I spend most of several days a week, as I've previously mentioned, standing around a grocery store trying to influence the shoppers to experience and buy product. Precisely, I work in several grocery stores all around town, which gives me a good opportunity to see how people dress, at least just for the grocery store. Now, no one will ever accuse me of being a fashion plate, and I'm certainly only going to be deputized to the Fashion Police in the direst of emergencies...something along the lines of Fashion Martial Law. However. I've been noticing a few things that are really trendy right now, and with the students coming back into town the trends are getting bigger and more hamfisted than ever. Hence, I hereby declare the following things absolutely, without fail, mandatorily OUT, right out, and begone from my sight:
1. Gold and silver purses and shoes. Whoever decided that these items would be in this winter is obviously dangerously psychotic. Metallic purses and shoes are tacky, tacky, tacky. Also, they're kind of tacky. There are exactly two kinds of people who can get away with it, so if you're not a crack-whore or an aging, alcoholic drag queen all hopped up on goofballs, please take your trendy new purse and shoes over to Goodwill immediately. Especially you girls carrying the huge spangled shoulder bags that look like you could hide a baby in them. Wearers of metallic shoes with kitten heels (see below) and carrying one of these bags will be shot on sight.
2. There are earrings out there which are not appropriate to be worn with just any outfit. Before you ever leave the house, you must look into a good full-length mirror. Look closely. If the tiny, delicate crystals of your chandelier earrings brush the shoulders of your "Turkey Trot" t-shirt, you must take them off. If the color of said tiny, delicate crystals clashes with your wind shorts, you must remove all jewelry and go back to bed. If said color clashes in a different way with your Tau Delt insignia flip-flops you must beat yourself 'round the head and shoulders with the heaviest pan you can find. Just because you can wear discreet pearls, modest gold hoops, or un-presupposing diamond chips in your ears with any outfit and on any occasion does not mean that the same holds true for all earrings, and especially not for earrings which you bought because of how much they look like the ones so-and-so wore to the Oscars. Idiot.
3. Denim for anything but jeans was never really cool, and it never will be. Those really expensive skirts you're all wearing that are especially frayed and ragged around the horrible bell hemline already when you buy them? They're awful. The cut is awful, the denim color is awful, the pre-frayed him is awful. Stop wearing them. Especially stop wearing them with t-shirts and chandelier earrings and horrible giant spangled gold bags and kitten heels. I'm going to kill one of you eventually if you don't.
4. Kitten heels are stupid. I really love shoes and when I first started to see this style back in stores I was elated and immediately started shopping for the perfect pair. Then I remembered (after trying on approximately 48,000,009 pairs) that kitten heels are dumb looking. The only place they belong is on those silly boudoir shoes with the pink boa around the toe, and the only place those shoes belong is in romantic-comedy movies made before 1972.
Just in case you're reading this and thinking, "She's wrong. I know what she means, but I can carry it off," You're wrong. The only times it's in good taste to do something in such bad taste: if it's really cute; if it's ironic; if it's funny. None of these trends are even deep enough for funny.
Tuesday, August 30, 2005
Wednesday, August 17, 2005
Defining moment
I never really grokked "eurotrash" until today. Sure, I had a vague, use-it-in-a-sentence kind of idea. I'd heard it used in context enough times to know I could use it semi-properly, especially if I happened to be drunk, talking to drunks.
Then I saw her. The shoes, first. High-couture, gold brocade with thousands of beads. Pointy-toed like some Italian hallucination of the Arabian Nights. Some sort of trendy skirt and a thick, heavy silk-satin halter top, more beads all over it, the color of weird foreign change just before you over-tip. Her hair was unbelievable--brushed completely forward over her shoulders and curled into perfect ringlets the size of bratwurst. Bigger. Her makeup looked like she'd recently been "done" somewhere that the lipstick cost more than I make a week. I don't even make enough to start talking about her handbag.
And here she was, stalking through the grocery store, screaming at the top of her lungs. A chagrined and possibly frightened young man wearing jeans and a t-shirt followed her, pushing a grocery cart with his head down and his mouth shut. She was screaming at him. In Russian. About limes. It was the only English word that I heard come out of her mouth, and it issued forth in a climbing, growling shriek like the cry of a cornered panther. Then would start again the incomprehensible muttering, the aggrieved whining, the yelling, the screaming, then, "LlllliiiiiiIIIIMMMES!!!!" They were heading towards the produce department, but she would occasionally leave him at the end of an aisle as she stalked down it, still orating, to grab some item and hurl it in the cart. He flinched every time. Once, when she was out of sight (but not sound) I caught his eye and considered offering to call for help, but she scared me too much.
Why is my life so boring? I hardly ever scream at anyone, much less about limes. And never in Russian.
Then I saw her. The shoes, first. High-couture, gold brocade with thousands of beads. Pointy-toed like some Italian hallucination of the Arabian Nights. Some sort of trendy skirt and a thick, heavy silk-satin halter top, more beads all over it, the color of weird foreign change just before you over-tip. Her hair was unbelievable--brushed completely forward over her shoulders and curled into perfect ringlets the size of bratwurst. Bigger. Her makeup looked like she'd recently been "done" somewhere that the lipstick cost more than I make a week. I don't even make enough to start talking about her handbag.
And here she was, stalking through the grocery store, screaming at the top of her lungs. A chagrined and possibly frightened young man wearing jeans and a t-shirt followed her, pushing a grocery cart with his head down and his mouth shut. She was screaming at him. In Russian. About limes. It was the only English word that I heard come out of her mouth, and it issued forth in a climbing, growling shriek like the cry of a cornered panther. Then would start again the incomprehensible muttering, the aggrieved whining, the yelling, the screaming, then, "LlllliiiiiiIIIIMMMES!!!!" They were heading towards the produce department, but she would occasionally leave him at the end of an aisle as she stalked down it, still orating, to grab some item and hurl it in the cart. He flinched every time. Once, when she was out of sight (but not sound) I caught his eye and considered offering to call for help, but she scared me too much.
Why is my life so boring? I hardly ever scream at anyone, much less about limes. And never in Russian.
Wednesday, August 10, 2005
Oh, p.s.
My computer crashed about two days after I wrote
the triumphant "my computer is set up and we're
getting wireless!" post, so it's not ALL my fault.
the triumphant "my computer is set up and we're
getting wireless!" post, so it's not ALL my fault.
Liar, liar...
Okay, okay, my pants are duly on fire. I've been promising to post and promising to post and breaking my promises every day. I'm sure no one is reading anymore, but in case you are, I absoloutely swear to stop promising to post. I'll just post whenever I get a bug up my ass and knock out the lying promises part.
So, my wonderful next raise at work is never going to happen (speaking of people who break promises) and the five days a week I was also (liar) promised fell through after about a month, so I'm working less now than I was before I got promised the fantastic raise and full time work. Yayy! (Which is what my boss always says when she's about to tell me that I'm "off for the weekend! Yayy!") So I'm looking for a new job. I haven't told her yet, but I'm going to. I'd like to keep working for her on the weekends only, but if I get a full-time, really really full-time job, she's going to be out of luck. So that's that.
Also, I've been spending lots and lots of time with my new friend Jasper (see previous posts). I've known him for years, on and off, since my roomate met him and his boyfriend...I have no idea how they met, actually. I suck at "Austin geaneology" and I could hardly tell you how I met Jessica, anymore. But I've known him a long time, and we never really hung out at all until I moved in here, right down the street from where he was living at the time. Where he promptly moved out of and ended up spending a lot of time at our house, until he found a new permament place to live. I don't really know how much of his life he wants to see splattered all over my blog, so maybe I should think about going back and changing his name in all the posts. Hmmmmmm.
Anyway, the roomate, who was really his real friend and I was just an acquaintance, ended up being busy most of the time and not being able to hang out with him, and we just started spending more and more time together until we basically started making everyone, including ourselves, sick with it. He's super-fun, and more than that, he helped me remember that I'm super-fun, too. Which is awesome, and he has a great new place, and we're both now able to utter up to ten minutes of conversation without mentioning each others' name even once; there's even whole days where we don't talk on the phone or see each other personally. His new downstairs neighbors (who I've never met, but who he talks to often) have even been persuaded that I'm really not his girlfriend. I may even eventually make a blog entry where I don't mention him.
Anyway, here's to new friends, and old friends, and new jobs, and being able to pay the bills. Yayy!
So, my wonderful next raise at work is never going to happen (speaking of people who break promises) and the five days a week I was also (liar) promised fell through after about a month, so I'm working less now than I was before I got promised the fantastic raise and full time work. Yayy! (Which is what my boss always says when she's about to tell me that I'm "off for the weekend! Yayy!") So I'm looking for a new job. I haven't told her yet, but I'm going to. I'd like to keep working for her on the weekends only, but if I get a full-time, really really full-time job, she's going to be out of luck. So that's that.
Also, I've been spending lots and lots of time with my new friend Jasper (see previous posts). I've known him for years, on and off, since my roomate met him and his boyfriend...I have no idea how they met, actually. I suck at "Austin geaneology" and I could hardly tell you how I met Jessica, anymore. But I've known him a long time, and we never really hung out at all until I moved in here, right down the street from where he was living at the time. Where he promptly moved out of and ended up spending a lot of time at our house, until he found a new permament place to live. I don't really know how much of his life he wants to see splattered all over my blog, so maybe I should think about going back and changing his name in all the posts. Hmmmmmm.
Anyway, the roomate, who was really his real friend and I was just an acquaintance, ended up being busy most of the time and not being able to hang out with him, and we just started spending more and more time together until we basically started making everyone, including ourselves, sick with it. He's super-fun, and more than that, he helped me remember that I'm super-fun, too. Which is awesome, and he has a great new place, and we're both now able to utter up to ten minutes of conversation without mentioning each others' name even once; there's even whole days where we don't talk on the phone or see each other personally. His new downstairs neighbors (who I've never met, but who he talks to often) have even been persuaded that I'm really not his girlfriend. I may even eventually make a blog entry where I don't mention him.
Anyway, here's to new friends, and old friends, and new jobs, and being able to pay the bills. Yayy!
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