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Presents for you and for me
I'm okay, so don't worry at the silence - I've just been busy. I had a nice shopping expedition yesterday night - went to Lane Bryant and bought two absolutely gorgeous shirts and a coat which is both pretty and reasonably dressy, but somewhat less over-the-top than the fur-collared one. Nonelvis got annoyed again because these items fit me perfectly - she doesn't like that I can buy at Express and Lane Bryant, perhaps the polar opposites of women's clothes.
(Actually, no. The polar opposite of Lane Bryant is The Limited. Guess which two stores are run by the same company? Do you find it ironic that I have a little tiny scoop-neck black T-shirt from The Limited and a big black flowing coat from Lane Bryant and yet both have the Venezia imprint on the tags?
On the other hand, given that the two stores literally have no overlap of size ranges, I guess they're just trying to have something for everybody.)
I'll let you in on a secret: The reason I can fit into such a wide range of clothing is that I have no figure. I am straight-sided. My biggest clothing issues are my excessively long arms and my wonderfully long legs (funny how you can want length in one place and not another) - and with my arms it's less of a problem because I tend to roll up shirt sleeves anyway - I don't like long sleeves very much.
Which reminds me: While on my shopping expedition, I was looking for something really hard to find at this time and place. I want a long nightgown with a reasonably open neck - no tight collar - made of some security-blanket fabric, a flannel or a soft cotton. Heaviness is not required. Now here's the tricky part: It must have short sleeves or no sleeves. I cannot sleep in anything with sleeves. They collect in my armpits while I'm tossing around and cut off the blood flow to my arms.
Any suggestions?
In keeping with this general vein of fashion prattle: I saw in Consumer Reports today that one of the reasons that women's clothing sizes don't actually fit very many women well is that clothing makers are working with bad data, and they know it. Their "standard measurements" for the human body are based on surveys done sixty years ago as a WPA project - mostly of young Caucasian women. Today the population is older, more diverse, and, yes, heavier, but no one has stepped forward to perform the grueling work of taking complete body measurements on a wide sampling of people - until now. A project called CAESAR (please don't make me go look up the acronym, it's contrived anyway) expects to have a new set of more accurate measurements by 2001.
The instigator in this project? The Air Force, which is tired of getting uniforms that don't fit.
I am going to be unable to post journal entries for a few days - I'm taking a trip. (For the benefit of stalkers and burglars, I won't say where or how long. My house is guarded by cats and starving artists, so beware.)
I'm not sure whether I'll be able to post or not tomorrow, or answer my back email. In the meantime, here are a few things to keep you occupied.
First, Clio has left you two Christmas presents. One of them is a piece on Three Minor Saints which has, among other things, her thoughts on Christmas. The other is a piece on the futility of trying to view the whole millennium in retrospect.
Second, I can't work this into a Stay Tuned, but if you love advertising (and making fun of advertising), you need to have a look at this page. I found it while walking about fifty weblogs tonight to do mouth organ research. I don't remember where, but thank you, whoever you were!
And speaking of mouth organ ... it's up and live. Officially it doesn't come back from its hiatus until 1 January, and it's still "being tested," but the main functions work fine - that is, I can add new items and have been doing so - there are twenty or so now, and I'll probably add more tomorrow - and you can leave messages on it. So go have a look.
The format has changed - what it is now, I can't exactly say - not a column, not a message board, not a weblog, but some hybrid of the three.
© Columbine
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