Practicalmadness

It was the first really shitty weather day of the winter in dear Chicago, and so it gave me my first opportunity to be taken in by the dear Swedes at H&M. But first, I ventured to Nordstrom, where I have a small amount of credit, to buy socks. You see, the shitty weather (combined with, er, three days of heavy walking, standing and running at my place ‘o work) conspired to make my socks soggy and gross. So I stopped at Nordstrom to buy athletic socks. I changed into a pair before leaving the mall, and that pair (I might add) was soggy and gross before I made it home. I was saved from an inexcusably rank messenger bag by that grand tradition of the men’s underwear counter at a finer departmentstore, the Free Cologne Sample. So the now-destroyed pair of Emily’s socks I was wearing at the time look of death, but smell of crisp, masculine death.

Now, about the dear Swedes: THEY ARE RELENTLESS IN THEIR DESIRE TO SELL CHEAP THINGS. Earlier this year I learned what a sense-destroying, wallet-numbing experience IKEA can be, in its hugeness, its chaos and its…blueness. H&M is the same, except they sell clothes and are not so much blue. I saw an entire wall, my friends, full of nothing but boxer briefs in various bright colors and designs. I was lured in by the promise of cheap winter gear on a harsh winter’s night. I bought gloves that were little more than crumpled Thinsulate™ insulation stuff packed into the shell of a cheap knit glove. I bought an acrylic scarf that will not survive the winter, but kept me warm on this one night. I passed many other items that I thought I wanted, but could not buy. Like pinstriped pants for $42. Or t-shirts with faux retro styling.

The music is so danceatronic and hip that only when they played a Cure song did I not feel dated. The fashion shots on the walls of the men’s department (maybe 400 square feet of a four-story NoMi behemoth) all feature the same hot Swedish guy, but in different clothes. I decided that the ad behind the registers was not, in fact, two pictures of the same man, but rather a picture of Jons and his identical twin brother Fritzi, both forced into male modeling at the young age of fourteen when their dear father, a scientist for Nokia researching whether that damned ringtone (Dadadada, dadadada, dadadada-DA) causes cancer, and their mother, who served Swedish meatballs in the restaurant at a Stockholm IKEA warehouse, were killed in a surprising moose attack.

My knowledge about Sweden is limited to the above, plus Ingmar Bergman.