Originally Posted by
stuffedsuperdud
Ugh goddammit Gilchrest. Related: As I've probably mentioned before, I grew up poor, and found out about what the 1% did for fun mostly through expository scenes of spy thriller villains. Well, the other day, I finally decided to find out what exactly these mysterious country club thingers were..... I figured I'd have to drive to, you know, the countryside, to go to one, but to my delight, Google revealed to me that there were several within a 5 mile radius of me, in the middle of the city. WTF??? Then, one of CG's scruffier friends revealed that he was actually a member of one of them, which immediately destroyed most of the aura of these places for me. Come Sunday, he drove us there and got me a tour...where I found out that it's basically a glorified gym membership??? Only with a golf course attached? And a ridiculous initiation fee? Talk about blue balls. He left to go jerk off at the driving range while a guy in a white polo gave me a walkthrough. Told him I didn't care about golf, so I was offered a possible discounted "social membership" (bleh)... The dude showed me their excuse of a gym, which included very nice mahogany lockers and multiple saunas, but no barbells. There was also a restaurant where members seemed to eat and drink for free, up to a certain point, which I guess was cool but not really. I even toured the pool hoping to catch a glimpse of some gold digger poon, but only found a few old people sitting around awaiting their deaths. Yea...no thanks. Seriously, between this, the horseback-related activities, boating, and most of the Winter Olympics, I'm left to conclude that rich people have the worst hobbies.
Training:
Hello snatch pulls my old friend:
60kgx4x2 Very high pulls
80x4
90x4
100x4
110x4
120x4 These were no longer high pulls; more like a snatch DL with a shrug
130x4 These were barely shrugged because I am weak
Snatch deadlift:
150x5 Very heavy and ugly FML.
I could feel the lingering strength difference in my legs, and was definitely favoring the right side. Ehh...
Mission impossible:
CG dropped something $800 or something preposterous like that on a pair of Louboutins the other day. Or rather, her personal shopper liked them and bought a pair and now she's too mesmerized to return them. Same diff. Hey it's her family fortune (I'm pretty sure her dad and all her uncles are in the Panama Papers btw) but I still blanched at the thought of dropping nearly a grand on a shitty hunk of painful rubber made by a bunch of guido fucks in Naples. When she saw my reaction, she went, "Dude it sucks! There are no good women's shoes. You either get stinky plastic things from DSW or you go to Neimans for this. There's no in-between." I chalked this up to her affluenza and told her I'd find her something tasteful and moderately priced, but then took a look around* and found that:
1. The women's shoes market is a total clusterfuck. Men need, at most, a pair each of: black captoe oxford, brown brogue, dress boot, loafer, and then whatever sport-specific shoes you need, and even that's probably overkill. Women need, at bare minimum, a billion pairs of painful bullshit in all sorts of highly outfit-specific shapes and colors, only to wear the same nasty pair of Tom's every day. The majority of their "dress shoes" have heels 4" or higher, i.e. chiropractors are creaming their pants, and women filter out guys my height on match.com...yea fuck you, Jimmy Choo.
2. The pricing is indeed a hot mess. Men's shoes are tiered very logically:
$50-$200 = you have all styles available with glued soles and lower quality leather
$200-$500 = again all styles available, with stitched soles, nicer leather, made in a 1st World country
$500-$1000 = ....I'm actually not sure what separates this tier from the previous one....except, I guess, aside from the good things, this seems to be where the nastier spear-toed Italian items end up, no thanks
$1000+ you're talking bespoke shoes that normal people don't buy
Women's shoes:
$0-$5000: I can't even make sense of this. Shit is completely random. It SEEMS like certain names occupy certain regions of the spectrum, but all are pretty broadly distributed, and most are ugly as shit and made by Asian child laborers. I quit for now. If anyone knows where reasonably price lady shoes come from let me know...
*I started at some outlet malls but then finally caved and went to South Coast Plaza, California's obscene celebration of conspicuous consumption and dollar-worship, and schlepped through tons of women's depts, stopping to observe 1. the shoes, and 2. the types of people shopping. Pretty sure not even KOTJ has examined so many pairs of ladyfeet in so little time.