To answer that nagging consumer question of “Where’d all my money go?,” I tracked every cent I spent in August. Here it is in an Excel pie chart. Note that I won’t be mentioning any dollar amounts because that’s not your business, mister.

Let’s look at the pretty colors together, shall we?

Boy, is it ever clear that I live in New York City. Jesus. That rent.

As for the other rough half of the pie, this was an abnormal month for spending in some ways.

The Gifts category threw things off because of a few important birthday celebrations. Normally, this category would be absent or well into low single digits, peaking again only in December for Christmas and in assorted other months for celebrations such as weddings.

Using my recently employed expense-cutting strategy, I spent an unlikely zero dollars on music. I bought a few shirts on deep discount from Century 21. And the only book I bought was a used hardcopy copy of—wait for it— Dave Barry’s Money Secrets, from the famous carts outside the Strand—in fact, the percentage for this purchase was so low, it didn’t register as a full percentage, which is why it’s not included in the chart.

That weird 1% for Recreation is related to an upcoming camping adventure and the 1% Household sliver covers things like toilet paper, Kleenex, outdoor insect repellant and roach spray.

In other ways, this was a normal month for spending.

I suspect Utilities (which includes laundry and dry-cleaning costs, plus bills I paid for internet access, electricity, natural gas and cell phone service) is very typical. And it’s a speck lower now that I’ve cancelled my cable TV and Netflix service.

Transportation is also typical. It includes my monthly MetroCard purchase and a handful of bus tickets, plus an odd charge for gas from a mini-vacation.

Regarding food and drink, I must tell you: I have a detailed version of the pie chart that breaks down each of the day’s three meals—plus snacks, soda and alcohol, each further broken-down into eating/drinking-out and eating/drinking-at-home—but it’s got so many tiny slices and percentages, it gives me a headache.

I can tell you, though, that the most interesting point revealed by that detailed data collection is that 13% of the 24% I spent on food and drink was dedicated to dinners in restaurants. It’s a lot but it’s also typical; it’s a New York thing (and, frankly, a Jason thing). I also learned that I don’t spend as much as I’d guessed on lunch, snacks and sodas at work (although these things would be healthier as well as cheaper if I bought them at grocery stores and packed them myself).

So what does this chart tell me? Where can I trim more expenses?

I could prepare more meals at home and eat out less. I could get a cheaper apartment when the lease on my current place expires. Heck, I could get a job that pays more, although this Times article from yesterday claims that I’m “fortunate” to even have a job in post-recession New York City, adding that “[p]ersonal incomes dropped more in New York than in the rest of the country last year, largely because of the smaller bonuses that were paid out in early 2009 for the dismal performance in 2008.”

Yup. The scrimping continues.

Opening today on Times Square: Pop-Tarts World. A real estate broker quoted in the New York Times article notes that the billboards for the store cost as much as the real estate it occupies, which is staggering and fascinating.

Who, even among the most lumpen Manhattan tourists, says, “We need some Pop-Tarts. Let’s go to the Pop-Tarts World.”?

I’d argue this isn’t a store at all. Rather, it’s a real-world, full-immersion Kellogg’s commercial. It’s an experience. It’s a virtual reality without the stupid goggles. And it’s getting close to what the hand-wringers were referring to when they lamented the Disneyfication of old New York.

Things are looking up but the American economy has a long, slow climb back to normalcy, according to Treasury secretary Timothy F. Geithner in an op-ed in today’s New York Times.

What’s been helping me improve my personal economy is spending my spare change—defined as the scratch left-over after I pay rent, transportation, utility bills and food expenses—more responsibly.

First, I’ve been eating and drinking (especially alcohol) in instead of out, which saves a lot. Groceries (even prepared food from a supermarket) and wine/beer/liquor at retail clearly cost much less than similar items at a restaurant or bar.

To curtail my slight addiction to clothing and various media, I’ve stopped reading blogs and magazines that are product-focused, such as Apartment Therapy and Esquire. Because I buy most of my wants online, I’ve also stopped logging into my alternate email account, which is where all of my sale-notification emails come in. This prevents me from seeing the coupons, discounted items and new-item notifications at places such as Amazon.com, Borders, Gilt Groupe, Jack Spade and others that used to sap my spare funds. Too often, I found myself buying something merely because it was advertised in an email or online—even though it was an item I likely wouldn’t have bought (or even thought of) outright.

Also, in the past few months, I’ve stuck with a new strategy of simply listing everything I want to buy for myself that’s beyond a necessity in a Google Document or, in the case of clothing, pasting a photo and details on the item into my Moleskine. The Google Document is sorted by books, CDs, DVDs, bike-related stuff and stuff for my apartment, and it's satisfying to merely classify and store away an item—it quells my urge to spend.

Tellingly, I’ve found that revisiting this list to add items reveals that I seldom remember what I’ve committed there, which tells me that I didn’t need that item to begin with. In fact, only once have I opened the list to add an item and found it was already there, on account of my poor memory. I'm thinking this may be the best way to determine whether I really want a non-essential item. There may be an ice-cream maker in my near future. Or, if I wait long enough, the weather will turn cold and I won’t want one.

After work, I drank my favorite, a Double Fill Up (rye, muddled mint, lemon juice and pomegranate syrup), at Death & Co. then bought a pair of Kubrick-like miniature toy figurines at Toy Tokyo and gave the Peecol one (a guy-in-a-hazmat-suit designed by low-res German art collective eBoy) to Vincent when we met later for a manly dinner and drinks at our favorite local honky-tonk, Rodeo Bar & Grill. According to the character’s bio, “Hazma never landed his dream gig as a chemical cleaner, but he heads to his desk-job in a Level A suit anyway.” In between this frivolity, I somehow procured a new hardcover copy (for half-off!) of John Hodgman’s new book, More Infomration Than You Require, even though its sale date is October 21. Hooray for rifts in space and time!

Over the weekend, Toisha emailed me to ask what camera I’d used to take my photos from our camping expedition on Indian Lake. She’s planning on buying a camera and wanted to learn about the features and costs of the models used by various campers.

After some quick Googling, I was surprised to learn the Lomo LC-A is no longer in production. In fact, it was discontinued in 2005 and this was the first I’d heard of it. I bought mine as part of a “Deluxe Package,” which included a small hardcover book and a few rolls of Lomo-branded film, in October 2002 for $180, which I thought excessive at the time. Then it sat unused until Labor Day weekend 2007 when I dusted it off to take photos of our camping trip in Hickory Run State Park.

Unbeknownst to me, the Lomo LC-A was discontinued on May 1, 2005 due to rising labor and production costs. Pricing on the company’s remaining stock increased to $260 for the camera alone and $325 for the “Deluxe Package.” Original “dead stock” Lomo LC-As still seem to be available for $350, while the Chinese-made replacement model, the Lomo LC-A+, currently retails for $250.

Much of the brouhaha around the Lomo was that although it was admittedly a flimsy camera, it actually had a decent lens, made by LOMO, a storied Russian optics factory that manufactured gun sights during World War I and now makes telescopes and microscopes. To have the camera—and that lens—made in China—it’s just not the same.

So although I didn’t know it, I snuck in the door just as it was closing on the original Lomo.

My neighborhood 99-cent store changes its window displays infrequently.

I bought a set of Colorware dinner plates at Fishs Eddy today, coincidentally 25% off. I couldn’t decide on a single color so I bought one of each. Now I have seven vibrant dinner plates. Hooray.

In the Pacific between San Francisco and Hawaii, there’s an area of convergence where clockwise currents trap flotsam from traveling elsewhere. An island of floating garbage has formed there, mostly plastic and twice the size of Texas, known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. It’s been growing, Blob-like, tenfold every decade since the 1950s. Any nation taking responsibility and cleaning it up seems about as likely as any nation phasing out the plastic grocery bag, a root of the problem. But some are giving it a try.

China, which has a long tradition of cracking down on various animate and inanimate objects, will have developed a collective, government-sanctioned frowny face toward plastic bags starting this June.

Ireland passed a 33-cent-per-plastic bag tax in 2002. “Within weeks, plastic bag use dropped 94 percent,” writes Elisabeth Rosenthal in a New York Times article published in February. “Within a year, nearly everyone had bought reusable cloth bags, keeping them in offices and in the backs of cars. Plastic bags were not outlawed, but carrying them became socially unacceptable—on a par with wearing a fur coat or not cleaning up after one’s dog.”

After considering a per-bag tax, everyone’s favorite city of hippies, San Francisco, is leading the states with a full ban on plastic grocery bags and demanded use of compostable counterparts.

Among retailers, Whole Foods Market will have stopped sacking its expensive groceries in plastic by the end of this month at its stores in the U.S., Canada and the UK. Ikea in the UK has stopped using single-use plastic bags, becoming the first major retailer there to do so. (In the U.S., the chain charges a nickel per disposable bag.)

I’m no big environmentalist and I’m aware the issue spans beyond the uncharted plastic-bag islands of the Pacific—What about garbage bags? Food packaging? The fact that paper bags may be worse for the environment in some ways than plastic? What about our landborne pollution problems?

But I try to do my bit and use a canvas bag now for groceries whenever I can. I see how difficult it will be to ever phase out plastic bags here: they’re a hardwire of most grocery store cashiers’ preprogrammed motions, to schlep food into a polyethylene sack. Even when I announce that I’ll be carrying home my purchases in my own bag, they often peel off a plastic bag without thinking about it.

Here’s an idea that wasn’t meant to take off: an airport vendor selling nothing but magnets. This was in Terminal E at the Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport and because the store was shuttered and apparently being overtaken by a Cowboys souvenir store, I would guess it was as useful a specialty store as The Leftorium would be in real life.

My friend Allison is staging a Brooklyn Sunday Night Dinner series, the first of which is a potluck with a “local/sustainable/seasonal” theme, so I figured I’d be spending time at the famous Union Square Greenmarket. But hold on: in Manhattan alone, there are 27 Greenmarkets. (Each is sanctioned by the city to promote regional agriculture and give family farmers the opportunity to sell their fruits, vegetables and other products directly to New Yorkers.) After checking a map, I discovered there’s been one in my neighborhood, on Isham Street between Seaman Avenue and Cooper Street, every Saturday year-round. I didn’t know that.

I walked up Broadway to check it out. Because of its location and the season, it’s small—much smaller than the Union Square version—taking up only one side of a block between an old brick school and Isham Park, where a flock of Canada geese scrounged for insects on a muddy baseball field. There were only seven vendors but each seemed chosen to avoid duplication, so that a creative cook could prepare a largely local meal from the Inwood Greenmarket: apples, beef, turkey, eggs, bread, pies and honey.

After several passes by the vendors, I decided I’d purchase locally farmed apples and eggs and remake that apple cake I first made for Thanksgiving. (At a glance, the recipe seems snotty and complicated but in reality it’s neither.) For the apples, I paid a few bucks for a half-dozen red-and-green skinned McIntoshes from Samascott Orchard, which has been growing them in Kindernook, New York since 1901. Different varieties brimmed in labeled wooden crates, resplendent in a natural glory without the wax, stickers, symmetry and surface perfection found in their supermarket counterparts. I enjoyed a sign on the crate of Fuji apples that blamed a particular hailstorm over the Samascott’s farm in May 2007 for the superficial scars on that variety. The apples were the size of peas at the time yet they carried the battle damage to their fully ripened size. After I had my apples weighed, I added a cup of hot cider to my order, which proved prescient, as a mini snow-squall arrived out of the literal blue shortly thereafter.

I also picked up a dozen large white eggs from Knoll Krest Farm, located in Clinton Corners, New York, where the free-roaming, cage-free hens are fed vegetarian diets free from hormones and antibiotics and whose eggs are “hand gathered.” Yee-hah.

Completing the hippie nature of my travels, I carried my groceries home in my canvas tote-bag from the Strand and instead of further depleting my iPod’s lithium-rich battery by listening to “Heart and Soul” by T’Pau, I sang it to myself a cappella.

Bonus mp3: “Heart and Soul” by T’Pau

I’ve mentioned before that my favorite Thai dish is pad see ew, and the idea had been bouncing around my head that I should make my own, when I serendipitously came across a tempting recipe, so I set off for Chinatown after work today for the ingredients and implements.

First stop, the tiny but well-stocked Bangkok Center Grocery, which specializes in food from Thailand but also other parts of Asia. I purchased sesame oil from Japan, rice vinegar from Taiwan, black soy sauce and dry rice noodles from Thailand, and my favorite, hailing from Bangkok itself, Squid brand fish sauce, the large bottle illustrated with a vibrant yellow squid but actually made with anchovy extract, sugar and salt. (“Salt crystals may appear naturally in high quality fish sauce,” notes the label. “These salt crystals are harmless.”)

By coincidence, when I’d told a coworker of mine earlier today where I was headed after work, he revealed he was preparing a highfalutin buffalo wing recipe for a Super Bowl party and was having trouble finding sriracha, a popular Thai garlic-chili red sauce. So as a favor, I picked him up a bottle of Thai-authentic Sriraka Panich brand. (“I like that the word ‘panic’ appears in the name of a hot sauce,” he told me later.) If I hadn’t boned-up on sriracha at Wikipedia beforehand, I’d have mistakenly instead bought the best-selling U.S. brand, Huy Fong, which is made here, doped with preservatives and apparently considered ghetto-fabulous by Thai people. After ringing-up my purchases, the clerk individually wrapped my bottles in pages from a Thai newspaper.

A short walk up Mulberry Street and I hit the Asian food and houseware emporium New Kam Man (200 Canal St.), where I’ve shopped before for tea and quirky mugs. It’s a far less touristy and more practical version of Pearl River. Upstairs is dedicated to food, mostly packaged goods, although if you’re in the mood for whole dried shark fin, there are several large glass apothecary jars, nestled on a high shelf, filled with this cartilaginous treat.

Here I bought the recipe-recommended brand of oyster sauce I couldn’t find at Bangkok Center, Lee Kum Kee. I’d have chosen a bottle of this regardless. On its label, a smiling Chinese mother and son row a canoe across a lake, only the boat also contains a small bounty of oysters, each the size of a Radio Flyer wagon. On each side of this scene, a posse of uncaught giant oysters rears from the water, shells parted as if to shriek, “You’ll never make it to shore alive!”

I also bought a cylindrical tin of Roland brand grapeseed oil hailing from France. I thought the mention of this oil of which I’d never heard was a “foodie” pretension of my recipe until I did some research and learned that the oil has a high smoke point and little aroma which makes it a prime candidate for hot wok action.

Which brings me to my final purchase, a wok, which I selected from the wok aisle downstairs at New Kam Man in the midst of all flatware, glassware and teapots. I selected a no-brand steel model with sturdy handles, deep and measuring about 14" across, for a mere $10.50. While I was down there, I grabbed a box of five pairs of lacquered wood chopsticks in vibrant colors and cheesy geisha illustrations for $4.95.

Now that I’m prepared for pad see ew, other than buying an egg, garlic, Chinese broccoli and pork loin, which can be more easily procured uptown, you should be reading soon how the recipe unfolds. Excitement!

I’d been trying to find a cheap cocktail shaker for a while and while out shopping today in Ohio, I didn’t like the designs or the prices of the models I found at Target. On a whim, I tried Marc’s, which is a great deep-discount chain here, and found a stainless-steel shaker with a classic silhouette for a grand total of $3.09. The metal isn’t the thickest so my hands will get frosty during a good shake, and the stainless-steel surface will attract all manner of water-spots and fingerprints, but it’s a price I’m willing to pay for tasty cocktails.

Inspired by my mom’s rectangular measuring spoons while I was cooking over Christmas vacation, I ordered my own pair and they arrived today. They’re Norpro brand, stainless steel with rubberized grips in standard 1 tablespoon and 1/8, 1/4, 1/2 and 1 teaspoon sizes, and I hadn’t seen them or other squared-off spoons elsewhere (Mom bought hers at an outlet mall), so I tracked them down on Amazon.com through a third-party seller.

These appeal to me because I can fit the spoons—even the tablespoon—directly into jars of spice for easy and accurate measuring. I also like that they increase my accuracy for eyeballing nonstandard measurements—half a tablespoon, for example, for which I can’t be bothered to remember or look-up the equivalent (1.5 teaspoons, in case you were wondering).

I took advantage of the 25-percent-off everything sale at Fishs Eddy and bought a glass Anchor Hocking butter dish for under $5. Hey, not every day can be a thrill.

Fishs is expensive yet stylish and always seems to have the best sale items on dinnerware: they were selling white stoneware dinner plates for like 99 cents apiece and customers were swarming all over the display and walking off with tall stacks of them.

Today I bought from Home Depot and installed the final pair of window treatments for my apartment. It would seem more people than I’d have guessed conduct their Christmas shopping at Home Depot. (“A belt sander? Honey, you shouldn’t have.”)

Jason

When will the hipster girls adopt those giant, 1980s-professional eyeglasses? Or have they and no one briefed me?

S.

You totally missed the boat. Those are, like, so 2004.

Jason

I’ve been out of it since I let my style consultant go. Desiree spent all her time at sample sales when she should have been attending Fashion Week, planning my winter wardrobe and answering the phone in my apartment-sized closet. Lately, I’ve been using American Apparel ads to let me know what’s cool.

S.

So how come I haven’t seen you at work donning a pair of royal blue tights and nothing else?

Jason

I was totally wearing royal gold tights last Friday. Occasionally I would cup my breasts and arch my back, alive with pleasure. Then I was sent home early.

S.

I can’t believe I missed your shenanigans. If you canned your former assistant, you need a new one, right? Can my nametag say “Fashion Consultant Extraordinaire”? Or maybe “Roving Ambassador” would be nice.

Jason

I dub thee “Roving Ambassador.” Go forth and spread thy riches of snark, fashion sense and myrrh.

With Halloween fast approaching, I’ve been receiving advice, solicited and otherwise, regarding the best places for costume-shopping/thrifting in New York City. Lately I’ve been favoring eBay for hard-to-find stuff and, on the other hand, for actual vintage clothing that’s reasonably priced, very well-described and doesn’t appear to have been photographed with a cellphone in someone’s garage, RustyZipper.com. But if I must shop a brick-and-mortar store, here are my favorites so far.

For costume basics, I like the three-story Goodwill on 181st and Audobon. Per its location far uptown in a scrappy corner of Manhattan, this isn’t a place to unearth buried vintage treasure, although they do have a well-organized small collection of leather and jean jackets on the second floor and a handful of things that could be considered retro-fashionable. I find it to be more of a workhorse for costume basics: for plain, solid-colored shirts, blouses, skirts or pants, this is the place to go for articles under $5, and I always feel better knowing my money will help fund the less fortunate as apposed to helping fund the re-wallpapering of a boutique owner’s Hamtons summer home.

A side note: a young lady wearing a nice turquoise vintage skirt told me recently that the best Goodwill/Salvation Army in Manhattan is the Salvation Army at E. 23rd Street and Third Avenue. Although as I’ve never been, I cannot vouch for this claim.

For vintage clothing in Manhattan, there are pockets of shops around 14th Street. I like Rags-A-Gogo (“Second Hand On The Move”) on that stretch, between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, although purists would frown upon its Manhattan pricing. There’s a tight selection highlighted by leather and light-weather jackets, as well as cowboy and Hawaiian shirts, and the proprietor is a butch, tattooed lesbian or perhaps bisexual who, every time I’ve been in the shop (and I’ve been there, like, seven times), is talking with a random customer about sex. Either that or how everyone needs at least one cowboy shirt in his or her wardrobe.

The store in Brooklyn that will make a seasoned thrifter stoop to kiss the floor upon arrival is the storied warehouse-like Beacon’s Closet, on N. 11th Street between Berry and Wythe, right across the street from the Brooklyn Brewery in Williamsburg. They have a fantastic, frequently changing selection of vintage awesomeness with prices that range from penny-pinching to boutique. As is usually the case, the women win with a selection that’s easily 2.5 times larger than the men’s.

A not-as-often reported fact about Beacon’s is that it would appear to be a prime potential pick-up joint, with its clientele of trim and fetchingly tousled young ladies and gentlemen pawing through the merchandise while glancing discretely at each other’s wardrobes and expensive haircuts. “Oh, are you into terrycloth leisure slacks, too? So am I! Wanna wear ’em tonight and join me at Union Hall for billiards and a PBR?”

If you’re in the neighborhood to check out Beacon’s, you might as well check out nearby Buffalo Exchange, too, which recalls a more condensed version of Beacon’s. It’s on the corner of Driggs and N. 9th Street. (Take the L to the Bedford Street stop to visit both Beacon’s and Buffalo.)

Finally, a costume shopper should always consider the cheap-and-nasty poor-people clothing stores in the Garment District, clustered in Midtown around 34th and Eighth, especially standbys like Conway. Shirts, pants, belts, ties and caps aplenty, often for well under $5.

This weekend I stopped into the Manhattan Portage store off of Canal Street and after some browsing, the guy behind the counter walked over and started staring at my bag, which astute readers will recall is a Manhattan Portage, shown here in a file photo.

Or so I thought.

“Where’d you get this bag?” he asked.

“The Manhattan Portage store on Elizabeth Street,” I said.

“The Token store?”

“I think that’s what it’s called.”

“It’s a fake,” he said.

He had me look inside for a tiny white “Made in the USA” label that wasn’t there, but that he showed me in a bag he pulled off a nearby hook.

“This is made in China,” he said. “See?” He picked at the red Manhattan Portage logo on the front of the bag. “That’ll come off eventually.” He compared the stitching of the label on my bag to the one he was holding, but they looked the same to me, and I assumed that any looseness in my label was from knocking the bag into walls, doors and assholes in my way on the sidewalk, all natural in the course of a day for a Manhattan commuter.

I don’t know if I believe this guy but he was supremely certain and made me feel like some sort of fake-bag buying jerk.

But his contention is suspicious. The store at which I bought the bag, Token, is listed on the Manhattan Portage website itself (unless that’s a fake) as an authorized reseller. And the bag I bought appears to look the same (at least from the front) and share the description of the bag depicted on the website. And I find it amusing that I had reviewed the “Copies, Counterfeits & Imitations” section on the website (scroll down to bottom of the linked page to view) before I bought the bag. Why would anyone bother to clone such a non-luxury brand, I wondered. Coach, Louis Vuitton or Rolex: you can easily find knockoffs of these for sale any day from the sidewalk on Canal.

But duplicating a Manhattan Portage bag would be like duplicating, I don’t know, a Hanes T-shirt or a can of Del Monte peaches. My Manhattan Portage label doesn’t resemble the obvious knockoffs shown on the website and appears to meet all the other criteria for being the genuine article. And frankly I don’t care if it’s a fake. It’s held up to repeated abuse and its seams haven’t melted away in the rain, so I’m happy with it no matter its lineage. Though until I get some CSI guys on the case, I say it’s real.

I’m not a huge environmentalist, just a minor one, although parts of the article in today’s Salon about the scourge of those ubiquitous plastic grocery bags alarmed me.

It made me think about two things: first, my friend Beth’s “everyday” bag, which her Mom crocheted for her out of strips of black, yellow, white and blue plastic grocery bags. I didn’t even realize what it was made of until I looked closely. It’s oddly stylish, lightweight but sturdy, water resistant and hews strongly to the second demand of the environmental credo, “reduce, reuse, recycle.” If you are crafty, check out this link to a Craft magazine link-roundup covering an array of totes and clothing one can make out of plastic grocery bags.

I also thought of designer Anya Hindmarch’s infamous canvas totes that are screen-printed in cursive with the smug sentence, "I'm not a plastic bag." They went on sale in Britain in April for $15 apiece but are now showing up on eBay for as much as $300. I’ve now seen them over the shoulders of fashionable young ladies on the subway and the streets here in New York, so I can tell you they have reached Full Popularity Status.

The inevitable reprisal item, as noted by Salon’s brief article on Hindmarch, has already appeared with British designer Marissa Vandersee’s “I’m not a smug twat” bag. Me, if my Babel-Fishy French is correct, I’d like to see a canvas bag emblazoned with the Magritte-like statement, “Ce n'est pas un sac de toile.” I’d tote that.

For about a year I’ve had my eye on a certain Manhattan Portage messenger bag, a gray one with sporty red racing stripe and vivid yellow vinyl lining that waterproofs the interior. I was biding my time because I thought it might go on sale, but it’s held firm somewhere between “too expensive!” and ”but I really want it!” I finally bought it this weekend and was amused to discover it’s named after my sister, Dana.

I haunted the restaurant supply district on the Bowery early this afternoon for ramekins, convinced I could pay less than the $2 Bed, Bath & Beyond asks per six-ounce model. Many restaurant supply stores are shuttered Saturday, I learned. But these are the places to go if you want napkin dispensers or red plastic squeezable ketchup dispensers or bulk boxes of those tiny paper umbrellas that adorn tropical alcoholic beverages. Ramekins are apparently more exclusive.

Mingling with the skateboarders, greengrocers and craft-sellers on the southwest corner of Union Square, some modern-day hippies held up hand-painted signs that read “Free Hugs.” They wavered expectantly, like athletes waiting for the starter’s gun, trying to make eye contact as pedestrians rushed by from every angle. A woman nearby videotaped the uneventful enterprise, whether a curious passer-by herself or a documentarian affiliated with the group. A tall man on his cell passed a bit too closely to one of the hopeful huggers, an older man wearing suspenders, who advanced with a gesture that was half “see my sign?” and half “I’m gonna hug you anyway!” The guy on the phone smiled but did not break his stride as he held up a Heisman Trophy-style hand meant to signal “no thanks” but firm enough to serve as deflection if necessary. I felt for the old guy but I must admit there is inherent creepiness in hugging a man, a strange man in New York City moreso, wearing suspenders.

Later I tooled around my neighborhood for a slice of pizza for dinner. I had trouble indicating which fruit-punch flavored beverage I desired from the cooler behind the counter. The Hawaiian Punch, the girl behind the counter asked? No, I said, stretching out my arm to point, that one. The Snapple? No, the tall bottle. Here? No, right... down a shelf... to the right. Yes, that one. Let the record show I was thirsting for a Jarritos, el sabor más Mexicano.

At the corner of Dyckman and Sherman, sidewalk entrepreneurs were hawking not only Mother’s Day bouquets of roses and assorted field flowers, but Mylar helium balloons and tiny lace-trimmed satin pillows stitched with “Love you, Mom.” Aww.

I went, again, to Ikea today, this time with Jimi, The Man and Johnny. I thought they might make some purchases of their own there so as to downplay the fact that I seemed to be using them for their rental car, but no dice. We had a nice lunch involving cheap meatballs and sandwiches in the cafeteria. Later, we learned that thrifty bibliophile-beloved particle-board confection, the Billy bookcase, barely fit in our vehicle with all but the driver and front passenger seats tucked down. I scrunched up in the back and Johnny fell asleep laying on top of the large flat boxes. Upon waking, he was surprised to learn my building doesn’t have an elevator so we all got to experience arrhythmia and shortness of breath lugging that lumber up all those stairs.

The Japanese chain Muji will open its first two U.S. stores in New York City, reportedly as early as later this year. To date I’ve been buying my Muji stuff, mainly pens for myself and socks as gifts, from the extremely limited selection at the MoMA Design Store. Here’s one of my Muji pens.

The brand, the name of which is an abbreviation of the phrase “no brand” in Japanese, is known for its lack of logos and simplicity, encompassing clothing, food and all manner of decor, utensils and office supplies.

William Gibson wrote a novel with a heroine who “likes Muji because nothing there ever has a logo.” He’s also mentioned the chain in an article he wrote in 2001 for The Guardian:

Muji [...] calls up a wonderful Japan that doesn’t really exist. A Japan of the mind, where even toenail-clippers and plastic coat-hangers possess a Zen purity: functional, minimal, reasonably priced. I would very much like to visit the Japan that Muji evokes. I would vacation there and attain a new serenity, smooth and translucent, in perfect counterpoint to natural fabrics and unbleached cardboard. My toiletries would pretend to be nothing more than what they are, and neither would I.

What to get this Christmas for the tycoon or mad scientist in your life who has everything? How about his own private island? Although I do note a suspicious lack of information about the presence of vicious dinosaurs and/or giant evil robots on said islands.

Hark, the herald angels sing! They’re singing, “You need to finish your Christmas shopping. Also, buy more furniture so you can have people over to your apartment for the holidays without fretting about your lack of chairs.”

Good advice, loud celestial beings in my head. And what better place for my needs than Ikea?

Katie and I headed out there this morning and on the way to Elizabeth, we took a wrong turn, which afforded her an opportunity to point out the grassy marshes the mafia favor for dumping corpses. Upon arrival we hit customer service and Katie tried to return the dish-drying rack she bought during our last visit, but the clerk wouldn’t accept it because he said the store no longer stocked it. Perhaps, Katie suggested, that was because it was a flimsy piece of shit that would sooner allow dishes to roll off the counter than it would dry them. Unmoved, the clerk wouldn’t even give her store credit.

Although Christmas is fast approaching, the crowds today weren’t any worse than usual. We moseyed along and checked out the showrooms, several of which contained weary customers taking catnaps on the display beds. I wanted a coffee table, but the nice one that matches my kitchen table was too expensive for me this month. Katie put much consideration and browsing power into purchasing a chandelier for her living room, but she couldn’t find a model with all the features she wanted.

I bought a kitchen chair to match the one I already have and went a little nuts with the impulse purchases. Those included a brick of 100 tea lights and four equally inexpensive glass holders, a new shower-supply caddy to replace the rust-cornered one I have now, silver-and-gold Christmas wrapping paper and a floor lamp to illuminate the love-seat reading area of my living room.

I never find more helpful salespeople in chains such as Sephora, Origins and The Body Shop than I do during the holidays. I like to imagine these outfits ramp up their help for confused gentlemen such as myself, who flood the stores this time of year to buy fancy bath products for ladies as Christmas gifts but end up stymied by the array of liquids, scents and packaging.

I must give a shout-out to the helpful and courteous saleslady tonight at The Body Shop on the Upper West Side who answered my most pressing question: What’s the difference between shower gel and body wash?

Ready? There is no difference. They’re both meant as substitutes for glycerin bar soap in the shower. I didn’t get into it with the saleslady why this name game is necessary, although I assume it has to do with marketing.

To over-generalize using the examples in my photo above, the Bergamot Body Wash seems positioned more as a masculine item. Citrusy and strong, the fragrance is an element of the original eau de cologne. Plus it’s in that manly dark-green bottle with a black cap. The Vanilla Spice Shower Gel, sparkling honey-gold in a transparent container, seems more of a stereotypically feminine scent.

So perhaps “Body Wash” was chosen for its descriptive bluntness, kind of a dumbing-down of the language for guys: Whatdaya do with this stuff? You wash yer body with it, just like Lava, only fancy-smelling. Whereas “Shower Gel,” like a lot of those mysterious cosmetic items ladies store in the bathroom, is more vague, positioned for experienced users only.

While waiting to be seated for a traditional Cleveland Heights lunch at Tommy’s, Dana and I moseyed over to Ohio’s best toy store, Big Fun, to see how their new digs have been faring.

Sometime over the last 12 months, the store moved from a shack-sized location across the street, crammed literally floor to ceiling with antique and retro toys and novelties, to a store at least three times as large on the other side. We were curious to see if the proprietors had been able to maintain the feel of coziness and wonder the original location had, while allowing freedom of movement; space issues in the original store dictated frequent pressing up against cabinets of Smurfs or vintage lunchboxes in otder to let other customers pass. High Tide/Rock Bottom, the business that used to be located in the larger space, was a bland sort of Spencer’s Gifts, selling saucy cards, posters and knickknacks: maybe ironically, the sort of store that dreams of being a store like Big Fun. But the ceilings there were high and dropped, of the white acoustic tile variety found in soul-sucking corporate office environments, and the hard floors were covered in that thin gray carpeting, also on loan from the land of Aeron chairs and fluorescent tube lighting. In short, not the atmosphere anyone wants in a toy store billed not only as big but fun.

Happily, they’ve been able to sort it out. They’ve ripped up the carpeting in part of the back, revealing unpolished but pleasing-to-the-feet hardwood flooring. Other major swaths of the floor have been expertly covered in sturdy plywood painted caution yellow, which makes sense somehow. And the ceilings: well, there was apparently no option to jettison those acoustic tiles, so the storeowners hired some artists or hooligans or artistic hooligans to plaster-tag the thing with vibrant spray-painted graffiti of psychedelic bursts, mischievous cartoons and the name of the store in explosive typefaces. It’s now the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, ghetto-fabulousized. Why I didn’t take a photo of this for your elucidation, I’m unsure, but believe me when I tell you the overall effect is like the hermit crab getting all comfy in its roomy new shell.

Decor aside, the practical benefit of the bigger Big Fun is of course more display space. Mouth-watering to those of us born in the ’70s and early-’80s are the tall glass cases crammed with seemingly every Transformer ever transformed, every G.I. Joe figurine ever posed with Action Accessories (or, if Zartan, placed in the freezer), even every Strawberry Shortcake, all artfully posed, all for sale. The centerpiece in the back corner, at least for those of us who gain instant fond memories upon hearing the phrase “and knowing is half the battle,” is a cheesy display (covered in “Do Not Touch!” signs) of the G.I. Joe Aircraft Carrier, as big as Gary Coleman and a premium item surely only that dick from Silver Spoons could afford. For scale, the G.I. Joe Hovercraft I once owned and painstakingly applied approximately 100 decals to, is floating indistinctly nearby in the poorly painted styrofoam sea. I couldn’t help but notice the depth charges were missing and that it’s an awful lot smaller than I remembered it being during intensive battle missions in the bathtub.

What a great store. It’s a challenge still to avoid exclaiming “Whoah!” like Keanu or asking your shopping companion every five minutes “Hey, remember this?” (or just telling her, “You gotta see this!”) while pointing at some near-forgotten plaything.

The New York Times reports today that Coliseum Books, “a Manhattan bastion of independent bookselling since the early 1970’s,” is closing permanently by the end of the year. Same old story:

The reasons may be obvious to anyone who has shopped for book discounts on the Internet or spent time pawing through books that they have no intention of buying at one of the thousands of chain bookstores across the nation.

I’ve never been to Coliseum, but I must redouble my efforts to patronize the independent booksellers I like, such as the Strand, Westside Books and McNally-Robinson, instead of buying my books online, which I’ve been doing a lot of lately.

It’s just so tempting to me and my thriftiness to take the Amazon.com route. There, for instance, I can buy Haruki Murakami’s new short story collection today in hardcover for $16.47, without tax or shipping fees. An independent is likely to list-price the title at $24.95, not including New York’s 8-point-whatever percent sales tax.

An even more tempting bargain are goods purchased via Amazon Marketplace Sellers, third-party merchants that sell new and used media through Amazon’s site and order system. For example, George Saunders’ newest book lists for $23.95, is carried by Amazon.com for $16.29, but is available as a clean new non-remaindered copy via a Marketplace Seller for a mere $11.75. You do the math, as they say.

But consider those extra dollars for the independent-bookstore book are helping fund my favorite parts of book-buying: browsing amid funky décor, mingling with a clientele passionate about reading, the thrill of the hunt for a new favorite among the creative displays and staff recommendations, and most importantly, the knowledgeable, friendly and often cute salespeople. I should more carefully allocate my book-buying dollars.

Two of my favorite brands are getting huge boosts for their popularity. Modo & Modo, maker of Moleskine notebooks, is putting itself up for sale because it no longer has the capacity to meet demand. Last year, it sold 4.5 million notebooks worldwide, more than half of those to the U.S. market, according to the London Daily Telegraph. And the company currently only has 13 employees!

On the local front, Daisy May’s BBQ, known by regular readers as a general favorite of mine and the first meal in the first 52 Meals Project, has recently expanded its dining arrangements. Previously, there was nowhere to sit inside, just a narrow lunch counter to stand at; fair weather would bring a blessed few picnic tables outside on the sidewalk. Now the place has been expanded inside to include cafeteria-style service within a pinewood dining room housing 48 seats at communal tables. They have also begun serving whole pigs.

Kudos to these establishments on their continued success. In both cases, I think the goods are slightly more expensive than one would expect to pay, but worth it because of the quality.

We were allowed off work at 1:30 today on account of the Easter holiday. It was gray, cold and drizzly so I went over to Norman’s Sound & Vision for used CDs to improve the mood.

I found Phil Collins’ No Jacket Required, which I purchased mainly for one of my favorite songs of his, “Don’t Lose My Number.” (I laughed when I read All Music Guide reviewer Stewart Mason’s gripe that “it’s never satisfactorily explained who Billy is and why he shouldn’t lose Phil’s number.”) Also, for $4, I picked up the soundtrack for Wonder Boys, which features some fine Dylan songs.

I decided to walk all the way down to Soho to check out the new Ben Sherman store, which opened late last month. Moseying down Bowery, I stumbled upon the restaurant supply district, where one can purchase chairs, tables and lighting for one’s bar or restaurant, or even those cartoonish statues of chefs or pigs, which are sort of like giant lawn jockeys, that you can put outside of your establishment to attract customers and vandals. One shop had several of these figures set out on the sidewalk, shrouded from the weather in translucent plastic, so that they resembled standing corpses.

Despite being the first standalone store for the brand in the U.S., the Ben Sherman store is nothing special. It’s on Spring Street between Broadway and Mercer and decked out in the area’s standard boutique format: lots of space for just a small bit of merchandise, a skew towards women’s apparel over men’s, distressed hardwood floors, cooler-than-you staff spending most of their time talking amongst themselves, etc. I shouldn’t have been surprised that they didn’t have a sale section. I’ll have to keep combing Filene’s, Macy’s and Urban Outfitters for true deals on those shirts I like.

Just so there’s no confusion, this is the instruction manual for the table I bought at Ikea.

And this is an instruction manual for the similarly named singer.

For even more Björk/Ikea, read this.

It was a beautiful warm spring day today; what better a time for two young Americans to go shopping. I took the PATH train to Katie’s new apartment in Jersey City early this morning and after hopping in her car and stopping for beverages and bagels, we got on the turnpike and headed to Elizabeth, home of Ikea.

We ended up missing our exit because we were talking about a flurry of unrelated topics: the recently released 9/11 911 recordings, Malcom Gladwell lurking in the cafe of Katie’s bookstore, and the 101.1 Jack FM robo-radio station playing as the backdrop to our chatter. So we took what my dad would call a scenic route through Elizabeth, which seems to have an obsession with recycling. After it became obvious we wouldn’t be finding our way to Ikea via the Elizabethan backroads, we relocated the turnpike and got back on it, advancing to the correct exit.

For my first time to Ikea, it was a marvelous experience. I thought the whole outfit would resemble a Home Depot, but only the last bit does, when you get to strain yourself hefting large flat boxes of unassembled furniture onto your cart right before the checkout.

We spent the bulk of our time in the showrooms upstairs, each of which is packed with all manner of Ikea merchandise. You can hang out in a kitchen, for instance, that’s constructed, furnished and lit like a movie set, and inspect the knife block, wall clock, wine rack and window curtains—everything, all for sale. If you open the cupboards, why, there are Ikea dishes and glasses inside. Signs on some rooms exclaim hopefully, “Buy this whole room for $800.” In addition to several kitchens, there are fully furnished home and corporate offices, boutiques, bedrooms, bathrooms, board rooms, living rooms, dorm rooms, kids’ rooms, ultility rooms, laundry rooms, wine rooms, closets. Each leads directly into another, swarming with dazed shoppers, and there is no escape from the circuit. Your mind starts swimming with unpronounceable Scandinavian names in soul-soothing Futura and you feel as if you’re trapped in the infinite dream house of a man named Sven.

But when you get down to it, most of the stuff Ikea makes is cheap and nasty. The company relishes in the impression that its merchandise is handcrafted by tall Aryans in lab coats when in fact the majority of it is “designed and commissioned” by the Aryans, then manufactured by less tall people in Asia from the finest plastic and laminated particle board. What I found most valuable during my showroom appearance, in lieu of ordering from ikea.com, was testing sturdiness and quality. The word I overused today was “flimsy.” I sat heavily in chairs. I eyed imperfections in glassware. I opened and closed drawers. I rambled about the room of kitchen tables, shoving and taunting the merchandise like a furniture pimp. I scoffed a lot.

I took notes and consulted with Katie, which was another nice touch over online shopping: getting an immediate and trusted human opinion with more style savvy than my own. In return, I advised on her purchases, which included a reading light, a coat-hanging unit, a dish drying rack and a bathroom mirror to replace her ugly existing one, which we were amused to discover was made by Ikea.

It was a long day. I think we spent six hours there. We had to stop halfway through to rejuvenate with coffee in the cafeteria, resplendent in the faint odor of meatballs, and listen to a couple on drums and accordion riff through polka adaptations of songs like Jim Croce’s “Time in a Bottle.”

As for my final purchases, I settled on a sturdy birch kitchen table that had Björk in its name, which of course helped seal the deal, and a wooden chair with padded slipcover that combines a paradox of comfort with construction that prevents slouching. How European! I picked up a lacquered wood tray for breakfast in bed or dinner while couch-sitting. The three large glass jars with stopper-top aluminum lids I got will be perfect for holding dry ingredients like noodles, sugar and flour. I located a similar model jar, but tall, in which to store my spaghetti. And for only $4.50, I picked up a set of six red wine glasses so I can cease drinking my shiraz from tumblers like a wino. My sole impulse purchase was a small clock, on clearance sale for $2.99, that sports the plastic boxiness and primary colors of Lego bricks. I shall place it in my bathroom where it will complement my brightly colored fish motif.

After we returned to Katie’s apartment, I goaded her to pry off her old bathroom mirror, which is adhered strongly and directly to the wall, using a paint-can opener, but she only succeeded in cracking the thing and getting glass slivers all over her sink. For a late dinner, we carried out a large mushroom and fried-eggplant pizza from Lombardi’s which we ate listening to Beck and Kate Bush, while Katie’s cats sniffed around her new purchases.

The East Village contains a lot of really good looking people, even on a sunny, bitter winter day like today when many of them are bundled up like surly Michelin mascots. I was in the neighborhood rooting around for a few hours in the basement of Norman’s Sound & Vision, now my second-favorite shop to snag cherry used CDs, after Academy Records. Root you shall at Norman’s: some of the best deals are to be found under the cabinets holding the higher-priced items, or thrown into milkcrates and cardboard boxes on the floor. If you go, make sure you’re not wearing your fancy pants; they may dirty as you scoot around on the floor like an arthritic breakdancer. Among my finds was a Samantha Fox greatest hits CD for $4.99! What? No, I’m not ashamed.

Garlic is highly hygroscopic, which I know because whenever I need it for a recipe, the cloves are bloated and spongy, lurking in the dark of my cabinet like plump maggots. Eww. So I stopped by Williams-Sonoma tonight and asked the greeter, an overweight woman with a high-pitched voice, where to find “one of those ceramic things you put your garlic in.”

“Actually, sir,” she said, “ours are terra cotta. They’re in the far back on the right.”

As I passed the KitchenAid mixers, Le Creuset cookware and gleaming stainless steel implements, I wondered how sexy Williams-Sonoma could make a garlic cozy, or whatever they might call it. Well, I can tell you without a doubt that Williams-Sonoma’s garlic cozies exude less style than most any other item they carry, including their coasters.

The cozies sat in a row on a low shelf near some bland salt and pepper shakers. They’re tiny terra-cotta pots, unfinished on the outside, glazed on the inside and topped with an ill-fitting lid. Three holes have been added to the face in an uninspired fashion. They reminded me of miniature versions of those pots designed for planting Hens and Chicks. For $10, I demand more flair from my garlic cozy. I recall seeing glazed ceramic ones shaped like garlic bulbs. Where can I get those, anyway? Target doesn’t have them, and now I know Williams-Sonoma doesn’t, either.

As I was leaving empty-handed, the greeter asked, “Oh, were we all out?”

“Nah, I just didn’t like them,” I said. “But they were right where you said they’d be, so in that sense, your help was a success.”

I hadn’t meant this to be funny, but she laughed this high-pitched laugh as if my response was the funniest thing she had heard all day. Or she was just humoring me, another potential customer leaving without a proper garlic storage device.

At the Kmart above Penn Station, I finally located some drapes in the appropriate size and the color I like (blue). Also, they were well priced at about $20 per two-pack. I bought two sets for the windows in my main living area and two light-dampening blind sets to replace the grungy ones in the bedroom.

After my adventures with bedding, it should come as no surprise that I had difficulty tonight buying drapes. Having measured my windows as roughly 39 inches wide by 73 inches tall, I bought a two-pack of handsome blue window panels, which according to the packaging are “82 x 63 inches.” Because the packaging gave no further details, I assumed that 82 inches was the height, as curtains are well known for their longer heights to shorter widths. Wrong! 82 inches is the total width of both panels and 62 inches is the height, so after I put them up, they weren’t long enough and resembled Gilligan’s pants. Is this yet another thing about consumer goods that’s never implicitly stated but that I’m expected to know, like that the first number in jeans’ sizing is the waist size and the second is the length?

On the new neighborhood front, having walked around more to absorb the local flavor, I’ve determined a good descriptor for the area is “musical.” People blast their jaunty Spanish pop and rap from the windows of their homes and cars. In my building, on the lower floors, someone practices trumpet, and one floor down from my apartment, someone is learning to play piano or teaching lessons. The piano doesn’t bother me because it’s not played after 10 p.m., and in fact has a warm, lonely resonance, filtered through the wood floors and the walls of big rooms. The crescendo, as it were, of my musical musings occurred late tonight, as I returned from a bodega with a Goya pear nectar. Just across the street from my apartment, there stood on the sidewalk a quartet of young fellows in a loose circle and they were beatboxing. They weren’t playing for a crowd, they were just doin’ it like it was 1984. That is totally awesome.

When you cross from Manhattan to the Bronx on the 1 train, suspended above the Harlem River, you may expect to be greeted by wondrous sites visible through the subway car windows, as you pass from one mighty borough to another. Instead, out the eastern windows, as the train delivers you to the West 225th Street stop, you see: a Target store.

And not just a Target, which opened only last year, but a Marshall’s, a Radio Shack and an Applebee’s, all in a tidy little strip mall area that looks out of place. I felt magically whisked away to suburban Cleveland, especially with that Applebee’s.

New York has Targets in every borough now except Manhattan (because of space issues, my real estate cronies tell me) and Staten Island, the freak borough (although one is scheduled to open there in March 2006). The Target in the Bronx isn’t much different than any other Target you’ve been to, except that in true New York space-saving fashion, the parking is on the roof. Also, there are guys outside on the sidewalk with grill carts, bags of charcoal and hand-lettered signs that you can get two hot dogs and a soda for $2.50.

Inside for the first time, without thinking or looking at signage, I walked precisely to my destination, the towel aisle. I think a large chunk of America’s collective memory is reserved for floor plans of mass merchandisers, which don’t seem to vary much from store to store.

At the checkout are the typical heartbreakingly long and slow lines, and hauling the bags home through the subway turnstiles can be challenging, but I suppose it’s convenient and saves a few bucks, all the while contributing to the decline of Western Civilization.

I wasn’t aware buying bedding was so complicated. Or maybe in my common fashion, I’m just making it complicated. For my new place, I’ve had to buy all that stuff because the sheets, comforters and such I’m using now are on loan from Andie. Now that she’s graciously donated her Ikea futon love seat and large extra bed to me, I need to get my own sheets, blankets and pillows.

You have all those bed sizes, like queen, double, single, twin, deluxe and what have you, none of which I can ever remember. Then you have thread counts to take into account, and options to buy all the bedding in one package or separately. Then you’ve got terms I’ve never heard, like “sham,” which, correct me if I’m wrong, is some sort of mutant pillow that’s only meant to be used as a decoration, like those fruit-shaped soaps in your Mom’s guest bathroom.

This is all not to mention styles, most of which, at least for the comforters offered by the likes of Target and Bed, Bath & Beyond, seem frozen in the garish design world of 1988. (Not that I care too much about that, since most of the time I’ll be using such bedding, it will be too dark for me to see it.)

After much soul-searching and consultation of lady-type coworkers as to what exactly “flat sheets” and “dust ruffles” are, I opted for a Bed-in-a-Bag package from Bed, Bath & Beyond for a mere $60 (before tax and shipping/handling) that includes a comforter, two standard shams, dust ruffle, fitted sheet and flat sheet. (Actually, the poorly edited description lists the phrase “two standard shams” twice, which I’m assuming is a typo, and that they meant pillowcases, which are depicted in the photo.)

The sheets and cases in this particular package are a really fruity paisley, described (or not, really) as “lovely periwinkle,” and it doesn’t take too much imagination to conjure an image of Prince curled up in them and dreaming of himself. The comforter has handsome vertical stripes in various shades of blue. Target was offering a comforter similar to this, but more expensive because it had a higher thread count and was designed by Isaac Mizrahi, although I imagine both were sewn by the same underpaid Chinese person but that my non-Mizrahi version was sewn late at night when she was really sleepy, so the lines aren’t as straight.

I’m also concerned my sheet set has an appallingly low thread count, likely classified by some national bedding association as “gossamer,” with the heft and tensile strength of good intentions. But I’ve worn most of my previous sheet sets to death, and I’m not going to replace the things until they have gaping holes in them, so maybe thread count shouldn’t be a worry.

Jimi, The Man and I took the train down to Jimi’s old West Village neighborhood and got brunch at Garage. It was a “jazz brunch” and we were treated to loud jazz renditions of classics from the ’80s, including Madonna’s “Material Girl” and a festive medley of Police songs.

While we were in the neighborhood, we did a lot of shopping. First was Banana Republic, where we witnessed two shoplifters bolting from the store right as we arrived. The Man, who decided a change was in order with his current ensemble, purchased khaki shorts and a handsome new short-sleeved shirt on sale, and wore the clothes out of the store. Next was Origins, where an enterprising young salesman demonstrated a new microdermabrasion product on Jimi’s hands, which Jimi then purchased. At the Jonathan Adler store, which resembles a funky early-’70s bachelor pad, Jimi pondered purchasing some small flower vases and a ceramic elephant, while at the Louis Vuitton store, he priced a bag he’s had his eye on, as well as some jewelry and dog collars for his dogs, Couscous and Bingo. Jimi one-upped the salesclerk with his superior knowledge of Vuitton bags. She admitted she was new but when we disparaged a hard-sided Vuitton vanity case as bulky and cumbersome, she noted it could be used as a stylish weapon to fend off a mugger. We popped in the Apple Store, then back to Jimi’s, with a brief stop in between at the Jamba Juice on Times Square for refreshments.

Then it was off to the DeWitt Clinton dog run on 11th Avenue just off W. 52nd Street. Lucky is the man who not only fathered the Erie Canal (and was a mayor of New York), but has Hell’s Kitchen’s only dog run named after him. It’s also the only dog run I’ve seen with a kiddie swimming pool in it, although it’s most definitely for the dogs; if you placed a child in this pool, the child’s bacteria content would instantly quadruple. The Man attempted to teach Bingo how to fetch a ball, but Bingo has so far only learned how to chase a ball and pick it up, after which point he loses interest, drops it, and wanders off to rip around elsewhere.

Couscous, meanwhile, greeted this drooling mostrosity of a dog, which vigorously and almost constantly attempted to mate with some other guy’s dog at the run.

Jimi revealed an ambitious new meal plan he and The Man have devised: to eat at every restaurant on Ninth Avenue between W. 42nd Street and W. 57th Street, in order. They’re starting on one side of the street, then working their way back up the other side. There are a few rules: Carryout is not allowed. They don’t have to eat at coffee shops, bars and delis, but they do have to eat at fast-food places. And if they’re not in the mood to eat at the next restaurant on the circuit, they can eat elsewhere, as long as it’s off that stretch of Ninth. Good luck, Jimi and The Man!

It’s Andie’s birthday! I got her a Paul Frank stuffed monkey doll named Julius, a funky retro-style lamp with a polka-dot shade from Pearl River and the DVD of eXistenZ, the crazy David Cronenberg sci-fi film that Andie’s a fan of. Yay!

This afternoon, I conducted some of my shopping for Andie’s birthday. I despise shopping but at least I got out of the apartment to walk amongst the tourists on Broadway in SoHo. When I returned, Andie and I watched The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. Clint is “the good,” in case you were wondering. Man, nobody uses widescreen to greater effect than Sergio Leone.

My friend Tina, who lives up on Long Island, was in the city today, as she is every so often, scouting ideas for new candy inventions at local toy, gift and candy stores, much as an artist might attend a museum for inspiration. She used to work for Cap Candy, the candy division of Hasbro most famous for the Spin Pop, and now runs her own business, developing candy and toy ideas for suppliers. One way she gets new ideas and inspiration is to trawl stores where candy, toys and other kids’ stuff is sold, picking up on, say, how a toy item could be translated to candy, or how a toy could be incorporated with candy, or she may just be inspired by one feature of an item or its packaging. It’s all part of her creative process and she’ll document it with notes, photos or purchasing the item of inspiration in order to remember it later or mock-up an idea.

I met up with her at the toy store Kidding Around in Chelsea, although in her message to me to meet her there, I thought she said “kitty-go-round” and pictured a merry-go-round with giant, leaping fiberglas kittens instead of horses. We went to a few costume, toy, discount and assorted tchotchke stores, like Alphabets in the East Village, and stopped at some other places just for he hell of it, like Ricky’s, the SoHo Bloomingdale’s and Pearl River, where I bought some ginger candy.

Tina got some Sharpie markers at Pearl Paint, a fabulous discount art-supply store in a decrepit five-story building on Canal Street, which also has the cheapest assortment of Moleskine notebooks I’ve yet seen—about $9 for the pocket-sized variety. To prevent idiots from testing the pens and markers on the walls and merchandise, the store scatters booklets of scrap paper throughout the store. There’s some weird stuff in there.

We had lunch at Go Sushi and discussed Tina’s recent trip to China where she attended a trade show and sourced apparel for another project she’s working on. She talked about the language barrier, the Great Wall, a five-hour wait in a traffic jam, and the horror of hole-in-the-floor toilets.

I was just sitting here, eating frozen Dole raspberries, when I noticed they’re from Serbia. I can’t rightly say I’ve ever eaten anything from Serbia, much less know where it is or that it even grew raspberries. (In fact, it produces a third of the world’s supply, according to a USAID article.)

Of course, I type this on a laptop computer made in Taiwan, sitting on a futon from Sweden, while wearing a watch made in Switzerland, eyeglass frames made in Japan, boxer shorts made in India, jeans made in Canada, a T-shirt made in Qatar (Qatar?), and sneakers made in China.

I seem to be the only thing made in America. Lord only knows where my socks came from.

I’m attending an off-site business meeting tomorrow and finally decided to buy a business card holder so they don’t get beat up in my wallet or pocket and look like a wolverine got ahold of them. The weather was nice, so I set out for SoHo to check out the Muji business card holder selection at the MoMA Design Store.

Muji, a Japanese brand that’s shorthand, ironically, for “no brand, good product,” specializes in sleek, streamlined household items, typically made from recycled materials, packaged cheaply and, of course, logoless. The stuff is moderately inexpensive, but the MoMA Design Store has a corner on the market—it’s the only physical outlet for Muji in the U.S. For $14, I bought a flat, brushed-aluminum, two-sided model—one side for my cards and the other for collected cards.

There are other Muji office products and a small selection of kitchen, storage and health-and-beauty items at the MoMA store. Muji’s UK web site peddles an even wider range. Muji’s Japanese site, of course, sells the most, everything from clothing¹ to bicycles, all made with the minimalist Muji aesthetic. Eerily, Muji’s parent company also owns a campsite, a fresh-cut flower distributor and restaurant and bakery chains, all under the Muji name.

I suddenly realize I have lots of questions for Muji and for Japanese consumers, all spurred by my little business card case.

• Who are Muji’s target consumers in Japan? (Cheapskates? Stylish and ironic youngsters? Housewives?) Judging by a page from their women’s clothing section, it looks like the Japanese version of The Gap or Banana Republic or something.
• Is Muji recognized as such? Like, when you, Japanese businessman, whip out your business card case, does the other guy eye it and think, “Ah, Muji!”
• Although it is positioned as more of an exclusive, premium item outside its home country, is Muji recognized locally as a mass market item?²
• Or is it all but unrecognizable in a sea of similarly “generic” products from other companies, like most of the housewares and decor Target is selling these days?
• Where does Japan get its “cool, relatively cheap stuff from overseas” from, like our “semi-disposable furniture,” as Douglas Coupland called it?
• Do the Japanese buy anything from the U.S. that’s considered stylish that we don’t? Like, I remember reading a while back that they enjoyed our used Levis and Nikes.
• Why aren’t there more Muji items available in the U.S. or even Muji stores, like in Japan?

¹ Cayce, the protagonist of William Gibson’s novel Pattern Recognition wears Muji clothing because she’s literally allergic to brands and has panic attacks when she sees corporate mascots such as the Michelin Man. [back]

² My favorite example of this is from the candy business: Ritter Sport bars. In the U.S., they’re sold for a premium at upscale grocers and other specialty food markets. In their home country of Germany, they are equivalent to Hershey bars: mass-market, cheap and available at every gas station and Wal-Mart in the country. [back]

As promised, I got work off at noon today and, at the suggestion of the ladies in my department, walked over to Macy’s (the one featured in the Thanksgiving Day Parade) to buy some gloves. Sure, I had gloves, until I accidentally left them in a cab over the weekend. I don’t know what it is about me leaving stuff in cabs, but I’ve also lost a favorite hat that way and very nearly lost both my umbrella and iPod on other occasions.

I spent awhile aimlessly walking around, getting lost trying to find the glove area in the store. After finding it, I quickly realized that now is both a good and a bad time to buy gloves. Good because they’re all on sale (30% off!). Bad because the selection has been ravaged. Still, I managed to purchase a pair of Isotoners that fit and cost $20, but that don’t really match my grey coat. (They’re “charcoal” but look more like “blue slate.”) At least my hands are once again warm when I’m outdoors.

As I often do on Fridays, I went down to Academy Records to peruse their usually excellent selection of used CDs, but I was only able to find an Outkast album I’d been looking for.

That evening, I watched American Mullet on DVD, a low budget but passionately produced documentary on the mullet, that most maligned of hillbilly hairstyles (“Business in the front, party in the back!”). It was strangely enjoyable, particularly the interviews with mulleted individuals who explain why. There is a heartbreaking moment wherein a sad young woman with large eyeglasses nearly breaks down when she is informed that what she thought was a perfectly acceptable hairstyle is actually a mullet.

The second movie in my double-feature was a surreal Korean drama, The Isle. When I first heard the title, I thought it was The Aisle and that the movie would be rife with religious undertones. But instead it is rife with houseboats. It also has a lot to do with a mute prostitute, murder and fishing, including a rather unsetting scene involving the voluntary swallowing of some fishhooks. I liked it because I had no idea what the hell was going to happen next, yet the plot still seemed to flow logically to its conclusion.

To complain that New York is expensive isn’t anything new, but to back it up with facts is. The New York Times published an article today (“Cost of Necessities Rises in New York,” by Jennifer Steinhauer) that reveals prices on necessities in New York City are “growing faster than almost anywhere else,” with inflation overtaking spending, which hasn’t happened in this region in 10 years. Escalated prices on everything from real estate (don’t I know it) and taking the subway, to orange juice and detergent, “have combined to make it harder for New Yorkers to make ends meet than at any time in a decade, according to new federal statistics.”

In nearly every category, people in the New York region spent more of their household dollar on essentials than other Americans between 2000 and 2003. Rental prices in the region rose 8.1 percent, while nationally, they went up 4.1 percent.

Food prices rose 9.3 percent in the New York region; nationally they increased 2.7 percent.

What residents gave up were the extras. Spending on clothing fell by 12 percent, and there were also cutbacks in buying meat, poultry, eggs, and tobacco. [...] And since December 2003, the price for food in grocery stores in the New York metropolitan region rose 5.5 percent compared with 2.5 percent nationally. Total food costs, which includes restaurant meals, rose only 2.7 percent nationally but went up 4.4 percent in New York.

Even national chains aren’t exempt from higher pricing.

At the Target store in Brooklyn, for instance, a 200-ounce container of Tide laundry detergent was $14.89, which was 27 percent higher than the same bottle at a Target Store in Houston, and 16 percent higher than in Target stores in Chicago.

And I ain’t complainin’, I’m just sayin’.

Although I’m not eligible for vacation time until next summer, I was afforded three “personal days” to take off from work this year. I used one for Thanksgiving, but I nearly forgot the days don’t carry over after the year ends, so yesterday, I decided to take today off. (The other one will be the Monday after Christmas.)

I caught up on wrapping and mailing Christmas gifts, did a bit of cleaning in anticipation of the parents visiting next week and dropped off my dry cleaning. I also took the subway down to the World Trade Center site, across the street from which is another popular tourist destination, Century 21. No, not the realtor. It’s a chain of department stores that sells fancy-label clothes at 25% to 75% off retail. There’s only one in Manhattan, and although the chain’s tagline is “New York’s Best Kept Secret,” quite a few people were in on it this afternoon. The place seems like it’s always chaotic. At least the clothing sections are well-labeled, so if you’re after half-off Jean Paul Gaultier merchandise, well, just look for the sign, buddy. Based on a tip from a coworker, I tracked down the tiny Ben Sherman rack without too much trouble and was able to pick up a nice shirt that, if the tag was to be believed, I saved $83 on. Realistically, I saved closer to $40, which I still found acceptable.

This evening, I went downtown again to visit Jimi for dinner. We went to our favorite Mexican place, Harry’s Burritos, on W. 3rd St., and got dessert at La Lanterna, on MacDougal Street. It’s a cozy little café, with dim lighting, a working fireplace, and an extensive wine and scotch menu. Jimi got a Limonada and some sort of custard dessert, while I got cappuccino and some tiramisu. Tasty.

Did some Christmas-ish shopping in Soho with Jimi today after getting some Chinese food at Suzie’s on Bleecker St. He bought some fancy wrapping paper at Kate’s Paperie, some T-shirts at Banana Republic and miscellaneous supplies at Office Depot, and we browsed Pearl River, the Apple Store and Kid Robot. Because Jimi has a current fascination with Bollywood, we stopped at Kim’s Video, but they only had a handful of Indian movies halfheartedly added to their “World” section. The helpful clerk told Jimi he’d be better off going down to the Lower East Side and checking out the shops in the Little India neighborhood.

Continuing our trek, Jimi bought a Comme des Garçons shirt on sale at Bloomingdale’s to wear to his Streetlife.com Christmas party tomorrow. It was a very expensive, very “Jimi” shirt, by which I mean it looked like what a shirt would look like if you yourself had made it but had: a.) never before made a shirt; and b.) died after completing only half of it. But as a person who only ever wears one pair of ill-fitting jeans and is a complete stranger to his dry cleaner, I cannot rightly mock high fashion.

We walked back to Jimi’s apartment to walk Bingo and Couscous and clean up the bottle of glue they had attempted to eat in our absence, then took the subway down to Times Square. It was a zoo, as expected, and they even had crowd control barriers set up outside the Toys “R” Us store and had rerouted the flow of traffic so the main doors were entrance-only, while a supplemental set of doors elsewhere in the store served as the exit.

I had planned on buying the Times Square Barbie as a cheeky gift for some of you, but it turned out to be lame. I thought Mattel could have had a lot a fun with such a theme, giving Barbie a MetroCard, Louis Vuitton handbag, Manolo Blahnik shoes, mace, etc. Or they could have gone in another direction (“Port Authority Barbie”). Unfortunately, all of her accessories are just miniature reproductions of classic Mattel toys, like a Magic 8 Ball. And because of the Toys “R” Us tie-in (Times Square Barbie is available exclusively at the Times Square Toys “R” Us and from a bunch of greedy fucks on eBay), she comes with a Toys “R” Us shopping bag that looks like it was made by an eight-year-old with a bubblejet-printed color label and cardboard cut from an empty box of Frosted Flakes. What’s more, nothing about her outfit was particularly “New York,” which with its synthetic fabrics and neons, seemed more California than anywhere. Even thought it was on sale for half-price (something like $7), I couldn’t force myself to buy such a travesty.

Jimi checked out the videogames on the lower level, then we went to the Virgin Megastore where he bought some Indian DVDs. Before parting ways, we got some Jamba Juice drinks.

When I got home, there was a call for more Katie birthday shenanigans, so she and her friend Chuck, who was visiting from Vermont, met up at McAleer’s Pub on Amsterdam (between W. 80 and W. 81 streets) with Andie, Eric, Sam and I. I didn’t stay that long but they were there ‘til closing time at 4 a.m., at which point, by remarkable coincidence, the 15th of 15 songs that Andie had chosen on the jukebox played, a Katie-favorite, “All I Want Is You” by U2. Good Guinness, good company, good times.

Katie called and invited me to go see Kinsey with her at 5:00 p.m. at Lincoln Plaza Cinemas. Alas, despite getting there before 4:30, it was already sold out, as was every other 5:00 show. Curse those theaters that don’t participate in Fandango!

Instead, we walked over to The Shops at Columbus Circle, part of Time Warner Center. We browsed CDs and books at Borders, looking for but unsuccessfully locating Walker Evans’ Many Are Called, his long out-of-print series of photos taken of passengers on NYC’s subway in the 1930s, but recently reissued to celebrate the subway’s 100th anniversary.

Katie has decided a new wardrobe is in order for her new job, so we looked at clothing at various stores. We discovered that a bunch of colors popular with the ladies in the ’80s are popular once again, including, but not limited to pink, sky blue and a lime-ish sort of green. At J. Crew, we checked out a red leather dog carrier that cost more than $300, the most expensive item I’ve ever seen at that chain.

We spotted a girl wearing a scarf that looked very similar to Katie’s, which was unusual, because Katie’s mom hand-makes her daughters’ scarves using colorful, sparkly knitting that bristles with hundreds of short, tendril-like threads. They’re hard to explain, but suffice to say, if scarves grew on strange Henri Rousseau-like trees deep within the jungles of Madagascar, they’d look like these scarves. They’re fun and eye catching, although Katie admitted hers occasionally tries to strangle her for no apparent reason. After she bought some hair care products at Aveda, Katie and I left the mall and walked downtown in search of some drinks.

We stopped at a bar near Times Square and got some nachos and beers and had a nice talk. Part of it included Katie’s glee at no longer having people living on the floors above and below her in her three-story apartment building. The guy above her was keen on playing his radio at very late or early hours, typically when Katie would be trying to sleep. She confronted him last week after he launched into a vigorous bout of pushing heavy furniture around at 7:00 a.m., only to find out it was because he was packing up to move. Katie hoped her face didn’t light up too brightly upon hearing this news. The guy on the ground floor was quiet enough, but was also a drug dealer, so there were always suspicious characters coming at going at all hours; he’s since moved out and apparently all the addicts got his forwarding address. Katie can now play her radio as loudly as she wants and not worry about being as quiet when she has to chase down the stairs after Lilly and Ariel, her cats, whose chief hobby is escaping every time she opens her front door.

Upon leaving the bar, we discovered that the nasty cold rain which featured prominently into last weekend’s weather decided to make a special repeat appearance, which we experienced thoroughly while getting somewhat confused as to where that pesky 1/9 subway entrance was located. Katie got off at W. 72nd to meet Andie at the Beacon Theater for the Ani DiFranco concert at 8:00 p.m. and I went home, saddened that my evening now consisted of looking forward to seeing Luke Wilson and U2 on Saturday Night Live.