I get it from him

Dressing strangely seems to be something of a genetic thing in my family. Not strangely as in Lady Gaga, but strangely as in dressing in ways that are easily misinterpreted by strangers. I love pleated skirts and plaid, and I look very young--alone plaid pleated skirts are unremarkable but it makes me look rather like a high school girl.

I recently found out my late grandfather had a similar habit.

Many eons before Steve Jobs would become famous, my grandfather frequently wore turtlenecks and sport coats. First of all, nobody looks good in this combination. Not even Steve Jobs did but nobody had the balls to tell him because he was worth more than you and your entire family combined. But it made him look like something he wasn't. Catholic priests don't have to wear the collar all the time, everywhere they go, but tend as a group to gravitate towards a shirt-and-jacket dress code.

Which is why everybody mistook my grandfather for a priest.

People at my parent's wedding were going up to him and kissing his hand and calling him 'Father'. Every few minutes my mom had to explain to the curious that no, they did not invite the priest to the reception (most people don't do this in NY), that the man was her father-in-law and please stop confessing.

At least I know I'm not the first person in my family to have this kind of habit. I expect I'm not the last either.

superfluous

One of the most useless catchprases of the twentieth and 21st centuries is 'bringing sexy back'. This phrase is completely redundant. Why does anybody need to 'bring sexy back'? I wasn't aware it had ever left. Sexy isn't missing. It hasn't gone anywhere without leaving a note. It isn't hiding. Sexy is undergoing some kind of identity crisis for sure, but it's still here. Stop saying that someone or something is 'bringing sexy back'. They aren't. They don't have to.

excessive

I've mentioned this before, but I'm a huge wimp. Everything scares me. I especially hate horror movies and can't even watch the ones that are so bad and campy you can see the sipper on the costume and members of the crew accidentally wandering in and out of the frame casually scratching their genitals with one of the plastic mannequin arms scattered around the area to give off an appropriately apocalyptic and gory atmosphere. In the end they all make me have to sleep with the light on. Even things that aren't scary scare me. I've even given myself nightmares just reading the plot of a horror film. And I've done this twice, because I am clearly not smart enough to learn from my own mistakes and avoid situations that invariably end badly for me.

But the degree to which I'm scared of ridiculous shit is hard to communicate. And overstate.

As a child I had a cute antique rocking horse that I liked playing with during the day but that scared me at night. It scared me so much I used to make my mom put a blanket over it so I didn't have to see it.

And in one of our old houses, my bedroom had curtains that frightened me in the dark.

Seriously. Rocking horses, curtains? If that's not a good enough reason to be embarrassed by yourself, then I can't fathom how you could justify it ever!!

awesome story

Another cool story about my ancestry.

My mother's maternal grandfather (my great-grandfather on my mom's dad's side) was born in Italy and emigrated to the United States in the early 30s between WWI and WWII.

Why?

Because for twenty years he wrote for an underground political newspaper in which he openly criticized Benito Mussolini and his regime.

He fled in fear of his own life, heaving behind his family and friends, and never returned.

I like to think stories like this suggest I might have a genetic predisposition for being wordy and a compulsive writer. He did something amazing with his words. Maybe I can too.

sensing a trend

Funny coincidence here.

I've known a small handful of men who ranged from extremely effeminate to full-on MtF transexual. I don't know if I just happen to know a lot of exceptional cases but except for not falling into line with what is typically thought of as 'male' or 'masculine', they almost all had one specific trait in common:

They had enormous dicks. And I mean porn-big. One of them would occasionally get lightheaded if he got a hard-on because of the sudden rush of blood away from his brain. Literally.

I'm not saying that being gay or effeminate has anything to do with penis size or vice-versa, just that it's an awfully specific thing to have in common with each other. I wonder if there's any kind of correlation between the two.

how did this happen?

While I'm tremendously accident prone, I don't often get hurt in ways most other people do. I mean, I have my share of spills and papercuts. And those obnoxious mysterious bruises that seem to turn up seemingly out of nowhere and at random, in places you would prefer to know how and when you suffered some sort of trauma.

So I'm not a stranger to hurting myself. I'm just really good at hurting myself in ways most people would never even think about. I've never broken a bone, but I sprained my ankle falling off my porch. I once needed stitches in an accidental self-inflicted stab wound in my knee that I got while trying to chop the head off of a 'My Little Pony' with a utility knife to customize it.

One of the weirdest ways I ever hurt myself was two years ago, when--upon my brother leaving for school and finally allowing my the opportunity to really get down to it--I gave my bathroom a thorough cleaning that involved bleach. The bathroom happens to be a completely internal room in my parent's house--it's smack in the middle of the second floor without sharing any outside walls where you could put a window--so there was no way to properly ventilate it. I ended up breathing so many bleach fumes that I managed to give myself a nasty case of 'chemical pneumonia', a pneumonia-like respiratory condition caused by chemical burns instead of a virus.

It was probably the most miserably ill I had ever felt.

(don't) call me Ishmael

I've never liked my name. I've always had a problem with it, often for opposing reasons. When I lived in the UK I hated my name because I didn't share it with anyone else. I was always jealous of peers who happened to share the same name. It made me feel even more like I didn't belong, which I felt already because I was American and my parents had American accents. When we moved to the US, the opposite was true--suddenly there were lots of girls that shared my name, and that fucking sucked, too! My name is so common that there was hardly a year when I didn't share a classroom at least some of the time with at least one girl who had the same name. And usually a boy who had the same name's masculine variation.

The name never suited me, either. I don't even like how it sounds. No matter what accent says it, I hate it. And it isn't even a name from which you can take an abbreviation or a nickname or diminutive. It's just... there. And I hate it.

I used to really want to change it as soon as I was old enough to do so, but by now I've lost interest in doing that. I don't hate my name any less than I once did, I'm just too lazy to want to go through the whole process and in the end it'll be more trouble than it's worth to try and adapt people who know me by this one to calling me something else.

It seems like I put up with a lot of shit I don't like out of a total unwillingness to make any effort to fix it.

hohshit

Way back in October I managed to injure myself fabulously without having any idea how or why it happened. I fell off my porch and severely twisted my right ankle. I don't have any idea how or why I managed to do this--I was just standing by the door one minute and the next I was a crumpled heap in the dirt and yelling extremely unladylike words. Not a single clue what happened in between.

Anyway. It was an extraordinarily painful injury and the next morning I limped off to the urgent care clinic where I was diagnosed with a sprain and given crutches. (Which I didn't use for long on the grounds that I was so graceless and clumsy on them that I was most certainly going to hurt myself even worse than I did falling down to begin with.) It improved but it never got totally better and has been sore off and on for the last few months. I either keep re-injuring it, or it never healed properly at all. I think it might just never have healed, and I also believe that I was misdiagnosed and had a fracture that probably needed a little more care than it was given.

Of course I went to a friend's house today and his two extremely excitable huskies tripped me. Now my ankle hurts a whole fucking bunch and I think I really re-injured it this time.

I plan on ignoring it but it's pretty eye-crossingly painful.

in retrospect....

Another one of those things that was normal to me until I found out it was weird first requires an anecdote.

I don't like to talk about it but I am technically a 'Southern Belle' because I was born in Melbourne, a small town about thirty minutes from Orlando. In the 80s it was still pretty much a swamp and there was nothing within miles, so in order to get anywhere or do anything my parents had to drive closer to Orlando where tehre was actual civilization. Since, again, most of the area was swamps and golf courses, it was possible to see the giant monument at EPCOT from a fair distance. So it was something I got used to seeing, this giant golf ball.

Except that once we moved to England, we lived very near an Air Force base called Menwith Hill that also happens to have a very similar feature:

The resemblance is uncanny. I don't actually know what purpose the one at Menwith serves. I'm not even completely sure what EPCOT's is, either, but I think it might be 'Tomorrowland' or something.

Anyway. I just thought giant golf balls were a feature of every town. Like post offices and schools.

As it turns out, they don't, and I'm really way weirder than I'm even aware of.

lights, camera

People of a certain sociopolitical bent are prone to pointing out how the mainstream media subtly promote racism by casting minorities in few roles and casting them as less sympathetic characters even when they do.

On the one hand, yes tehre is some subtle racism at play in a lot of modern media but this isn't exactly a new thing, nor is it done for deliberately malicious reasons. Sometimes it's just a product of the times. A lot of the time it was considered totally acceptable at the time of filming.

English actor Richard Barthelmass played a kindly Chinese immigrant in London in a 1919 early silent film called 'Broken Blossoms', alongside a young Lillian Gish. The character, called Chang, is actually a very sympathetic character. He is very kind and generous despite the disappointments and hardships he faces as a foreigner in early 20th-century London and only once in the entire film does he do anything bad at all--and even then it's just to defend the Lillian Gish character with whom his has fallen smitten. (He shoots the character's drunken, abusive father shortly before he administers the assault that kills her.)

But as good a character as he is, they still apparently couldn't be fucked to get an Asian actor to play an Asian character. Richard Barthelmass is as white as his name suggests he is and looks slightly less than nothing at all like a Chinese man. Barthelmass apparently chose to remedy this fact by squinting for the entire 90-minute run. Nobody thought there was anything potentially insensitive about any of this. There were no overt ill intentions. It was just the product of a time and place where racism was a social norm.

It's still a cute movie, though. Well, sweet and sad anyway. I knew how it was going to end but it still made me choke up at the end. It's also one of those very old films that has outlived its copyright protection and is public domain, which means it's available online for free should you want to have a look at it.

And before you can ask, yes, this silent movie also scared the fuck out of me because it was silent. There isn't a single element of horror or suspense in this entire film but the lack of sound coupled with the exaggerated makeup and body language is still enough to creep me out. Even Lillian Gish did. Especially Lillian Gish did. And I have a massive girlcrush on that woman.

the times

Times change, obviously. Things go in and out of fashion, bad habits are discovered to be robustly harmful, taboos are dropped or acquired, stereotypes evolve. So it's not in any way surprising that some of the shit that featured commonly in your childhood are completely unknown to the next generations. It's as unrealistic to expect acceptable norms to stay the same as it is to expect fashion to stay the same. But sometimes I find out that things I thought of as being completely normal are nowadays considered extremely dangerous or inappropriate.

I know some of the shit I did is dangerous. When there were to many kids for the number of seats available on our admittedly severely overcrowded bus, my fellow school bus riders and I would instead crowd into the seatless 'emergency exit' space or sit in the aisles. Obviously this is a dangerous situation just waiting to happen and we were all very fortunate we weren't hurt.

I also gather that wandering an enormous, endless sprawling forest unaccompanied at a time when cell phones were very uncommon and unreliable even if you were rich enough to have one. My parent's area is fairly rural and partially protected as a state park, so the surrounding area is extremely dense with woods. There weren't terribly many well-marked trails and it went for miles in every direction, so it was possible to get really lost if you're like me and have no sense of direction and lose your bearings. But my parents let me play tehre whenever I wanted, even though it was full of rusting cars and old metal drums and poison ivy and lyme disease-bearing ticks. This is how I found out I am unusually unreactive to poison ivy: because I spent forever wandering through it and I never once came down with a rash. I'm sure I am allergic to it (that's what the rash is, an allergic reaction), just that I haven't had the requisite exposure. Also, fun fact--you can get poison ivy rashes in your lungs if you burn it. The oil on the leaves responsible for the reaction is vaporized and you breathe it in through the smoke.

But one thing I found out recently was considered really 'dangerous' until it was no longer necessary was the practice of bringing healthy children to play with children afflicted with common one-time childhood illnesses (the kind you typically get only once, like chicken pox or measles) in order to expose them to it and get it over with as soon as possible. Apparently this is extremely bad, but I remember clearly how happy all the parents were when my brother and then later I had it on our respective birthday parties because it meant all the guests who hadn't already gotten it were going to come down with it and they could just get it over with.

I guess it makes sense but I had no idea this was so strongly discouraged until recently.

DIAGNOSIS: you're fucked

Today I am going to scare the fuck out of you again.

There's a peripheral nerve disorder called Guillian-Barre Syndrome, sometimes also referred to as 'French Polio'. What does it do? It paralyzes you from the feet up. Quickly. It can take a few weeks or it can take a few hours, but it starts with numbness of the feet and climbs upward until you're completely paralyzed.

GOOD NEWS: It's rare. Really rare. Just a few thousand cases of Guillian-Barre are diagnosed worldwide every year. Most doctors go their entire careers without ever once encountering it. You won't get it.

BAD NEWS: It's SO RARE that any doctor or emergency room you see once you realize you have a problem won't even think to look for it. Sometimes they haven't even heard of it. They won't think of Guillian-Barre until you're well and truly fucked, like when it gets up to chest level and stops you from breathing.

But don't worry, that tingly feeling in your feet is nothing to worry about.

Probably not.

Most likely no big deal.

Sleep tight.

boom

Tonight's severely depressive fact of the universe:

The continental United States contains an enormous--possibly the biggest in the world--volcano. Eruptions of this particular volcano are believed to be responsible for the 'Little Ice Age' as well as many of North America's (and the world's) extinction events.

The volcano is still there.

It is still active.

You know it as Yellowstone National Park.

Let's be clear about this--there isn't a volcano in Yellowstone. Yellowstone is the volcano. It is 45 miles wide and 125 miles deep. When it blows it will kill everything for thousands of miles in every direction immediately and change earth's entire climate for thousands of years. It may trigger another ice age. Everybody from New York to California will die.

It goes off every 600,000 years.

The last time it went up was 650,000 years ago.

Tick tock, bitches. Tick tock.

if the shoe fits...

Who decided that dress shoes for women would be various permutations of the sandal, and when was it decided? Because I would like to go back in time and beat them to death with a hammer.

I fucking hate sandals. Mostly I just hate feet. Feet are gross. Only a few people have feet that aren't disgusting to look at with crusty nails and fungus and cracks and red splotches and toe lint--way fewer than the number of people who wear fucking sandals everywhere. Which is pretty much everybody except me. I look at the women's shoe sections of stores during spring, summer, and most of fall and find nothing but fucking SANDALS. For some reason they are actually starting to piss me off just by looking at them hanging up in displays. Just... why is this the default? Why do we all have to be subjected to this?

Look, I have a wedding to go to. I literally have no fucking idea where to find shoes that aren't sandals. Do a search for 'women's dress shoes' and you will get nothing but page after page of open shoes. Sandals and shit.

ENOUGH WITH THE MOTHERFUCKING SANDALS.

Cover your goddamn feet you assholes. They are repulsive. I don't want to see them. And I don't want to walk about showing mine off, either.

Fuckheads.

coming up short

Being of primarily Italian descent, shortness is something of a family heirloom. Joe Pesce is quite famously a shrimp. Also I happen to have a second cousin named Joe Pesci, which still means 'Joe Fish'. It's just part of the genetic code, like a predisposition for neurosis and a tendency to be extremely dramatic and argue unnecessarily about everything. And occasionally get into World Wars but let's not get into that, shall we? Particularly not as the rest of my genetic code is (I swear) German and Jewish. Oh yes, I am a ticking DNA time bomb of mental instability. And a WWII joke.

But anyway. Being short is primarily what runs in my family. Except for my maternal grandfather, who is over six foot (he has the Jewish DNA), nobody is very big. My dad is the tallest in his family and he's square average male height--5'10". Of course, my mother is 4'10" so all of their photos look stupid. I'm just glad she didn't marry her high school sweetheart, who happens to not only be 5'5" but also Irish so my inherent predisposition for neurosis would have been even worse.

All the women in my family, especially on my mom's side, are short. None are more than about 5'2". Most aren't even that tall. So it was a fact of life growing up.

Even so, I still wanted to be taller than my mom. I never liked being a shrimp. I knew I was always going to be one but I didn't want to have to bear the indignity of being less than five foot. I bear enough indignity just by being me and doing things like forgetting my own name and being deaf. I'm serious when I say that in my entire life my only real driving ambition has been to be taller than my mom. I mean that was literally all I ever wanted out of life. Please dear sweet baby Jesus let me be taller than my mom and I will be happy. Please let me make it to five foot. Please do not make me too short to technically legally be allowed to sit in the front seat of the car. (Fun fact: some states have laws like this and in some of those states, my mom is too short to sit in the front seat of a car. My grandma is only 4'9". She really is too short.)

I made it to five foot. I made it exactly to five foot. That was all fate was going to grant me.

But I got what I wanted. I'm bigger than my mom. I am just barely grownup-sized. I can live with it. On the plus side it's made me, of necessity, have very good posture--if I slouch at all I don't reach the five-foot mark.

I can't have that.

That would be embarrassing.

Now pardon me while I try and remember where I left my purse.

HIDE ME

As big a wimp as I am, I'm not typically afraid of other people. My fears tend to be relegated almost exclusively to things that, statistically speaking, are less likely to pose a legitimate threat to me than lightning or killer bees. I used to fight all the fucking time in high school and still have brawler's tendencies so I know I'm both physically and morally able to thrash the fuck out of another person. Naturally I don't pick fights with people quite as much as an adult, but there isn't very much question in my mind regarding whether or not I could hold my own in a fight if it came down to having to defend myself.

So in the even I do get scared of another person, it's usually because that person is about as dangerous as Charles Manson. (Incidentally, we tend to think of Manson as this big scary spectre of a serial murderer and an imposing, intimidating person and he has such a huge and manipulative personality that he really is like that--but most people don't realize that Charles Manson is an extremely shrimpy little guy. He's just 5'2" and at the time of his arrest weighed less than 130 pounds--not very much bigger than I am.) Suffice to say, when someone scares me they are fucking scary.

My boyfriend's ex scares me.

You know how people say that looks can kill? When I met this chick I wasn't even dating him and the look she gave me was still so withering and scary that it would not only have reduced me to a little greasy spot on the road but would have obliterated everything around me for two hundred yards. I have never received such a vaporizing look. She isn't big. She's my size. She's not tattooed or pierced or wielding a machete or anything else that would make her stand out in a crowd as a threat. But god damn if she doesn't scare the fuck out of me. I have every reason to assume that she has a little doll that looks like me in her bedroom and spends a little while each day whacking it with a hatchet. I don't hide behind people, but I will hide behind Max until she goes away. Sometimes she doesn't. When that happens I more or less just climb onto his head and cling for dear life.

I figure if he slips a disc it'll still be less painful than whatever it is his ex wants to do to me.

They would probably never even find the body.

.

don't remind me

One of the more depressing things about Facebook--aside from seeing how pathetic your life is in comparison to everyone else's--is that it forces you to confront facts that you might academically know to be true but are not yet ready to emotionally accept.

Chief among these: exes do not die once you have broken up.

The nerve some people have, continuing to exist.

uncanny

Sometimes I think of things eerily similar to things that become popular without any explanation.

For years I wanted to be a writer and did develop a fantasy universe in my head in which to set the stories I never wrote. This world and its 'rules' and inhabitants were somewhat detailed. There were humans as well as shape-shifters who lived as humanoid dragons or griffins and could physically morph into full dragons or griffins.

But it came with a price.

I don't give a fuck about Twilight but I know this much: in the Twilight universe the vampires will 'forget' their humanity and go all-out animal and prone to attacking loved ones.

Over ten years ago I invented a world in which the dragons and griffins, when taking on full animal physical forms, would take on animal brains as well--in essence lose the ability to think, reason, and remember life as a human. Leaving them prone to attacking people or things they otherwise cherished. They also had no control over what they did as animals, leaving them vulnerable to whatever the animal wanted to do--and occasionally they would not turn human again for a long time (the characters were extremely long-lived), or ever. It was a risk they had to be willing to take in order to tap into that power.

This universe also had its own version of the Medieval mythology of St George and the dragon. In THEIR version of events, St George and the princess (called Sabre, I found out) were lovers. St George was an unwanted human suitor and the romance was considered shameful. The Dragon only took on his dragon body to defend Sabre from him, on the provision that she should instruct St George to kill him and go with him should he turn violent against her. When he did just that, Sabre told the unwanted St George to kill him and married him as she promised.

I don't know what made me remember this.

it had to be done

As much as I live on comedy the way other people live on food and water, I have never been a prankster. I enjoy occasionally watching really clever and well-staged pranks orchestrated by other people (like the annual worldwide mass-public-prank 'No Pants! Subway Ride' and pretty much everything else the Improv Everywhere group does), but I don't get any enjoyment out of doing it myself. Successful pranks are hard work and there isn't a whole lot of room for me to giggle when I'm inevitably stressed by the eight thousand different perfectly-timed and coordinating steps that will ultimately end in essentially a glorified metaphorical prat fall.

And also I'm chickenshit. I'm terrified of getting caught by a less-than-good sport.

But every now and then I'll come across a potential prank that's basically just presenting itself to me in a provocative manner and that I would be an idiot not to do.

Bored in an art class one day in high school, I amused myself with the old 'fake-skin-made-of-dried-Elmer's-glue' on the palm of my hand. I got bored with that so I decided for no real reason to do it on the underside of my forearm right near the elbow. That way I could use my hands while it tried. The glue tried but by then I had found something to do so I didn't peel it off before the bell rang. I just threw my hoodie back on and went to my next class.

In the next class there was a substitute.

I sat in the front row of this class.

This was an opportunity that could not be missed.

I scratched at my elbow through my shirt a bit, like I was annoyed by a persistent itch. I frowned like I was trying to ignore it but was too annoyed by the itching. Eventually I rolled up my sleeve, still prodding at the 'itchy' area and scratching it. Then I carefully picked at the edge of the fake skin, again like I was scratching, and casually peeled it off.

I thought the sub was going to faint or throw up.

She asked me if I wanted to go to the nurse.

I told her no thanks, that it looked like I'd managed to just pick off the afflicted area and I'm sure it won't get gangrene this time.

mascot

There doesn't seem to be any real pattern when it comes to deciding mascots for middle and high schools. It just seems like the school boards pick whatever they think sounds/looks the best. So you have a derpjillion schools with 'Tiger' or 'Hornet' or 'Bear' or 'Pirate' or 'Knight' or any other animal or character that's deemed appropriately badass. I'm not sure whether it's a regional/cultural thing or how common it is, but all the schools in Montgomery County seem to pick mascots that start with the same letter as the school's name. So my middle school mascot was the 'Neelsville Knight' (okay, technically it doesn't start with the same letter but it's pronounced like it is). In high school, the mascot was the WMHS Wolverine.

Wolverines always seemed like a semi-obscure name because it's not an animal most people will immediately recognize. But since the name of the school started with a 'W', they had pretty slim pickings. I can't think of too many other animals that start with a 'W'. Whales, warthogs, weevils, wookiees. That's about it.

I never had any school pride or anything, no particular loyalty to the 'community'. But I was always kind of weirdly proud that the mascot was a wolverine.

Because wolverines are fucking insane.

They're one of the few animals in the world that is actively aggressive. Most animals will fight back only when they're provoked or can't run--the wolverine starts fights because it wants to, often with opponents significantly larger than itself, for no reason at all. And it will fight with a disproportionate amount of brutal violence. Wolverines are even known to challenge mountain lions and bears for food. And they win.

The wolverine is a BAMF.

it seemed like a good idea at the time

My dad has his moments of being slightly less awful. Every now and then he'll do something interesting, and this one happened I guess about five or six years ago.

When he was a teenager, he and his friends were big fans of model rockets. Not model rockets as in scale reproductions of real or fictional spacecraft, but those cardboard-and-plastic ones you actually launch into the sky with the aid of some gunpowder. And he actually let my brother and me build a few small ones to set off for a few years when my brother and I were younger and the family dynamic, while not all that great, hadn't developed into the aggressively dysfunctional psychological cancer it would later become. We would launch them from my old school's field on the weekend when there was nobody there and it was one of those fun weird things that enticed friends to come along. Because, hey, how often are you going to get the invitation, 'Let's go down to the old school and set off rockets!!'?

And then we pretty much stopped. Mostly it was because we had by then stopped being able to tolerate one another any more than was absolutely compulsory.

One day a few years ago, my dad and brother decided that they were going to launch rockets again. And somehow someone came up with the genius plan to buy a rocket designed to go several thousand feet and make alterations to it so it would go further and then launch it at an angle (like a missile) to see where it lands. They stuck a couple of our home address labels to the body and waited for a calm day to set the thing off.

After a few days nobody had come forward claiming to have found the rocket so they assumed it crashed or was destroyed. Until the phone call from the guy in DC came.

Apparently this little model rocket made it all the way into protected airspace.

Completely fucking deranged.

then and now

When you compare it to what we have today, early bikinis from the 40s and 50s look pretty demure to modern eyes. But when it was first introduced in 1946 it was considered so scandalously revealing that no professional models could be found who were willing to wear it.

The only woman willing to model it was nineteen-year-old Micheline Bernardini--a stripper and nude dancer in Paris.

bitchy-bitch

(That title is only funny if you're old enough to remember the old cartoon 'Richie Rich'.)

I do an incredibly petty, bitchy thing at work.

Through a combination of customer comments and using your employee discount to buy way more shit than you would otherwise be able to afford, working at a clothing retailer usually results in a fairly substantial knowledge of the merchandise's various features and quirks. You know this style fits short people better than that one, these shirts are stretchier, the shoes run a little on the big side, and so on. Old Navy makes some awesome super-tight skinny jeans, and makes them in a bunch of colours. There's various denim shades and black and white, but also bubblegum pink, fire engine red, rusty brown, and eye-spanking blue. (They make purple and green, as well, but not for our store.) I've grown to like skinny jeans even though I'm horribly self-conscious of my lower body, and I've learned that these particular jeans have a weird size variation based on the material they're made from.

The denim-coloured, black, white, and grey jeans are all made of stretchy denim material and have a lot of stretch to them and accommodate most figures really easily--but all the other colours, possibly due to the dying process, are made from a completely different material that's more like artist canvas than denim. It's not uncomfortable, but it also isn't NEARLY as accommodating. The material hardly has any give to it at all, and being that the style itself is meant to be worn very, very snug, nobody can fit into their 'normal' size. You have to get one or two sizes up from what you're used to because the material is so rigid. (For example, I wear a 6/8 but had to buy my red jeans in a size 10--the others I have in the same style are grey and dark denim and fit normally.) But most people aren't aware of this.

I feel really badly for some of the women I see in the fitting rooms with these jeans when I hear their dismayed cries that they can't get them up over their thighs and oh my god, did I gain a lot of weight without knowing it?? It can be really frustrating to find yourself too big for old clothes, particularly when you're prone to body-image issues. If I happen to see one of these issues in the making by way of a woman being upset about the pants being too small, I always stop and let them know that the style runs extremely small and lacks stretch, so needing a size or two bigger has nothing to do with them and everything to do with the design of the pants. They always feel better when I say that. I also warn women when they're purchasing the jeans so they don't degenerate into panic when they get home and find the jeans don't fit.

So what makes me a bitch about it?

I only do it when the women in question wear a size eight or bigger. If they're skinny and buying a size zero or a two, I just keep my mouth shut. Let them get home and try on the pants and think they're getting fat. They could use a little taste of how the other half lives.

out loud

I used to live in Germantown, Maryland--the same town in which Frank Warren receives countless postcards every day, each revealing the secrets of strangers, in a project he began in 2005 called 'Post Secret'. For months Warren handed out and left in public places a postcard inviting strangers to make a home-made postcard bearing a secret they've never told anyone before, anonymously, and send it to him. Shortly after the postcards started coming. They have never stopped.

Amazingly, the Post Secret address IS Warren's actual home address--even after gaining worldwide fame he had no qualms using and clearly broadcasting the location of his home.

A home that happened to be just a few minutes from where I lived.

My secret is this: Before I moved I drove to the Post Secret house, got out of my car, and said my secret out loud.

what is the point of this?

I've been repeating this all over the place since yesterday, but it's such a weird thing that it bears mentioning again. I've also never heard anyone else bring this observation up, so presumably it isn't the kind of thing most people are inclined to question.

Why the ever-loving HELL does 'death in the family' equal 'QUICK EVERYONE, LET'S ALL GIVE THE BEREAVED SANDWICHES!!'

No matter when or where or in what culture it happened, every grieving family seems to be given a tray of sandwiches. As a gesture of support, I guess. It would be one thing if Grandma was the kind of person who always, always made sandwiches for anyone who came to visit--but everyone does this for every death. There's nothing wrong with finding solace during a difficult time with some comfort food, but why always sandwiches? Why not, I dunno, cake or a fruit basket or a leg of lamb or something?

But I guess it's just one of those things we all do without thinking. If you DO think about it, though, it makes approximately ZERO sense.

cultural differences

I'm not entirely sure whether this is a cultural difference or a generational difference--I'm pretty sure it's a cultural thing since it wouldn't have just changed abruptly like it did if it was the result of a changing fashion.

Anyway.

Face painters are always a common staple at events geared towards kids and families and sometimes at birthday parties, as well. It was that way in Yorkshire and it was that way in the US. But like with a lot of the things shared trans-Atlatic, it's the same name for basically the same practice but the Brits and Americans do it in two completely different ways.

I loved getting my face painted as a kid. I love costumes in general--there's probably some deep, profound psychological subtext in that but I'm feeling too lazy to try and find it--and in England my parents always knew that if we were going somewhere that had a face-painter hired, I was going to beg to get it done. But I think I only grew to love it because of how they do it over there. Over there, 'face painting' means the entire face painted up like a mask or Halloween costume makeup. My favourites were animals, so if I said I wanted, say, a tiger then the painter would do my entire face up orange with black stripes and drawn whiskers and nose and white accents in a really quite startlingly professional manner. And then I'd spend the rest of the day pretending to be a tiger and throw a royal hissy fit when my mom decided it was time to wipe all that crap off my face.

Within the first few months of moving to the US, my parents were invited to some big party or other and there was a face painter there for kids. I asked for a lion (it was around the time 'The Lion King' had just come out) and was deeply disappointed and dismayed when this request was interpreted as 'I want a small half-assed lion face on one of my cheeks'. Every subsequent experience I had with American parties had the same result, while in England the full-face-mask practice, as far as I know, continues to this day.

I don't know if it's a country/culture thing or what but I've never been quite able to shake my disappointment that it's not an acceptable practice here to give children elaborate full 'masks' of face paint so they can pretend they're wolves or tigers or mummies or aliens all day long.