“I Heart Being Me”, and other 2003 t-shirt slogans I did not truly embrace
September 2002, Fishers, IN. I’m lying on my bed, staring at the ceiling and listening to a low hum of Missy Elliott from a glittery purple boombox my mom bought from Big Lots. “Work It” competes with an unpleasant static that overtakes the music entirely every 30 seconds or so. The only station that comes in clearly is the local Christian station that broadcasts haunting sermons, so I cut my losses and settle for distorted top 40. “Work It” disappears and is replaced with “Like A Bird” by Nelly Furtado. Over the static buzz and Ms. Furtado, a familiar sound from the kitchen perks my ears up like a dog hearing the garage door - the high-pitched slap of waxy magazine paper on the ceramic tile countertop. I tumble downstairs for my prize. It’s arrived.
***
I am a brat by nature, but I reach maximum brat capacity when I search something on Google and I can’t find it. Isn’t that the point of the internet? To archive everything for the purpose of immediate recall? This must have been how they felt when the Library of Alexandria burnt down. I’ve become a madwoman on the hunt for an item that, as far as I can tell, is not available in its entirety online. The document I’m seeking is from long before we archived everything online “just in case”. A relic from a bygone era. I’ve contacted libraries and been told the item I seek does not qualify as literature or journalism, which is crazy, because to me, it was both. I want a digitized copy of the quarterly Limited Too catalogs, years 2002-2005.
As a child, my favorite book was the Limited Too catalog. Like any voracious reader with her hands on a classic, I found something new in it with every read, and for absolutely no reason at all, I saw myself in its protagonist. The Limited Too Girl. She was athletic and sociable, often seen dribbling a basketball with her friends in front of palm trees (spring 2005, fodder for my “I’m a Californian tomboy like Zoey 101” phase). She was well-travelled and bookish, seen wearing a ribbed sweater and daydreaming on a ski lift (winter 2001, inspiration for my “Hermione” phase). She had a big city spirit stuck in suburbia (fall 2002, responsible for my “New York or nowhere” phase). It was like the mall, a movie, and ten vacations all at once, and I could hold it in my hands!!!
Every season, I’d circle my five favorite outfits, and if the budget allowed, my mom would take me to the mall, and I’d get one of them. On Friday nights before the mall trip, I couldn’t sleep. How could anyone, when self-actualization was around the corner?? In the morning, I was getting orange pants that zipped off into capris that zipped off into shorts; I was drunk on dopamine.
The winter 2002 catalog came out on my cousin’s birthday, so I brought it to his birthday party. I spent the whole night in the garage, eating a hot dog and staring at the clothes I liked most until they burnt permanently into my brain, like the NBC logo in the corner of an old TV screen. I might have looked like I was making pleasantries with my aunt’s neighbors, but deep down, I was thinking about the matching silk pajama sets on the last few pages. (Matching pajamas were cute but not really my scene, for what it’s worth. If that’s how you want to spend your one-outfit-per-season, that’s great, but I slept in giant t-shirts my parents got at a warehouse sale and stained with box hair dye.)
If I close my eyes and think of that catalog I brought to my cousin’s birthday, I can still see two girls in layered tees and pastel camouflage pants - one in blue, one in pink - cuddled over big cups of hot chocolate that they held with both hands. I consumed the Limited Too catalog not just as an advertisement (like the best advertisements, I barely recognized it as one), but as an art collection, a concept album, a moment. Green Day had American Idiot. Limited Too had “Spring 2002: From Here To There”, a mint green/powder blue/baby pink floral fest celebrating transportation of all kinds. Both manifestos on the post-Y2K American condition and both crucial to my personal development.
I really did love Green Day for a few weeks. At the fifth grade carnival, I asked the mom who volunteered to work the face paint booth to paint “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” on my forehead.
“Ah… Can’t,” she said. “Won’t fit.”
“Convenient,” I thought.
I settled for “American Idiot” in bright blue paint, and then I walked around a social event that way, passing every single person I knew. Sick. You see, it can do a great deal for one’s inner life to toss something clunkily on one’s body and signal to the world, “See? I have myself figured out.”
As always, thanks for being here. I hope you sleep well or at least have fun nightmares. Goodnight.
Xo,
Gabbi