Chatting recently with a Lebanese-Palestinian friend in Beirut, I confessed to him some of my online pandemic purchases made from the Oaxacan coastal village of Zipolite, where I’ve been since the start of Mexico’s not-so-quarantine last March.
I have, for example, acquired no fewer than three pairs of high heels, despite the fact that there is nowhere to wear high heels in Zipolite — and that I don’t wear high heels in the first place. I now own two fanny packs — one neon blue and the other rainbow — an accessory I have not used since I was six. And I’ve bought five yerba mate gourds, even though one has sufficed for the past fifteen years.
My friend informed me that he himself had just returned from the supermarket — which had been closed for various weeks in accordance with Lebanon’s lockdown — only to review with horror the contents of his shopping bag: bulk quantities of Philadelphia cream cheese, Oscar Mayer salami, and other subpar food that, he explained, he didn’t even eat.
A survey of other acquaintances produced accounts of similarly questionable quarantine investments. There was the friend who had stockpiled sweaters despite being stuck in Hawaii, and the friend who had stockpiled bras despite an aversion to using them. There were tales of Ninja Turtles boxers, sea-foam green sequin turtlenecks, and late-night Amazon binges resulting in the delivery of multiple Star Wars helmets. And there was the friend in Philadelphia who commenced an obsessive procurement of what she described as “vaguely Mormon linen dresses that will transform this dystopian nightmare (in which all the pleasures of urban life are stripped away) into something pastoral and picturesque.” READ MORE AT JACOBIN.