anthropologie

i forgot i had a blog. mostly because it was ugly. /fixed!

here're some pictures i took recently at Anthropologie, where i will never be able to afford to buy anything ever ever ever but at least i can take pictures.











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it's "apocalypse week" or something equally lame on the history channel. i was watching one of the programs last night with my family -- basically a mockumentary of life after a pandemic. anyway, all of these self-proclaimed "survival experts" (i assume they're self-proclaimed because i can't deal with the absurdity of someone handing out certificates for the mastery of post-apocalyptic survival techniques) seem to believe that it would take only a few days for the facade of society to crumble under the stress of a national or global disaster. they imagine total anarchy, people shooting each other for a bit of food or water or fuel, people whose desperation completely overrides any morals or ideals they may have once had.

maybe (definitely) i'm just a hopeless idealist, but i would like to think that humans are better than that, and that the morals we follow now could still be applied in less comfortable situations. (otherwise what's the point of having them?) i'd like to think that there will always be selfless acts of kindness, and people willing to die knowing they did what was right, rather than trying to live a little bit longer through selfishness and cruelty.

historically, yes, there are plenty records of people being downright cruel, with or without reason. but there are also records of people risking their lives for others, with or without reason, and i'd like to keep those ones in mind.

i'm reading Jonathan Safran Foer's new book, Eating Animals. the passage below is told to Foer as a child by his grandmother, a holocaust survivor, and i think it's relevant to the topic above on several levels.

"During the war it was hell on earth, and I had nothing. I left my family, you know. I was always running, day and night, because the Germans were always right behind me. If you stopped, you died. There was never enough food. I became sicker and sicker from not eating, and I’m not just talking about being skin and bones. I had sores all over my body. It became difficult to move. I wasn’t too good to eat from a garbage can. I ate the parts others wouldn’t eat. If you helped yourself, you could survive. I took whatever I could find. I ate things I wouldn’t tell you about.
“Even at the worst times, there were good people, too. Someone taught me to tie the ends of my pants so I could fill the legs with any potatoes I was able to steal. I walked miles and miles like that, because you never knew when you would be lucky again. Someone gave me a little rice, once, and I traveled two days to a market and traded it for some soap, and then traveled to another market and traded the soap for some beans. You had to have luck and intuition.
“The worst it got was near the end. A lot of people died right at the end, and I didn’t know if I could make it another day. A farmer, a Russian, God bless him, he saw my condition, and he went into his house and came out with a piece of meat for me.”
“He saved your life.”
“I didn’t eat it.”
“You didn’t eat it?”
“It was pork. I wouldn’t eat pork.”
“Why?”
“What do you mean why?”
“What, because it wasn’t kosher?”
“Of course.”
“But not even to save your life?”
“If nothing matters, there’s nothing to save.”