accountable, and also human - I am not holier than anyone, and wouldn’t be even if I managed to turn into a total ascetic. The difference between me wanting roller skates now and if I had wanted them a year ago is just how I thought about procuring them. This year, I started my search on Craigslist.

Lightly used sporting goods are almost guaranteed to be found used - in the US, if you want to start a hobby, you typically buy the shit first and then discover it’s not your thing. As a country we’re woefully behind on things like libraries of things or non-predatory rental companies, so if you want to take up weightlifting or racquetball, there’s a good chance you can find what you need on Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace or eBay. Unless you’re looking for a particular brand of a particularly trendy sporting good, like me.

I couldn’t find any skates in my size on Craigslist, and in the searching found a few of the cuter current offerings, specifically the Impalas and the Moxis. This narrowed my eBay search to those brands, and then because I second guess everything I started looking at articles to determine which styles from those brands were “best.”

This is where I jumped the shark a little - instead of committing to buying used skates, I got it in my head that I wanted the best outdoor skates for beginners (aka people who haven’t skated since middle school), and so looked at the web inventory of every single skate shop in LA County to make my decision. I only congratulate myself that I didn’t pay above MSRP on eBay for the pair I eventually landed on, and that I found them at a shop in San Diego instead, but I didn’t quite live up to my circular economy ideals. And that’s ok.

I consider it progress that I spent time trying to find a not-new pair of skates and turned to local small businesses when that plan didn’t work out. Was it the very best thing I could’ve done? No, the very best thing I could’ve done was not buy skates at all and also plant several trees and donate my car to the Sierra Club, but I’m going for good, not perfect. It’s also worth remembering that every individual on the planet could reduce their carbon footprint but if no corporation did we’d be pretty much where we are now, so all those “personal responsibility” folks that accept donations from mega polluters masquerading as innovators can go fuck themselves. Anyways.

I’m hopeful I enjoy the skates, and if I like skating around on carpet enough, that I can find pre-owned knee pads and wrist guards to take my hobby outside. I’m also hopeful that when I finally sign an actual lease that it will be in a community with a library of things, but if you’re reading this and going ‘oh I want that too,’ START ONE YOURSELF! It’s basically 2021! Do whatever you can to make your slice of the world better! Things won’t be any different when the clock strikes midnight, but if this challenge has taught me anything it’s that you can make changes to yourself to maybe make changes yourself. Happy New Year!