Oh right, I like to use Vox to talk about all my consumerist foolishness! I'd forgotten.
I'm feeling pleased at the moment with a shirt I just bought at Target. I was reading this post for the archives of A History of Architecture, where she pointed to several examples of chic people incorporating clothes from Target into their fashionable wardrobes. (Art History and History of Architecture certainly are at the apogee of academic stylishness, aren't they? Linguistics, I may tell you, certainly is not.) Since we were going to Target anyway to pick up such romantic items as sponges and kitty litter, I thought I would take a look at the clothes while I was there. That post was about a skirt that all these well-dressed types had identified as especially good, which I looked for particularly, but it was long gone, I think.
This shirt that I bought instead is very pleasing, however. It's from the Converse One Star line and doesn't appear to be available online. It has a surprising number of interesting and weird details. At first glance it is an ordinary cotton duck buttoned shirt. But then you see that it has inset panels of ribbed cotton jersey running up each side and down each sleeve. (This, incidentally, makes the fit extra nice.) The sleeves also have a button halfway down the upper arm that you can use, maybe, to pinion your rolled up cuffs into place, though I haven't figured out quite how. The One Star logo appears on a funny little piece of off-white, shinier fabric that's folded around the hem and sewn down so that it looks like a mysterious patch. White grosgrain ribbon runs up the button side edge of the shirt, underneath the buttons. The third button down is sewn on with black thread while the others are sewn on with white thread. There's a strip of ticking ribbon sewn inside the lower edge of the collar, so that it shows as the collar falls back (because you haven't buttoned up all the way to the very top Erkel button). In conclusion, it is packed full of odd little textural touches, and I think it also cost me $16. It is good on top of a black poplin dress with long gray socks and clumpy black shoes, not that you can really tell from this grainy and underlit photo:
I love Cleveland, and I like my current teaching position very much, but today I am feeling especially keen on the prospect of getting one of the jobs I have applied for and moving away.
The world needs a MMORPG all about Robert's Rules of Order. No, really, it does! Gameplay would look something like this:
Happiest thing on YouTube for me this week: the 1965 promo video for "I Can't Explain." Oh, The Who! You are all so incredibly young! Check out the incredible knee-wobbling moves of striped shirt guy, and the guy after him who dances entirely by making the international hand signal for "time out." And everyone is chewing gum, because gum is totally bohemian.
A recent dream:
I was at a New Year's Eve party at my mother's house. Some guy we knew slightly had crashed the party, and he was menacing me with a chainsaw. Instead of being scary, though, it was incredibly irritating. So annoying, always in my way with your murderous buzzing power tool. Can't you give it a rest? My mother was also irritatingly reluctant to throw him out. I was all, "I'm not really in the best position to get rid of this guy, because he's kind of about to kill me. You could do something, though!" But no.
AND, for the ultimate annoyance, there was a big fallen tree right outside. Would Mr. Texas Massacre use his chainsaw to cut it into firewood for us? Noooo, he only wanted to use his chainsaw to menace. What a pain in the ass.
