For this assignment, I decided to shop for something I’ve needed for awhile: a new dish rack. The prospect of getting a new dish rack for my roommates and I is actually deeply exciting, which is how I know I’ve officially transitioned out of teenhood. I decided to start by just googling “dish rack” and seeing what the internet’s first ideas for me were. Of course, the top hit was an Amazon link, which would surely lead me to the most extensive plethora of options. So I bit. Shapes, sizes, colors, and prices varied. The price range sat at a pretty consistent $20-35, but for name brands like KitchenAid, we were looking at about $50. What did I want out of this dish rack? I had to decide after being presented with the existing options. Ooh, shelves? A drainer? A place for knives to drip dry? Amazon was presenting me with options I didn’t know existed until I’d begun scrolling through the page. This complicated things. I thought I knew what I wanted, but Amazon opened so many doors for me in terms of what a dish rack could truly be. There was, of course, the $13 “Amazon’s Choice,” but now that I’d seen what beautiful dish racks existed, I didn’t know if I could settle for the silicone option. Sure, if I’d seen that one first, maybe, but Amazon strategically stuck it at the bottom of the page. My roommates and I deserve something a little flashier, right? And isn’t it an investment? We’ve been laying our dishes out on the limited counter space. This is a purchase that’s granting us space and efficiency. When did this get so complicated?

I settled on a $25 silver dish rack with two shelves and, yes, a special place for our (dull, breaking) knives. And I felt winded from the search, but then I took two seconds to really reflect on it. It was a seven minute ordeal. I looked at probably fifteen dish racks in that time. Dish racks that completely presented themselves to me as I sat in the same place I’d done the rest of my homework and eaten my lunch. I just conjured them with their name like a wizard. 

As for my browsing, it was a completely different experience. It was different mainly because I didn’t go in looking for anything at all. I woke up early on Saturday morning with some extra time and realized it would be a perfect time to walk over to Twice Blessed, the church thrift shop on Huguenot St, and just poke around. So I did. I left my phone at home and walked over at 10 am. It was hopping. The old folks in town come from far and wide to browse on these Saturday mornings. It was also the iconic basket sale, meaning patrons can fill an entire basket for a flat price of $15. But I wasn’t even planning on doing that. I picked up a basket and it remained empty. Something I realized, actually, was that nobody really goes to Twice Blessed because they need something. The promise of nothing being new kind of eliminates that. It’s a treasure trove. You really have to dig, which makes the prospect of finding something all the more rewarding. 

It’s hard to compare ease because one experience felt like leisure and the other felt like a task. I had to find a new dish rack. It was on my to-do list. But the trip to Twice Blessed was honestly just to kill some time and maybe see some of my peers who I know also love to make the Saturday morning trek to chat with the church ladies. It was nice. When I journaled about my day later, I found myself writing about the twenty minute experience more than I thought I would. But it felt like hanging out with myself, which I forget to do. And interacting with little objects is fun. Imagining where the items came from, thinking about how disastrous it would be if I dropped the ceramic hummingbird, trying on little golden rings, these are things I can’t actually do on the Amazon storefront. I think Guriel is onto something. When I found myself on Netflix later that day, I noticed the tab at the top of my laptop said “browsing.” It made me laugh. I wasn’t browsing. I was looking for something to satisfy my exact mood, though I didn’t know what it was. But I was looking for something. That’s the difference. I wasn’t looking for anything at Twice Blessed, I was just looking. I was having an experience, as Guriel urges us to do in his writing.