This essay focuses on personal experience of the author through a personal reflection of her past and present life. She starts the article with a self reflection, a technique, which identifies the personal and informal nature of the essay. The author was addicted to living a careless and wasteful life. However, after living this life for sometime, things began going astray. She realized that she had wasted most of her life and she was heading to destruction. At this stage, she began considering to accept herself the way she was. She began thinking of taking a positive turn in her life; although she knew it would not be easy for her to adjust to a life of cut standards. In this essay, she covers the life which she lived while in high school. She spent her money carelessly on dressings and fashion.
Fashion was her only way of life. She takes her audience through her days of fashion. Fashion for her was everything; she was the most fashionable lady during her high school days. Male fellows adored the author for dressings, and fashionable trends, while female colleagues hated her. She was obsessed with shopping although thoughts of addiction would never come to her mind. She would go to extreme ends, in an attempt to satisfy her cravings, which were as a result of her high addiction. The statement, “I secretly withdrew most of the money – $ 1,000 – to satisfy my Jones,” is an evidence of how desperate she would be because of her addictive behavior.
The author was a student at the time when her life was revolving about dressings and fashion trends. She neglected her books. This is because she did not have time to study. Shopping was occupying all the time that she had. In her essay, she says a statement that not only confirms the dislike she had for geometry, but also the hatred she had for books and education at large. “Who cared about geometry?” This is a statement that supports the fact that education was not in the list of her priorities. She wanted to live a fancy life, and would not derive pleasure in performing challenging tasks like geometry. The author at this point brings out this aspect ironically. She was a student, yet she did not have any interest in her books and studies. As time went by, the author began running out of money due misuse of cash. She resorted to stealing to satisfy the wants of her addiction. Her mother realized that her daughter was not saving money, instead was spending it on a fancy lifestyle that was beyond her means.
The author was not rich; she could not afford $ 1,000, yet she would give money to the millionaires in the name of shopping. This is irony that results in rhetoric. The author would borrow and spend her mother’s money on luxuries, since she did not have enough money to maintain her lifestyle. She knew that life did not revolve around fancy moments. However, she was as addicted to fashion as a drug addict to hard drugs. “Champagne taste, Beer Taste” refers to the seriousness of her addiction to a fancy lifestyle. She refers to herself as recovering junkie who was into hard stuffs. Anecdotes that touch on her fanciness tend to create a light mood of the story. It is easy for her audience to relate her anecdotes with their personal experience. These anecdotes are vital in adding weight on the ideas of the author.
Throughout the story, the author employs irony while bringing out several implications. It is ironical that her family was not rich, yet she was living an extremely trendy life, which included her passion for shopping. Irony continues to come up when the author confirms that she knew she was not well off, yet she continued living a life beyond her means. During this time the author was a high school student. Instead of concentrating on her studies, she took most of her time in shopping.
The author shows us a negative and hateful attitude towards shopping, through the use of her essay. She portrays shopping as a thing of negative influence to individuals who relate with it. She uses an example of parents who spend most of their money taking their kids for shopping to buy trendy clothes, yet the same parents do not save even a single cent towards their children’s future. She continues to show her hateful attitude on shopping by ironically talking about people who spend a lot of money, up to $ 150 to buy hiking boots, even though they will never go hiking.
This portrays shopping as an evil power that has a forceful influence on people who get in a relationship with it. It drains peoples’ finances and prevents them from pursuing their personal developments in life. The author writes from her personal experience, focusing on people who are getting into the habit of shopping. She does not only address those people who live beyond their means, but also those who have enough money but are starting to get into the habit of shopping. She, however, concentrates more on those people who understand that they are not able to live up to some standards of life yet, they still insist on meeting certain standards. She warns them basing on her personal experience.
People should accept themselves and learn to live according to their abilities, rather than try to live up to frustrating lifestyles. The author of this essay intended to advise her audience against shopping habits. This was an attempt to manipulate their minds so that they can view shopping from a negative perspective. She intended to impact a hateful attitude about shopping to her audience. However, through her essay, she did not achieve her purpose. Although she tried to give several anecdotes, and develop different arguments about the subject matter, she did not develop exceptionally deep and heavy arguments to win some of her audience. She did not bring out a vivid image of shopping.
One can argue that the author was too ignorant of her life, and that any reasonable person cannot fail to balance between essential life needs and luxuries like shopping. Another argument may be that the author had a mental problem that made her obsessed with shopping; this may be supported by the fact that normal human beings usually like many things; they cannot only love one part of life.
Reflective Memo
The author of this essay has a fairly proper use of diction, and is able to create a continuous stream of sensible ideas. She has used an excellent writing style by communicating her ideas easily and chronologically. Her essay uses irony and contrast to create different effects on the author’s ideas. She uses these styles well. The essay, however, has few weaknesses; the author used very difficult words at some parts of her essay making it hard to perceive the essence of the reading. Developing this essay was a heavy task for the author that involved a lot of work. This work included looking up for the meanings of difficult words, which the writer has used, while at the same time correcting grammatical mistakes that were present in the author’s piece of work. However, the author wrote a fairly good essay, which was entirely based on her experience.