Another One Bites the Dust...

Almost. According to Moody's yesterday, Loehmann's clothing stores will soon be joining the ranks of the financially insolvent. Funny how that happens when businesses are held to the same credit standards the rest of us schmucks have to live by. But Loehmann's? The loss of a great international chain of bargain-bin designer-label pantyhose shills signals a fundamental shift the basic life processes of the American people.

Seriously, how did these people stay in business in the first place?

I have several traumatic childhood memories of visiting Loehmann's with my mother in the 1980's and possibly 90's. If you are a woman over the age of 25, with a depression-era female relative, you probably have the same post-traumatic stress syndrome symptoms.

Loehmann's contributed to the negative body images of young girls everywhere by providing, not the traditional minuscule, poorly-lit individual changing rooms, but one, giant, communal, mirrored-in-the-round, poorly-lit changing room. An octagon of terror without the chain-link fencing. On numerous occasions, I and my sisteren (??) were exposed to the lumpy, calcified flesh of anonymous elderly ladies, those with no decorous sense of modesty. These ladies bared all (and I mean all) to the harsh assessment of those wrap-around mirrors, the ones that allowed no escape for small children hiding behind the returns rack. Garters, stockings, brassieres, "support garments" of all shapes, compositions and styles, I think a corset or two (and not the cool types, either), hairy legs and crotches, the horrors unfolded in a slow-motion ballet similar to the elephant scene in Fantasia sans cuteness.

Admittedly, it has been many years since I approached the hallowed halls of Loehmann's (which may be their problem), so they might have subdivided the Octagon of Dystopia into traditional changing rooms. Perhaps, in an attempt to boost flagging sales, they abandoned the 1930's in favor of something slightly modern: privacy.

Still, if a cheaper version of TJMaxx can't make it in today's economic climate, we must be headed down a slippery slope.

RIP, Loehmann's, RIP.

Overnight Train

I work overnight. A night shift. But I'm not a steelworker or a security guard. I'm a thirty-year-old married Caucasian woman; I work a normal, white-collar job and hold two college degrees. My job title is "Analyst," but it could be "Network Supervisor," "Team Lead," "Account Executive" or any other vague, undescriptive moniker.

This is the new world we live in, the one our parents don't understand, the one where our employers consider us commodities and we offer no loyalty to our employers. Displays of loyalty are met with, at best, distrust. We consider ourselves lucky to hold a steady job, and our employers often take advantage of that gratitude with a myriad of tiny degradations. But I don't intend to catalogue my sardonic mental gymnastics with respect to neo-corporate evolution.

When you work at night and sleep during the day, your perspective shifts. You operate under different social rules, and I suspect there's a growing population of us, the "creatively scheduled," wandering around at 7:30 on a Saturday morning.

How do we cope with our displacement? Previously, we joined friends for 5 pm happy hours, slept late on weekends, hustled through endless am rush hour commutes, watched two hours of "must-see tv" at 7 and 8 pm, maybe even carpooled or used public transportation. Much of the normal American lifestyle is beyond my reach, at least in it's unadulterated form. I now know which bars sell food until 4 am, which bagel shops open at 5 am, where the 24-hour grocery stores are, and which of my neighbors are unemployed and making unjustified, unruly, unrelenting noise at noon on a Thursday. A girl's got to sleep, after all.

Life turned literally back-to-front presents challenges and unexpected windfalls. For example, at 11:30 pm, when I'm commuting to work, it takes me less than 20 minutes, less than half the normal time. All I have to do is slalom past the occasional drunk driver (why are they always, regardless of weekday, drunk drivers? Have we lost the moral sanction of the 90's?), and I'm sitting at my silent, fluorescently lit desk.