thanks for your order!

around this time of year my mailbox becomes inundated with fall fashion catalogues. i love this. i've loved looking at catalogues ever since i was little. in second grade, my best friend sharon and i would look through the giant ones you get from places like sears where you can find everything from sweaters to sofas to snow blowers. we'd take turns playing the client and the salesperson. and we'd order ourselves an entire fake life. one time her mom even caught us picking out which male model would be our husband. she, of course, had a good laugh over it and i felt embarrassed for weeks afterwards. but even now, there's something about being able to live vicariously through these publications that is so appealing to me. like having a new lifestyle delivered right to your doorstep. as i turn the pages of the anthropologie catalogue i spend a few brief moments imaging what my life would be like if i always wore velvet and lace and high-heeled shoes and lived in a huge old victorian farmhouse and entertained dinner guests with my tales of overseas adventure and wrote poetry and drank wine and read large dusty old novels for fun. perusing the latest jcrew offering i am whisked away to a world of yacht racing and polo matches and spending entire summers wearing nothing but bathing suits and flowy tunics at my beachfront cottage with no worries but what to grill for dinner and is there enough corona in the icebox.

of course i always walk a fine line between admiring and coveting what i see in these catalogues. i know it's time to put them away when my dreams of decorating my entire house with nothing but pottery barn furniture turn into feelings of inadequacy or unhappiness because i'm not constantly surrounded with what these catalogues tell me are the "finer things in life." there's nothing wrong with a little daydreaming now and then. but there's also nothing wrong with my life just the way it is. although those pleated cuffed wide-leg herringbone trousers were awfully cute...