Philadelphia's Magic Gardens of Stearns' Visit.2

Philadelphia's Magic Gardens is a huge area that is entirely covered with mosaics, both indoors and outdoors, on South Street. It is the work of Isaiah Zagar, who has also designed other murals throughout the city.

It's amazing because every little corner is covered with tiles, mirrors, bicycle wheels, pottery, statues, etc.

 

It's very Philadelphia--I've never seen art like this in any other city.

 I've been passing this place for years and have always wanted to go inside, so I'm glad that Stearns agreed to go with me.
 

 I wouldn't say that the mosaics are beautiful, but they sure are interesting. They incorporate some religious imagery, a lot of international folk art, and a lot of broken things are normally thrown away.
 

 I love all of the glass--it reminds me of Roxaboxen.

Unfortunate Marketing Campaigns

So, in an effort to be healthier (no, it's really because they were cheaper), I bought multi-grain cheerios. Their slogan is, "More Grains Less You!" Who wants there to be less of them?! Also: what I didn't see on the box is that these are lightly sweetened. I guess the only way that they could make people eat these multi-grains is to sweeten them. In the future, I'll be sticking to the good old yellow box.

The ad campaign anticipating Mad Men's return is, I think, pretty tasteless. I love the introduction to Mad Men--it's part of the show that I don't want to miss. Possibly my favorite part of the show. But I never got the idea that the guy falling in the intro is falling off of a building and about to hit the ground (which is exactly the idea that these advertisements give me). Rather, the show's intro conjures up for me the lack of control you feel when you're falling, the sense that things are happening to you that you can't control. Honestly, these ads also remind me of the only time that I've ever seen a human being jump from a tall building--9/11. These ads were a mistake.

Ramblings

A very catchy song came on the radio the other day--Pitbull's "Give Me Everything":

"Tonight I will love love you tonight
Give me everything tonight
For all we know we might not get tomorrow
Let's do it tonight
I will love love you tonight
Give me everything tonight
For all we know we might not get tomorrow
Lets do it tonight"

Incidentally, I heard about Pitbull for the first time last weekend, when I was at an excellent Mardi Gras party at the house of several of my friends. And where I was delighted to learn that Wendell, one of the blogs oldest readers, still reads this blog. Anyway, that song strikes me as a contemporary reiteration of the theme of Andrew Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress":

"Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime."

Marvell goes on to talk about vegetable love (best line) and time's winged chariot hurrying near. And how she needs to sleep with him tonight (more or less).

And it reminds me of Robert Herrick's "To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time":

"Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,
    Old time is still a-flying :
And this same flower that smiles to-day
    To-morrow will be dying."

Of course, Herrick's poem is more about hurrying up to get married. Which reminds me of the old, depressing song, which I know from Eva Cassidy singing it:

"When I was younger
The boys all came around
But now I'm older
And they've all settled down
Control your mind my girl
And give your heart to one
For if you love all men
You'll be surely left with non."

Goodness gracious--all of these things are subtly threatening! And I really don't believe in cajoling people to sleep with you based on "we might not get tomorrow."

The Italian Market of Stearns' Visit.1

Stearns visited Philly! We explored the Italian Market, where we were met by a surprise snow shower, which was over as quickly as it started. 

 

 

 I was surprised to see a fire on the street to keep the market workers warm. It looked like they were just burning whatever leftover wood they had.

Celery root.

The prices at the market were very low, but, honestly, very low prices in produce worry me. Anyway, we stocked up, and I'll have to let you know how it tastes.

I Can See That This is Trash But I Like It

I watch Private Practice, and I like it. But boy, they sure know how to make it sound boring (this week's episode summary):

"Sam struggles to take care of his sister; Sheldon finds out that Amelia has life-altering news; Addison and Jake continue to flirt."

Caveat: I hate Addison's monologues at the beginning. They're really poorly done. I think they're an attempt to imitate Meredith's monologues at the beginning of Grey's Anatomy, but Meredith's are great and Addison's are terrible. 

Random Assortment

~ "God is Bigger than Elvis"--On the nun-actress who kissed Elvis and is attending the Oscars. I want to see the documentary! Also, how melodramatic--the man who she almost married before becoming a nun never married and visited her until his death!

~ Famous architects and their gas stations: Frank Lloyd Wright's here;  Mies van der Rohe's here (because I love driving).

~ On romance novels. I've never read one, but I'm intrigued:

For all the scoffing from various quarters at the fairy-tale messages they contain, romances largely deal with practical, everyday matters; they're more like field guides for resolving the real-life difficulties women face. As those difficulties have changed over time, the romance novel has adjusted accordingly. The problems of balancing a career with running a household, looking after children, negotiating a romantic impasse: these kinds of things are dealt with directly. Rarely do "serious" writers on women's issues stoop so low as to address such homely questions, agonizing though they remain to women even now. How do we express generosity, love and patience without becoming a doormat? Yes I want to have a career, but I still like jewelry and pretty dresses! How can this incredible man like me even a little bit, when I have all these flaws? What kind of person does one need to be in order to really deserve someone's love? These questions have never stopped being asked, no matter how emancipated we may become.

...

These writers have no authorial brakes at all, and their irrepressibility is enchanting all by itself. What other kind of author is free to name her hero Sin Watermount or Don Julio Valdares, Tarquin Roscuro or Duc Breul de Polain et Bouvais? There is generally a wild, far-flung and exotic locale: Queensland, the Western Cape of South Africa, the Scottish Highlands. There are impossible situations, natural disasters, a whole pantheon of dei ex machinis, drama galore.

~ On Jerusalem Syndrome and a psychiatrist who treats it.

~ On audiobooks, which I obviously love, and am not ashamed to tell my grad-school peers:

I used to avoid talking about audio books. In general if you are 28 years old and in graduate school and you listen to audio books then the worst thing about the whole practice is admitting it to your graduate-school peers. Every time a book comes up in conversation, your dude friends will ask “Did you listen to that on audio book?,” and then they will laugh. Less dude-like people, people less invested in making fun of you, will just cock their heads to the side and ask you why you do it. As if liking books were not enough! As if it weren’t the best thing in the world to have someone read to you! As if you had something better to do! I thought about starting this essay by insisting that I listen to audio books for work, so that I could not be mistaken for that other kind of person, that kind of person who listens audio books because it brings her some kind of unsophisticated pleasure. I am not, I wanted you to know, your Aunt Paula. My kitchen is not decorated with rooster towel racks and rooster potholders and rooster trim. I am a very serious person.

Thing I Learned Today

Portland has a unicycle hockey team (my friend used to be on it). (Which is to say, Portlandia is true!)

One More Crocus Picture or Happy Birthday, Mama Leopard!

My apologies for the surfeit of crocus pictures. But here's one more to wish Mama Leopard a happy birthday! I think that crocuses are appropriate because they're purple, like amethyst, February's birthstone. Plus crocuses are very February. And February is very purple.

Anyway, anyone who knows Mama Leopard knows that she is a remarkable woman--incredibly hard-working and a mother to her core. I wish I were home to pick you real wildflowers!

Nothing's Real But Love

One of the great delights of my life is really sunny days (especially unseasonably sunny ones)--driving down the road a little too fast, listening to some bubble-gum pop, and smoking a cigarette (pretend you didn't read that). (Francisco says I'm a valley girl at heart.) To put icing on the cake, this morning I passed a whole little field full of crocuses, just at the end of my driveway! It made me feel how Wordsworth felt when he came upon the daffodils.

As I was driving to school the other day, a song came on the radio with the refrain, "Nothing's real but love." I like that turn of phrase. Augustine would have loved it, too, I think (although I'm sure that he and Rebecca Ferguson have very different ideas about what love is, exactly).

Small Rant

Near my (shared) office at the little school where I'm teaching, there's one bathroom that everyone shares. The toilet seat is routinely left up. Now, there are mostly men on this floor, but still! There are women here, too!

Bad Hymn

Ashes by Tom Conry

"We rise again from ashes,
from the good we’ve failed to do.
We rise again from ashes,
to create ourselves anew.
If all our world is ashes,
then must our lives be true,
an offering of ashes, an offering to you.
...
The rain we’ll use for growing,
and create the world anew
from an offering of ashes, an offering to you."

I don't know, maybe I'm missing something, but I'm really uncomfortable with the creating ourselves anew and the creating the world anew parts. It sounds existential to me.

My Experience at the Dental Clinic

Driven both by my perpetual desire to find a good deal and my actual broke-ness this year, and, even more than both of those things, by some dear friends and my hypochondria, I made an appointment at the dental clinic. 

I was enjoying an annual Christmas brunch several months ago with a family full of dear friends. Well, our family full of dear friends is intimately connected to the dental profession. Days before, I’d noticed a little white spot on my gum. Diana thought it looked like the spot that resulted in her root canal. Her sister and mom, both hygienists, agreed that I’d better have it x-rayed (especially since I haven't seen a dentist in years). They didn’t tell me to panic—I did that on my own. I mean, I’m uber-poor, as I said, and I had no idea how much root canals cost! They could be ten thousand dollars, for all I know!

Fast-forward to January and my first appointment at the dental clinic. After four hours and my student-doctor not showing up, I had gotten almost nothing done and had to schedule another appointment. This week they finished all the work and cleaned my teeth, after almost another four hours, for not that much money.

I’m very frugal and very broke, as I mentioned before. However, I’m not really sure that the savings was worth it. My student-doctor was as nice as can be; we chatted for a long time while we were in line for x-rays. He was young and we had a nice time. However: he was young. And boy, he slaughtered my gums. The hygienist and periodontist  and regular old dentist who checked his work felt like experienced surgeons, like angels touching my teeth with fairy dust, by contrast. He did this weird perio-probe to see if my gums were a 2 or a 3 or a 4. I have never heard of a regular old dentist doing that. It involved a lot of digging down into my gums. (I mean, he also took my blood pressure and my pulse, which no other dentist has ever done.)

Then he cleaned my teeth. This involved a cavitron, something I’ve never heard of (again, I've never seen a regular old dentist use this machine). He told me there was a lot of water involved. It was actually a lot like a shower or drowning. I don’t particularly like going under water (I do like being in the water, though!). The water from his tool was shooting under my glasses, smearing my mascara. It was shooting up my nose, and down my chin, and around my neck. I was basically holding my breath for 20 minutes. But, he told me, at least he wasn’t cleaning my teeth by hand, because the dentists call that a blood bath. Holy goodness!

I could tell what he meant by blood bath when he finished up the cleaning by hand. I was really bleeding a lot. The hygienist suggested that maybe I don’t floss, since I was bleeding so much. Lady, I floss! It’s just that he was repeatedly stabbing my gums with a small sword as I squirmed underneath him. My gums definitely came out bruised and battered. 

Oh, and my dentist had never seen grafts before (I have three on my teeth). When he saw mine, he asked me if they were always infected and bubbly like that. I was shocked and scared. I had never noticed them being infected, but maybe I just hadn't checked lately! When the other head doctors came over to take a look, they said that my grafts look great (Diana--you should pass that on to your dad!). Later, my dentist admitted that he had never seen a graft before. 

On a positive note, he said that my teeth are in great shape, especially for not having been to a dentist in, I don’t know, three or so years. No cavities! No need for a root canal! Plus, it gave me a lot of opportunity to tell myself that it doesn’t hurt because I’m a strong woman!

From the coffee shop after the dental appointment. I was worried that I wouldn't be able to drink coffee after that experience, but everything seems to be working alright.

Slovak Cookie

Guys, you know I love receiving letters. The only thing that I can think of that's better than that is receiving a Slovak thank-you cookie in the mail! Isn't it lovely?

Seriously--send me letters! I'm low on correspondents at the moment.

A Confederacy of Dunces

A professor recommended A Confederacy of Dunces to me a million years ago so, since I now have a sizable commute on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, I put it on my iThing (it's an iPod, but I've named it "iThing"), so that I could listen to it on my way to school.

I promise, I didn't know this before I started listening to it, but Walker Percy wrote the foreword! Percy writes that mother of the author (John Kennedy Toole) brought the book to Percy's attention some years after Toole's death.

A Confederacy of Dunces is a picaresque novel that is so over-the-top that it puts Don Quixote to shame. Almost everyone in the book (with the possible exception of Gus Levy of Levy Pants and Claude, Mrs. Reilly's suitor) is a ridiculous cartoon caricature. The main character, Ignatius J. Reilly, is an immensely obese man-child who is caught up in Medieval philosophy (it was great fun to read this book while I am teaching Medieval philosophy). He is constantly critiquing the contemporary world from a Medieval standpoint--he constantly refers to Fortuna and her cycles. On the other hand, he is caught up in a fascination with precisely the thing he critiques. The book follows Reilly on his pursuit of a job--he first works as a filer at Levy Pants, then at a hot dog stand, accidentally smuggling pornography.

Ignatius' mother, Irene Reilly, drinks too much (she keeps her wine in the oven, which leads to Ignatius making lots of funny comments about her baking wine). There is a mistreated black man who is forced to work in a club as a janitor. There is a pathetic policeman who is the brunt of his department's jokes. There is a Freudian woman, Myrna Minkoff, who corresponds with Ignatius and wants to fix him. There is Gus Levy's wife who tries to psychoanalyze Miss Trixie, one of the employees at her husband's business. Miss Trixie is ancient and dying to retire, but Mrs. Levy is convinced that she needs to keep working in order to feel valuable. There is Darlene, who wants to be a stripper at the club with the help of her bird.

The book follows loads of different characters, their stories all intersecting repeatedly and tightly. Toole is best at the way that he gradually reveals his characters' true personalities. You see them the way that they see themselves first. Then you see the way that other characters perceive them. You aren't quite sure who to believe at that point. Then, you see them through their own actions.

I really cannot recommend the book on tape version. It took me a good five minutes of listening to be sure that the narrator was not a computer. He puts on a Southern accent, but his voice just sounds digitized. He affects many different accents throughout the course of the novel. The thing is the book just plain isn't politically correct--there is one character who is flamboyantly gay, for instance. This isn't helped by the way that the reader reads the book out loud. I would recommend reading it to yourself if you read it, and not listening to someone else read.

I guess I'm also slightly confused about Ignatius' love of Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy: Ignatius is obsessed with the book, but he sees himself as being controlled by the force of Fortuna. He does not believe himself to have much influence over his fortune. But I read Boethius to say that fortune is irrelevant--he says at one point that all fortune is good (from God's perspective); from the human perspective, all fortune that happens to good people is good, and all fortune that happens to wicked people is wicked (not because God rewards people neatly for their actions, but because good people can be made better through either misfortune or fortunate occurrences and because wicked people are at least given an experience of justice when they are punished). Which is to say, I understand Boethius to be removing fortune's power, but Ignatius seems to see everything that happens to him as the result of fortune.

I suppose the whole book comes down to the epigraph from Jonathan Swift, from which the title of the book is taken: "When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him." Is Ignatius the genius that he thinks he is, with everyone uniting against him? Or is he the crazy man that his mother and her friends think that he is? Almost certainly, he's a little bit of both and a little more crazy than genius.

Quote

"It's just like being married: you pay for the things and then your wife tells you when you can use them." --a friend who is *not* married

 

The first crocuses! (or croci, as I'm sure Stearns would love to point out)

Secret Restaurant

This weekend, I went with Francisco and some of his friends to a secret Mexican restaurant in Columbia Heights. It is a restaurant where you find the phone number from one of your friends (who has scrawled it on a piece of scrap paper that he shoved in his pocket). You show up outside the door to that apartment building and call the number if no one is coming out to let you in; they throw the keys down from a second floor apartment just beside the door ("Maria, la llave!"--gosh, I love that movie).

You go up a stairwell to the hall, which is blue on the bottom and green on the top, and then walk in a door with a prayer card with a picture of Mary on the outside (there's also a statue of Mary just inside the door). The restaurant is literally in a family's apartment--the woman sells Avon stuff, which lines three shelves on the left wall. There are cacti and other plants in the window in the back. There are family pictures on the walls (the waiter is on the wall in a green military uniform that didn't look like the American military). There is a huge flat screen tv that was playing some old black and white horror film (the little boy who was part of the group we joined at the big, communal rectangular table in the middle of the living room/dining room was glued to the tv--couldn't look away--it reminded me of #1tomatolover when he was little).

An older man and woman were cooking in the kitchen, which was open to the dining room. They were making the tortillas fresh, right in front of you. A younger man was serving. Francisco's friend encouraged me to go daring (it really never takes too much encouragement), so I had the lengua (beef tongue) taco and a taco with beef and cactus strips (which reminded me of green peppers). The beef tongue was good in the taco, but it looked exactly like tongue--you could see the taste buds on the little pieces of meat. Which is to say, I ate the whole taco, but didn't bother with the pieces that fell out of it. It reminded me of the time when I was a little girl and I walked into my great-grandmother's kitchen to find a cow tongue boiling in a little saucepan on the stove. The sauces on the table were amazing--there were some that were very hot and one that was green and made out of guacamole--they were spicy and interesting and wonderful.

Us, having ice cream in the square after lunch. 

Tie Clips

I'm super into tie clips at the moment. One of the fellows here wears them, and they look so Mad Men. They look so sharp and put together and remind me of our dear, sweet landlord from when I was growing up, since I'm pretty sure that he's the only person I've ever seen wear them. (I think he also used to sometimes wear those string ties.)

I think tie clips are like brooches for men. If I were a man, I would wear them as often as possible. Probably with a knit tie and a cardigan. 

 I wonder what girls could do with tie clips. Turn them into a pendant? Turn them into a hair clip?

Valentine's Day

Last night, for the second time in as many weeks, someone asked me what was wrong and why was I walking like that. Note to self: must learn to walk like a model in high heels. (Brief aside: once, when I was walking down a Georgetown hall to lead a discussion section, a stranger accosted me from out of the blue and asked if I was a model. So this high-heel walking problem must not have always existed. Also, dear reader, in case you're thinking this was just a lame pick-up line, it wasn't--the person who asked me if I was a model was an older woman, not a young man.)

For Valentine's day, I went dancing with Fedora and Cardigan--we went back to the Barbary. I was convinced that while we went to the 90s hip hop bar part of the Barbary last time, the downstairs would be a regular old dancing place. Nope: the downstairs had an 80s prom-theme and was all hipsters. I'd never heard any of the songs before. Although during one of them, all the hipsters were singing along at the top of their lungs. It was so endearing to see hipsters not being ironic, but being utterly absorbed. Hegel would have been happy.

Hipster watching is pretty intriguing, although since it was Valentine's day, there were a lot of frisky hipsters. What I like best is that you never have to worry about matching--you just wear whatever clothes it occurs to you to wear. I wore an obviously summer dress with a yellow cardigan and was immediately complimented upon walking into the Barbary. Before the dancing, we went to Village Whiskey, where they make a mean hot brown and lots of fancy burgers.

A Random Assortment, Valentine's Edition

~ Poet Marianne Moore was asked to help name a Ford back in the day. Here is a list of the names that she suggested. The car ended up being named "Edsel" (not a name that Moore suggested) and flopped. I wonder why. Here are my favorites from the list (but they're all awesome):

Hurricane Accipter (hawk)
The Impeccable
Symmechromatic
Thunderblender
The Resilient Bullet
Intelligent Bullet
The Intelligent Whale
Mongoose Civique
Anticipator
Magigravure
Pastelogram
Taper Racer
Utopian Turtletop

My favorites are the Thunderblender (which is almost as awesome as Moneypenny--my favorite name ever) and Utopian Turtletop (because of its obvious political resonances). 

~ Dating advice at CPAC. This is really too good to be true. (I don't think "good" is really the word I mean right there.) Take her shooting?! So that you can show her what to do?! No wonder these guys need dating advice.

~ Oh my goodness. I love working in bed, too. Unlike Charles Simic, I don't keep it a secret. I've never really liked desks and I don't think that they're good for your back. My favorite working spot, though, is a couch, and they really are terrible for your back. Great line: "In New Hampshire, where I live, with five months of snow and foul weather, one has a choice of dying of boredom, watching television, or becoming a writer." What do you think, Percy? Are those the choices?

~ Elizabeth Bishop's brownie recipe! Best part: "Spread about <——————> this thick in square pan."

~ Baylor and Wellesley coordinated a Valentine's Day release of the letters between Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. (Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese are one of my favorite things.) When I lived in Waco, I often visited the Armstrong-Browning library, which is almost certainly the prettiest building in Waco. I can't quite remember, but I'm pretty sure I spent an afternoon looking at the letters. But I might have made that up--my memory is just not so good.

Quote

"'Now I know,' she said, 'the further cause of your sickness, and it is a very serious one. You have forgotten your own identity. So I have now fully elicited the cause of your illness, and the means of recovering your health. Forgetting who you are has made you confused, and this is why you are upset at being both exiled and stripped of your possessions." --Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy

My grandmother and Mama Leopard were quoting Boethius to me all those years and not even knowing it!

The Book Corner.2

The Book Corner always has a good selection of Laurie Colwins. This cover, however, was quite surprising given that A) Laurie Colwin's novels are not romance novels! and B) there are no movies, as far as I know, made from Laurie Colwin's novels, although there clearly should be. Ah! I take it back--it seems like there's a made-for-tv movie of "An Old-Fashioned Story" called, Ask Me Again. But I cannot figure out where to find it and how to watch it, and that movie is not about this book. Anyway, what a scandalous cover! I didn't buy it--I just took a picture in the bookstore.

Philadelphia: Manayunk.4 and 30th Street Station

Happy Valentine's Day!

(Via Joe's NYC, which you can go to if you click on the picture)

I love Valentine's day, and I think I will wear red and pink to celebrate (thanks Frankincense!). I wish you all tons of lace paper doilies and shiny red stickers!

Quote

From a letter from Mill to Tocqueville (my own translation, so I can't really tell if it's accurate):

"I expect it [the second volume of Democracy in America] with impatience, for the lights that it will spread on the questions in my own spirit, for the good that it will have for our century and for the time to come, and for the interest that I have in your glory."

I clearly need a Mill to write me letters like this; then, I would finish my dissertation in no time at all.

Matching Help Or My Blouse.2

My roommates from over the years deserve every bit of thanking them that Mama Leopard did (and she did a good bit: starting with Salinger in college, my mother would sometimes send them snacks and thank you notes for being my friend. I mean, to this day she thinks that it's due to her prayers that Diana and I are friends. I mean, I'm sure it is due to her prayers, but I like to think that I'm also friendly and worth being friends with.)

Anyway, my roommates have had to help me a good bit with matching. Salinger once wasn't there and I decided that I would color block pink and purple and white. She was horrified and told me afterward that I could never do that again, because I looked like an Easter egg at the symphony. Another time Salinger wasn't there and our other roommate curled my hair into tiny ringlets and I wore it to a dance. It was really pretty bad. I learned then that I needed to be careful with who I trusted to tell me what looks good.

 Myrrh and Frankincense and Gold did a lot of helping with various aspects of my outfit over the years, even down to helping me know if I needed a jacket or not. Of course, Stearns and Ilana have been invaluable--Ilana has skyped with me several times when there was no one around to help me plan outfits.

And last semester, Sequins and Cardigan not only offered fashion advice, but they also lent me clothing when I didn't have the right thing. So now I have a question for you, dear readers. I bought this new blouse, which I told you about, and which I love. But now I need to know what it matches. I think it's pretty obvious that it matches my gray pencil skirt (in the first picture). I really, really want it to match my green skirt, but I have a sneaking suspicion that it doesn't (although I'm pretty sure that my aunt told me when I was little that any two solid colors match--plus, wouldn't a hipster totally wear that even if it didn't match? Edge, what do you think?).

I'm pretty sure that it matches my brown skirt (third picture), but I could be wrong. I totally believe in wearing red and pink together, especially for Valentine's day, but what do you think? (Have I told you how I feel about paper doilies around Valentine's day? I get super excited. This year I found little red heart-shaped paper doilies!)

Okay. Matching comments welcome. I'm planning to wear it with a white skirt in the summer (not pictured), and I also have a pair of brown cropped pants that I think will be great with it in a couple of months, too.

Quote

Sayers: "Look at us all with our Macs."

(She and Mr. Sayers and Francisco all have Macs. I have a PC with an apple sticker on the back.)

Philadelphia

I took this picture out my car window when I was stopped at a red light. I'm super proud. (Okay, so, ideally I would have gotten closer to this awesome water tower.)

I love this door! Like, I want to buy a house just so I can have a door to do this to!

My Blouse

Guys! Remember this post about this picture??:

Well! I found this shirt! (Okay, so not exactly--it has a high neck and it's pink and the polka-dots are small and white and of varying sizes and there's a ruffle-ish thing, but more or less this shirt!)

I'm super excited and fully intend to just re-wear the shirt over and over to class everyday and mix up the pencil skirts that I wear on the bottom...And I'll probably make my students call me Jeanne Crain.

Plus, it's shear, so I'll just wear it year round.


Update to this post: I wore this shirt to get my oil changed, and the otherwise chatty, nice mechanics tried to rip me off. I mean massively. They were talking about flushing fluids that never need to be flushed, like the breaks and the power steering. I blame it entirely on this shirt, in which I probably look especially feminine and maybe even rich. Next time I go see a mechanic, I'll be wearing all black and getting tattoos.

But really, then I took my car to my real mechanic, whom I trust. Only about half of the work that those first two guys fear-mongered needs to be done, but even still, it isn't cheap. The truth is, my real mechanic is super cute. I guess he sort of has the attractiveness of Elvis (who is the first man I ever fell for--I fell for him sitting there in my grandparent's kitchen watching all the Elvis movies on Sunday afternoons on their little tv). He's like a tan, partially Egyptian Elvis (I work with his uncle, so I happen to know his ethnicity). And he has these eyes. Okay, so I could go on, but I'll leave it there for the moment. All to say, if I have to pay a lot of money for something, I'd rather pay it to him.

The View from My Window

(1.2.3.4.)

Brooches

This is a brooch with a caveat: originally it was my great-grandmother's clip-on earring. I usually use it as a small brooch, but this time I hung it on a chain as a pendant. I thought it helped make my button-down shirt more feminine (I really just don't like plain old button down shirts, but I have a lot of trouble finding dressy long-sleeved blouses). I almost added a pearl necklace to the whole thing (my pearls are short and I wear them under the collar), but I chickened out and just stuck with the flower.

The View of My Window

This is what I wake up to in the morning.


(1.2.3)