I got my first issue of Nylon in the mail today and, as had been so common since girlhood, I found myself wholly incapable of reading the magazine.

Perhaps this is a remnant of gloss-depravation in my formative years. I’d get my dose of bright flashy things from the TV screen, occasionally buy myself a Seventeen, but never really get into it. The other girls did. They loved it. Their parents (no doubt their mothers) bought them subscriptions to all sorts of things. They would devour, a process akin to feasting with the eyes, every page of the little book “from cover to cover,” as if the excess of any more pages or colors would drive them up the wall straight into MTV studios.

But my narrow-minded sensory intake couldn’t handle it all in one go. No—when I brought a magazine with me to some poolside location (because that’s where you take them, wearing sunglasses, carrying a tote bag), I could only flip around from ad to ad, much like a lost little sphere in a pinball machine. There’s always one image of a girl in a nice pair of jeans, a hearty shot of her bottom and maybe a three-quarter profile. Then there’s the one of a girl and a guy, at least one of them at least half-naked. And of course, there’s one of the melancholy emaciated man, juxtaposed against the sunshine of a carton of cigarettes.

My subtle communist indoctrination told me that someone was trying to get me to buy something. And when I read the helpful make-up and exercise tips written by the over-30 editors, I started making shopping lists of the things I needed. I could always rely on the ad-free horoscope page in the back, though I had a hard time finding the fucking glossary. It was buried under a model’s angled legs. Another ad. And apparently that article on handbags, which I clumsily mistook for an ad, is a good read on the winter’s must-haves. Going rate: approximately a few hundred dollars, give or take.

I admit that I read these magazines like a fumbling fool, trying to avoid commercials and an impending seizure from the eye-popping vibration of the colors in gloss. This in front of me happens to be about London, or so I discovered later, having searched the cover for hints of what might be, “The coolest city in the world!” only to find it shrieking in bright yellow at the center of the frame. I missed it, you see, because the header “Nylon” is in bright pink, and the folks in front of/behind the big letters are dressed in black, and the background is a piercing kind of blank whiteness so the whole thing functions more like an optical illusion than a clear display of what’s inside.

And indeed, inside is much of the same: a bunch of pale London hipsters outlining themselves in black leather and mascara, donning bright yellow boots and bright pink handbags. Makes sense, I thought. London is so dreary it takes bold colors just to stave off depression. Perhaps it’s like this in any big city. I remember being bombarded by the frequency of Times Square. Everything was electric: the tall buildings, the glass, the products behind the glass, even the cars and faces. The idea seems to be that the more closely a region resembles the inside of a diamond, the more special it appears. Perhaps we, as animals, as consumers, will be attracted to the sheer vibrancy of a store sign, like fluttering little moths to a highly systematized flame. Magazines seem to have gotten the hint, but something about it shocks me. I stand stunned, incapable of flipping a page and landing on substance.

Maybe I’ll react to a high-gloss city in the same way, bouncing from neon to neon, hardly able to make heads or tails of the fast-paced marketing ploys. Though I’m not sure I’m meant to go in order, bend and tear at each page in a row, it’s safe to say these little monthly exercises in sensory stimulation are a good way to train for the big move to the big city—a bit more blatant in its demand for my money, more dimensional in its take of what’s in.