Invitation, Impetus

On Wednesday, just a few days ago, an acquaintance invited me to the so-called "Fantastic Hosts' Party", which she described as a "wild dance/food/drink/socialize party downtown full of artists, corporate execs, and 'burners' ". I had no idea what that last word means but was too embarrassed to ask for clarification. She even told me where to find an inexpensive party dress. Being in adventure mode, I said sure, even though it meant I'd need to come up with an outfit in 72 hours or less. Somehow I'd managed to arrive at my age with fewer than a handful of skirts and dresses combined, and none of what I had on hand was suitable for a mid-December evening party.


I had some misgivings about the event itself - normally I don't seek out large and most likely loud gatherings - but being in new in town I figured it couldn't hurt to be exposed to this new scene. Maybe I'd be pleasantly surprised; if not, I'd don my anthropologist's hat and take it all in. And I decided that even if the party was a disappointment, at least I had an impetus to update my wardrobe. With the economy in a shambles, I was hoping to find some good deals if not some real steals.


Early Wednesday evening I set out on my mission. First I headed to Ross, the store that this woman suggested. They had dresses galore, many for less than $50 and several for less than $15. Either they didn't fit or they were poorly made, looking as though they might not survive even a single evening intact. I headed over to Macy's and made a beeline for the clearance racks. Nada. Then my eyes glanced upon a simple, below-the-knee sleeveless dress with a deep V-neck that culminated in a twist of fabric. Unlike many of the strappy and skimpy outfits, this dress looked wearable and comfortable. It fit like a charm. I checked the tag - it, unlike the majority of the merchandise, was not on sale, not even just a little bit.


I hung onto it and continued browsing, finding a few pair of black pants that were marked down. Rather than spend the next two days hunting for a less expensive dress, I decided to spend the money on this one. I got in line at the cash register, where a customer was trying to use a coupon from the local paper on her purchase. The clerk rang her up and the customer offered the remaining coupons to me and and another woman. When it was my turn, the clerk tallied my three items and they came to just $1.62 more than the amount required to use a coupon for $50 off the total. I felt as if the Universe had conspired to help me find a reasonably priced dress in less than two hours, no mean feat for an indecisive and picky shopper like me. And wanting to bring my bill down even further, I opened a Macy's credit card to save another 20%.

The following day I realized that I didn't have an appropriate coat to wear over the dress. My Gore-tex and down jackets just wouldn't fly. Back to Macy's I went for a more thorough look. Bingo - I found a faux lambswool cropped evening jacket that, with my newly opened Macy's card, would also be 20% less. Done.

On Friday, although I had managed to pull together an outfit, my enthusiasm for attending this event was starting to fall apart. For one thing, there had not been subsequent communication from my acquaintance about how she or her boyfriend - he was one of the 18 "Fantastic Hosts" - were going to get me my invitation, required for entry. And not knowing the precise address of the party, I couldn't easily invite someone to go with me. I called this woman to check in.

She made it clear that it was her boyfriend's responsibility to physically deliver the invitation to me - she wasn't going to get involved beyond giving me his cell phone number. While I respected her need to create some boundaries for herself around his last minute behavior, I couldn't help but feel that she was blowing me off; after all, she was the one who had told me about the event. When I suggested that maybe we could all head over there together, and therefore he could simply hand me my ticket at that time, she said she wasn't sure what their schedule would be. In other words, maybe I'd see them there, or maybe I wouldn't.

Huh.

In the meantime, I had mentioned my dress quest to a few artists in my studio building and one of them recommended that I check out Colorado Mills, a group of outlet stores. Only a 15 minute drive away, and with nothing else on my calendar, I figured I'd do some more due diligence. Just as I pulled onto Highway 6 to head towards the stores, my cellphone rang. It was the boyfriend, asking me if I'd be at home in 20 minutes so he could give me this prized invitation. Sorry, I said, I'm heading West and will be gone a few hours. Then he suggested stopping by later that evening. I told him that I had to get up the next morning for a yoga class so he could swing by up until 11pm. He asked me if I do text messaging - I said my cellphone plan doesn't cover it and I'd prefer a quick phone call to let me know when he was on the way.

At the outlet stores - even Nieman Marcus and Saks - they were practically giving the clothing away. I had never seen so much couture for so little cash, relatively speaking. Dresses that normally sell for several hundreds were discounted to the low three digits. And there were a few luxury items whose prices had temporarily dipped into the double digits, thanks to special Friday evening offers. In that respect, I had chosen the perfect time to visit. A few hours later I left with a long knit skirt, some tights, a funky royal blue short-sleeve coat and some gifts. Back home, I went to sleep without hearing from the boyfriend.

On Saturday, the day of the party, I went to yoga, enjoyed a manicure, had some lunch and got ready to go to a "Change is Coming" meeting in my neighborhood. At around 3pm I called the boyfriend to let him know that I'd be turning off my phone for a few hours and that hopefully we'd connect somehow. He was good to his word - sometime between 4pm and 6pm he had managed to squeeze the invitation into my supposedly airtight mailbox. I checked out the address. I was in luck - this bash was within walking distance of my apartment. Being someone that prefers to speak to people over the phone, I called the boyfriend to thank him for the invite and to find out when he and my acquaintance might be arriving. He was non-committal, but later sent me a text message saying 10:30 p.m.

My inner reaction?

"Whatever."

Although I am only a few years older than this couple, I feel like I'm from a different generation if not another planet altogether. From what I've read about the contemporary 30-something social scene, it is perfectly acceptable to engage in dynamic, last-minute plan making and plan breaking, all possible with the aid of text messaging. I grew up with a different model for social interaction - you agree on a time and place and a way of getting in touch if something comes up. To me, this whole party situation felt non-committal, if not slightly rude. Indeed, this fellow was one of the Fantastic Hosts yet was not planning to make an appearance until after the party was underway.

I realized that if I wanted to salvage any fun from the evening I'd need to refrain from indulging in judgmental and negative thoughts and stay focused on the upside: a chance to dress up, check out the scene, enjoy some wine, meet people and dance. I also realized that I could simply choose not to go at all. Perhaps I'd already received the full benefits of the invitation: inexpensive yet high quality clothing that I'd enjoy for a long time.

In the end, I decided to go. As I suspected, the venue was loud and crowded and many people - including women - had chosen not to dress up at all. While I don't regret my purchases, I was a bit disappointed that my acquaintance had given me some inaccurate intelligence on what to wear. While waiting in the long line at the bar for a glass of red wine, I struck up a conversation with a woman named Molly who, it turned out, was also looking around for her friends. I had not spotted mine. When I mentioned that I had just moved to Denver she said, gesturing towards the crowd behind us, "Don't worry, not everyone in this city is a poser. There are some down to earth people in town, too."

Ah, posers.

Could it be that my new acquaintances were of that ilk, despite my hopes to the contrary?

At around 11:20 or so, amidst the din of this bash, located in a vacant multi-story building, I violated my no text messaging rule to contact the boyfriend to see if they had arrived. "Not yet," came the reply. As it approached midnight, snow began to fall and, with my acquaintances nowhere in sight, I decided to call it a night.

Intimacy

Walking into Denver's downtown this morning to do some errands it occurred to me that a possible way of looking at the cause of the financial crisis is through the lens of intimacy or, in this case, the lack thereof. As I strolled in the sunshine I was thinking of intimacy as meaning detailed knowledge of and deep familiarity with a thing or a person. That is simply what arose in my head.

Lenders were not intimate with their borrowers' financial condition. Borrowers, in many cases, were not intimate with the terms of their loans or with their own financial positions. Both borrowers and lenders may not have been intimate with themselves, ignoring their doubts or misgivings about what they were doing. Heads of banks and financial institutions were not intimate with what their organizations were doing.

In other words, maybe it all boils down to an entire culture not paying attention to details, glossing over unpleasant facts, realities and twinges of inner discomfort in the quest for monetary success.

I wonder if this crisis will help some people wake up and start tuning in and, in an intimacy-building way, turning inward.

Ideology, the Danger of

There was a time when I stopped reading newspapers. I was on a diet of sorts, not for my body but for my mind, which was generating an unhealthy surplus of anxieties and fears. I was determined not to introduce any additional negative stimuli in the form of violent or depressing stories that would leave me feeling even more overwhelmed or despairing.

I'm not in such a dark place anymore and so I now do read the New York Times online. Typically I skim the headlines, check out the Letters to the Editor and poke around for feature articles. I am still on a news diet, trying to carefully select what information to feed my still impressionable brain. But sometimes I do give into the temptation to click on a headline that might lead to a longer and upsetting story.

And so it was that I read Ending Famine, Simply by Ignoring the Experts, about how Malawi is now growing enough food for export after years in which it couldn't produce enough for domestic consumption. During those bleak years Malawi followed the World Bank's ideologically orthodox free market advice to not subsidize fertilizer. Without the fertilizer, farmers couldn't coax food out of the weak soil. Many people died of starvation. What is so sickening about the World Bank's advice is that the United States and Europe subsidize their farmers.

But after the 2005 harvest, the worst in a decade, Bingu wa Mutharika, Malawi’s newly elected president, decided to follow what the West practiced, not what it preached.

In my master's program, which each year produces a fresh crop of World Bank employees, I was indoctrinated in the dogma of free trade and free markets and could spout the ideology on command. Some of the economic theories underlying this ideology are seductive in their simple logic and beautiful when illustrated by an elegant curve on a graph. But insisting on transplanting these Ivory Tower ideas into Africa's, or at least Malawi's, barren terrain seems foolish at best and - in light of the resulting deaths - criminal at worst.

Intellectual Inanity

The following headline in the New York Times online edition caught my eye: In Economics Departments, a Growing Will to Debate Fundamental Assumptions .

Well, it is about time.

Like my brothers before me, I studied economics, and found that some of the assumptions underlying Microeconomics 101, which forms the foundation of much of the discipline, did not correspond to my experience of how I or others made certain decisions. In microeconomics, people are assumed to be "rational" agents, always making decisions to maximize their welfare.

But unless you are a cold blooded, emotionally disconnected and hyper analytical person, you behave like a human, which is not particularly rational. Not to mention that each person's idea of "welfare", and what is in their best interest, is highly subjective and varied. That is what makes the world an interesting place in which to live, each of us perched on his/her quirky "indifference curve". On several occasions, the specifics of which elude me here, I was gently chastised by certain family members for having committed the misdemeanor of not behaving or thinking "rationally".

Has anyone ever noticed that the first three letters of this word spell "rat"? And with the exception of wanting to have the cooking skills of the protagonist in the film Ratatouille, I have no interest in behaving like a rodent. Sometimes my heart, soul and psyche long for things that my overeducated and logical brain fails to comprehend. I am learning that if my "rational" side is puzzled by what the rest of me is doing, then I am probably on the right track.

But back to this article. It begins: For many economists, questioning free-market orthodoxy is akin to expressing a belief in intelligent design at a Darwin convention: Those who doubt the naturally beneficial workings of the market are considered either deluded or crazy.

Sadly, the brainwashing happens early in the academic training, long before a Ph.D. is bestowed (if anyone who doesn't know me is reading this, I don't have one). And if you don't swallow the orthodoxy hook, line and sinker, you are pretty much out of luck. Several of my former economics professors told me - back in the 1990s - that they would not become economists if they had to make that choice again, and perhaps I am still a bit bitter or disappointed that, due to the rigidity of thought and belief in that profession, I didn't feel particularly at home there (not to mention that in that field, anyone without a Ph.D. is, shall we say, barely acknowledged).

What is frightening is the profession, which prides itself on the use of mathematical models and rigorous analyses to distinguish itself from (and sometimes to look down upon) other social sciences, is increasingly divorced from the world it is supposedly trying to understand and affect.

I hope that the New York Times article is correct, that things really are starting to change, that more economists will be climbing down from their inane ivory towers to see what life on earth is really like.