Girl and City

PHB and I met up for our ritualistic Christmas shopping trip this past weekend. We have been doing this for nearly seven years. He is one of those random friends I have on the side, who isn’t really involved in my life, but who I’ve somehow managed to keep in touch with for a long time. We meet once or twice a year and spend a day together, just the two of us, shopping, eating, and catching up.

Like his name might suggest, he is a perfect gentleman. He has never been in a long relationship because he is too nice and, as we’re all too familiar with, nice boys finish last. Most of the time it seems, girls use him when they need to be comforted, but at the end of the day, pick someone else to be their boyfriend.
I can’t say that I’m not entirely guilty of the same, considering I have never been attracted to him and yet I have let him take me out on these day-long dates for seven years.

We started the day off with shopping and ended the day off with shopping. In between, we had an amazing all-you-can-eat sushi lunch where we took our sweet time catching up. After listening to his ex-girlfriend woes, commiserating on the challenges of falling in love dating, and basically bringing each other up to date on our life stories, I realized that he has grown from a boy into a man. He’s become more cynical about women, become less of a “nice boy”, and I hate to say it but, more attractive as a result. He was proving his own theory about attraction between men and women; women are more attracted to nice boys who act like jerk boys than nice boys who act like nice boys (I have asked him to write a guest blog on this matter so I won’t go into depth here).

After lunch, we drove around aimlessly north of The City. We kept the GPS turned off and just drove, without an inkling of where we were going. It was great to sit in the car and chat and watch the farmland go by, a completely different side to The City I know and love. It was like a mini road trip. Suddenly, out of nowhere popped a mega-mall. We were pretty shopped out but at the sight of a Forever21 sign, I convinced him we had to make a stop.

Forever21, to me, is basically heaven. If I could, I would make that store my closet. I spent a long time in that store trying everything things on, and he was patient enough to wait for me and hold my coat and purse. I am guilty of totally enjoying his coat rack services while I pranced around the store with an idiot grin on my face like a kid in a candy store.

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I mentioned in my previous posts that I have been doing a lot of shopping recently, and it’s true. See below for photographic evidence.

Most of these are from my two trips to New York, although the make-up is from Toronto. There are four dresses in the photo, all from New York. Three are from a boutique I found in SoHo on my first trip. The white dress in the bottom right was the dress I wore to TheBusinessSchool formal, and the dress in the top right is a dark grey business casual dress that I wore to the offer dinner last week.
The fourth dress is from Forever21. There’s been a trend towards ballerina-inspired skirts recently, and this layered black and cream dress was too cute for me to pass up.

I also bought a Coach wristlet even though I have been resisting Coach products for its “over-trendiness”. Unfortunately, I realized the usefulness of the wristlet as a small wallet when I don’t bring a purse to school and ended up buying a hot pink one.

My mom actually dragged me shopping with her in Toronto and I ended up buying some make-up even though I hadn’t really planned to. The Shiseido brightening products are a wonder for your complexion, and I needed some new lip gloss. I have no justification for buying the Oscar de la Renta perfume other than the fact that I was waiting for my mom to finish shopping and wandered into the perfume section. I’ve always believed in having one “signature perfume” but I never put too much thought into it when I was younger. A few years ago, I bought a Shiseido perfume that was light and sweet, but after careful consideration, I don’t really think it’s “my smell.” So I was going through the perfumes and man, there are a lot of different smells out there! After smelling a few, my nose was starting to tire, my head was beginning to hurt, and even my vision was starting to blur. So even though there were a few that I liked, I quickly grabbed this one before I talked myself out of buying perfume altogether. I chose this one because it is a lot less common than the other ones that I liked (for example, I liked JLo’s perfume, but it seemed too popular) and I want my smell to be unique, just like a signature.

Not shown in this picture are: the Anne Klein watch I bought on my first trip to New York, the Adolfo Valencia luggage I bought on my second trip (like this but in baby blue), the Body Shop reed diffuser kits (now making my apartment and my parents’ home smell real nice), and chocolates I bought for my parents.