It’s a mystery to us men why women have to buy a new dress and a new pair of shoes every single time they get invited to a wedding or a reception, when they already have racks and shelves full of the same stuff in their cavernous closets. Since the usual excuse is "But I already wore this! I can’t possibly be seen wearing it again!", our obdurately male minds can’t figure out why no one designs and sells cheap one-time, throwaway wedding-gown-and-shoes ensembles.
On the other hand, it never strikes us as odd to acquire another cellphone, another computer, or another car (and, in some cases, another mate, but that’s another story). We even give it a fancy name like "redundancy"–a fail-safe measure to guarantee the availability of a back-up or alternative device in the event of equipment loss or failure–and convince ourselves that our work and, heck, the world as we know it, will surely collapse if we didn’t get our hands on that new 3G Sony Ericsson or that midnight-black MacBook.
Let’s face it: we guys love shopping just as much as anybody else, and it isn’t just for heavy-duty tools and steel-belted radial tires, either. You don’t have to be a moussed-up metrosexual to wander through and appreciate the men’s colognes, neckties, and watches in the duty-free at Changi, or the freshness of the seafood and the vegetables at Farmers Cubao. Putting on my weekend anthropologist’s hat for a minute, I’d propose that shopping has replaced the old hunter’s instinct–except that we no longer hunt mammoths or forage for food so our families can eat (for that, we peck away at computers in the office), but it satisfies a vestigial, primal need to bring home a trophy, and never mind that the trophy’s interesting only to the guy ("Honey, you’ll never believe what I found on sale at the mall – a new 42-inch plasma TV for my den!") and never includes dubious gadgets like new refrigerators and new dishwashers.
Myself, I like all kinds of things; well, maybe I draw the line at cubic zirconium earrings, but I’ve been seen straying into the women’s lingerie section of department stores, doing a comparative study of, uh, men’s and women’s prices. I like clothes – especially if they fit me and my budget. Given my size (which exists in inverse proportion to my disposable income), I’m often constrained to go shopping in the seediest dives, where I can find the castaway shirts and shoes of former NFL linebackers-turned-alcoholics.
Imagine this: while pawing the other day through the garbage dump that I still like to call my desk drawer, I came across an artifact that just might qualify as one of the world’s most pathetic IDs – a card denoting me as a full member of an elite circle of shoppers in a special store. That unique boutique just happens to be one of Cubao’s bigger and grottier ukay-ukay emporia, which I was frequenting so often a couple of years ago that I applied for and got a membership card entitling me to a further 10-percent discount in a discount store. That means – let me see – getting a 50-peso Hanes Beefy T-shirt for P45, with the savings going to the bar of soap you’ll need to exorcise its former owner out of the moldy fabric.
It’s the kind of ID that – despite being plastic-laminated and graced with a surprisingly good picture of its possessor (which is perhaps why I can’t bear to throw it away) – probably won’t get me past the guards of any of our gated villages, including those huddles of shoeboxes along the expressway. But if my house, God forbid, ever gets buried under a ton of volcanic ash or a wall of water, and if this ID were to miraculously survive that cataclysm for the exhumation of archaeologists a century hence, it would offer incontrovertible proof that one "Jose Dalisay" lived to shop in the most desperate ways and the most desperate places, in unrelenting search of irresistible bargains. (And bargains they have been – among them, the Balenciaga blazer that drapes my paunch in chi-chi affairs, found in Cubao for P150.)
I wish my tastes were limited to anything below P200, and that this surplus-store ID were the only card in my wallet, in which case I could live on to my retirement in imperturbable modesty. Unfortunately, my wallet bulgeth over with plastic of all persuasions – Visa, MasterCard, Amex–which, lethally combined with a computer hooked up to the Internet and a two-button mouse, invites me to explore digital bazaars half the planet away and leads me to temptations I didn’t even realize existed.
Some days I think that this thing called eBay was invented by the Almighty to simplify the job of sorting out who goes to paradise or to perdition. Once you sign up for it–which I did nine years ago, when most Pinoys didn’t even know what the Internet was, let alone online shopping – you know where you’re going, the heavenly spin of winning an online auction notwithstanding.
At least it’s comforting to know that we men won’t be alone in consumer hell; it’s an easy guess that there are enough women addicted to eBay – and to the ukay-ukay – to make the place warmer than it already is, but also more tolerably interesting.