Oh, the Bovinity!
Aug. 18th, 2008 12:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsAs I mentioned earlier, Kouryou-chan and I walked into the local mall. The weather outside was the hottest it had been all year, but enough Seattlites had gotten past their heat-induced coma to drive over and try to revive in the air-conditioned splender of our newly rebuilt shopping center. I was desperately looking for a single, out-of-season item. Kouryou-chan was tired and hot. We were already exhausted from the heat and the effort of the day.
The shocked bovinity of my fellow mall-goers told a single, sad story. Nobody looked happy to be in this huge crush, nobody smiled. My normally lecherous instincts were completely tamped: despite the Abercrombie torsos, the Victoria's Secret and Aerie breasts, the Sephora smiles that blared out of animated displays from every wall, from hanging flat screens and dangling banners, from even the floors, nobody who finds the shopping mall a natural habitat is attractive. High school girls flaunting every square inch of skin they could legally expose destroyed any sexuality or attractiveness they might have had with vicious mouths and vapid eyes. Every child was whiny and overwhelmed, every adult man and woman drained and demonstrably capitulating ahead of schedule to the inevitable degredations of cruel time and megacalorie Starbucks Frappucinos.
Architects call malls "machines for selling," and never have I seen a mall fit that description so well as new Westfield wing of Southcenter Mall. Men and women waddled about, cognitively staggered by the alternating zones of bright and dark, color and monochrome, the blaring, braying advertising, the shiny the sexy the tall thin buxom built handsome beautiful you're So Damned INADEQUATE! message.
No wonder I have trouble finding clothes for my tall, fit little girl: the place is geared to servicing the needs of XXL-Jamaba Juice-sucking porcine mouth breathers.
And of course, for that moment, I was one of them.
Yech.
The shocked bovinity of my fellow mall-goers told a single, sad story. Nobody looked happy to be in this huge crush, nobody smiled. My normally lecherous instincts were completely tamped: despite the Abercrombie torsos, the Victoria's Secret and Aerie breasts, the Sephora smiles that blared out of animated displays from every wall, from hanging flat screens and dangling banners, from even the floors, nobody who finds the shopping mall a natural habitat is attractive. High school girls flaunting every square inch of skin they could legally expose destroyed any sexuality or attractiveness they might have had with vicious mouths and vapid eyes. Every child was whiny and overwhelmed, every adult man and woman drained and demonstrably capitulating ahead of schedule to the inevitable degredations of cruel time and megacalorie Starbucks Frappucinos.
Architects call malls "machines for selling," and never have I seen a mall fit that description so well as new Westfield wing of Southcenter Mall. Men and women waddled about, cognitively staggered by the alternating zones of bright and dark, color and monochrome, the blaring, braying advertising, the shiny the sexy the tall thin buxom built handsome beautiful you're So Damned INADEQUATE! message.
No wonder I have trouble finding clothes for my tall, fit little girl: the place is geared to servicing the needs of XXL-Jamaba Juice-sucking porcine mouth breathers.
And of course, for that moment, I was one of them.
Yech.
