Un-Wanty

Under normal circumstances, I make a point of being Team Stuff. I am principle-of-the-thing in favor of taking pleasure from browsing and god forbid sometimes even purchasing physical objects. Now, however, I'm simultaneously on the lease for two apartments, in two different cities. Having two homes is a glamorous situation when intentional. When unanticipated (long story involving American and Canadian logistics), it's more like an expensive, if temporary, pain in the neck. Not dire, thankfully, but not inconsequential, either. (My desire to take up kickboxing, say, fluctuates, but is, as I type, at maybe an all-time high.)

Various situational factors have combined to completely change my relationship towards stuff. On the one hand, I can't imagine even wanting new clothes. The mere thought of packing - and of two rents - leads me to enumerate all those items that seemed so necessary, and to which I so brattily, in some past version of myself, felt entitled: Four sleeveless blouses. A romper and a jumpsuit. A blazer and a trench coat. All purchased, needless to say, Before.

While I know I'm a quick Google search away from reminding myself that my clothes-purchasing rate is unimpressive cost- and quantity-wise by the standards of the average Western woman, and while some of these purchases (no, not the romper) were the pretty straightforward result of under-packing initially, the sense of shame I feel when thinking about having gone to stores and bought myself stuff is sort of intense. While I confess to having replaced an old and broken $50 pair of sunglasses with a new and not-broken pair of the same over the weekend, my impulse to treat myself is at nil, and has been for the past couple months. Which is bleak. Situational, which is something, but bleak all the same.

It's not, to be clear, that the inability to go and buy myself whatever Uniqlo has new for summer is the biggest problem anyone has, or the biggest one I have, even just as it pertains to this rather craptastic situation. But I am basic and ridiculous and it's something I notice all the same. I experience one kind of self-loathing for having shopped, and another for feeling even at all bad for myself for not being able to do so now.

On the other hand, I will soon - finally - be settled. Or settled-ish. Settled for at least a year in a specific apartment, and indefinitely in a specific city and country. Which means... I'm not even sure what to call it. Decorating? Me?

In the immediate future, it means assembling (helping my spouse assemble) IKEA furniture, and otherwise stocking a new apartment with such urgent home decor accents as olive oil and laundry detergent. But I can finally - finally finally - have a vision for a space. Ancient history for many 33-year-olds, I realize, but a first for me. All previous places I've lived as an adult have either had dorm furniture of one sort or another, or the haphazard result of Brooklyn street-furniture and panicked IKEA, which is, let me just say, a very different beast from thought-through IKEA.

I dream - dream! - of purchasing a jewelry stand, and knowing I won't have to find a way to bring it on an international move. (Of purchasing jewelry itself? Ugh, nope.) Maybe even clothing storage purchased with aesthetics a liiitle bit in mind. (It is for the best that there's no Container Store in Toronto, because if there were, oh boy.) The same don'tspenddon'tspend impulse guiding my current not-shopping will still be present, but balanced with the need to, you know, not have all my clothes on the floor. All sorts of decorating inspiration picked up, inadvertently, from Japanese and Scandinavian poodle Instagram, is going to be channeled into, I don't know, bins or baskets, or selection of armchair cover. (Oh, did I mention an armchair is finally happening?)

The not-so-distant-future-oriented shopping that, look, has to happen whether I enjoy it or not is the cheerier reason for aggressive non-shopping now. I'm really looking forward to checking out this shop on Queen West that sells practical items for apartments. So I guess this means I'm still Team Stuff. It just means the Facebook ads for cool-girl athleisure are wasting their time with my account.

The Dress, or close enough

A photo posted by Phoebe Bovy (@phoebe_bovy) on Jul 24, 2015 at 5:20pm PDT

So I was on my way to buy garlic chives in Chinatown when I passed a store that had, in the window, a dress I'd seen on a woman on the streetcar. When I'd seen it on the woman in the streetcar, I remember thinking, hey, there's that fabulous dress (so similar to the dress) that was in the window of a wholesale store in Chinatown! Also that, seeing as it was on someone near the store in question, it was probably not strictly wholesale, as in, it could be mine. But I promptly forgot about it. Until there it was: that window, and that dress. A maxi dress, which isn't something I'd normally attempt, but this is the rare one that's actually proportioned for a woman my height. (Hemming is also potentially an option, but given that this, unlike The Dress, is sleeveless, maybe it works as is.) It is, if not as close an approximation as exists on this planet, as close as exists within a short walk of my apartment and in the $30 (CAD) range, for sure.

A serious matter

I keep going back and forth on these sandals:

-They're fabulous!
-They might be more fabulous in brown, but they're only available in black.
-But they're actually maybe better in black? And they have this cool, south-of-France vibe, and for only $80!
-Actually, $80 is kind of a lot for glorified flip-flops.
-But they're so Gwyneth! So timeless!
-They're so impractical. It's not sandal weather, but even once it is, it's not sandal country. These are not poodle-walking sandals.
-But they'd be fine for, like, driving somewhere. (To the supermarket.)
-What makes you think they'd even fit? This is a place that charges $5 for returns!
-But free exchanges! And the t-shirts are definitely nice, so if an additional size doesn't work out...
-$80 worth of t-shirts?
-But... that leather belt from them is gorgeous, and similar!
-Do you ever wear that belt? Do you even know where you put it?
-But the thing with them is, they might sell out.
-This is a website that doesn't post reviews, and the Googled reviews seem to be PR-journalism written by people who've never so much as seen the sandals in person. (And are you sure those Facebook ads for the company aren't influencing your thinking?)
-Perhaps, but everything's advertised. Surely the day will come when some sandals are necessary.
-Yes, and when it does, the Naots from before grad school will do.
-No, actually, those have long since disintegrated and don't stay closed.
-Which doesn't change the fact that you don't need sandals.
-You make a good point, although I'm not entirely convinced.

"One more pigeon response" UPDATED

This afternoon brought with it an email avalanche of unprecedented proportions. Nothing mysterious about this - I, too, am catching up from the holiday weekend - but it did make a change from the usual stream of H-France (French history listserv) items. Not, of course, that there weren't those as well, including one with the subject, "One more pigeon response."

Expect substantive posts at some point, but in the mean time, some shameless consumerism. Recent exciting purchases include:

-COS tights, in Yves Klein blue. That color can be tricky - what looks right on the computer screen may be all wrong in person. But having been inside a COS or two, I remember from their color scheme that their royal blue is the right one.

-One let's say family-sized package of hot chili peppers, from H-Mart. I know nothing about hot pepper varieties, and last time ended up with ones that were chili-shaped but basically bell peppers. These are... sufficiently spicy. Adding a couple whole to last night's hot-pot managed to infuse the broth with a pleasant spiciness. Meanwhile, chopping up one and using it in place of chili flakes in an arrabiata sauce this evening managed to turn that pasta into a meal that would have the maximum number of chili-pepper icons at a Thai restaurant. I can't decide whether that's a good thing or not.

UPDATE

The chilis:

-Uniqlo "room shoes," in an elegant plaid that's sadly no longer available.

Tabletop Burner Tuesday*

Black Friday, for my non-US readers, is an annual holiday, celebrated by patting oneself on the back for caring more about friends/family/experiences than stuff. On Black Friday, those who can afford things full-priced, or who are so confident in their socioeconomic status that they see no need to signal such status through the use of anything so crude as brands, or who favor brands too posh to hold discounts on the day after Thanksgiving... all such individuals celebrate the day by ostentatiously not shopping. They may, however, patronize Small Business Saturday, Cyber Monday, etc. And if they happen to be in Paris for the soldes, it's OK, because "sale" in proverbial yellow subtitles is acceptable.

Anyway, seems I totally forgot to do my annual-ish reminder that anti-Black-Friday sentiment is largely-but-fine-not-entirely about class snobbery. I also skipped Black Friday for the very noble reason of, I slept through most of the day. It had been a very long time since I'd gone running, and keeping up (kind of!) with my fit friends left over enough energy for grocery-shopping and little else. But I did make something of Swing By The Mall Saturday, and am now the proud owner of a $12-but-originally-$15 ear-warmer, purchased half to avoid jogging in a pom-pom winter hat, and half to guilt myself into actually running when it's cold out, having now invested twelve dollars in this activity.

*Not a thing, unfortunately. Although what stops me from going that route remains not so much the price of a hot-pot set-up (which... who knows) as the fear that such a device (which I'd inevitably buy with Japanese-only instructions) would somehow lead to my building burning down.

The search for perfection in an age of online shopping and mass-produced everything

After the Zara dress didn't work out, I was left thinking maybe the clothes-shopping bug would be met some other way. There's always the list of items I want and - increasingly, the longer I live in the woods and refuse to drive to the mall - need. According to that Buzzfeed "privilege" quiz, if you buy new clothes more than once a month, you have, I don't know, shopping privilege.* I think I'm in the clear; the stains and holes of various tank tops confirm. So, the contenders:

-COS has arrived in 'merica, online-only at this point. What is COS? Higher-end H&M - the Banana Republic to H&M's Old Navy. Minimalist, vaguely Scandinavian clothes whose main appeal, I'm starting to think, was that you could only get them abroad. Scarcity and all that. I was so excited! But now that there's all this COS before me, I'm starting to remember why I never bought any of those dresses when in COS in person. Everything looks distinctly intended for a very tall woman. Like the shoulders would be too broad, and, in the case of dresses and skirts, like they'd make me look Orthodox. (There's already a friend pointing out on Facebook that I look Orthodox in my graduation robe. It's unavoidable.) The site's underwear, at least, has potential, but there are just some items (shoes, bras) you need to try on in person.

-I have a longstanding love-hate relationship with this Everlane t-shirt. The doubt isn't exactly over whether it would fit (their v-neck fits fine), so much as whether a navy pocket tee is normcore-fabulous or a terrible look chosen by the boys at my high school who most ostentatiously rejected style. So bad it's good or just... bad? Normally, if I'm thinking about a relatively inexpensive item long enough, this is the sign to buy. But in this case, it seems possible that the item in question would actually make my wardrobe worse.

-I have a love-love relationship, meanwhile, with these sneakers. Nike, fine, how original. But they're what I was looking for, style-wise, and have this bizarre quality of fitting perfectly. These were the winners, and have yet to disintegrate after extensive walking in Philadelphia and New York. That's about all you can ask of a pair of shoes.

*What does this mean, even, in this age of H&M and Forever 21? A black coffee (if pour-over) may well cost more than a new shirt.

Inadvertent cheapness triumph

I give up. I fail at shopping. I may be a heterosexual woman who grew up in New York, who studied French, who in stereotyped principle ought to be all about this, but at the end of the day, nope. I'm terrible at it.

I had spent the entire winter admiring a particular pair of Alpine brown leather hiking boots. They kept fluctuating in price from around $240 to around $310. I could imagine paying the former (as the previous such pair was one I wore from freshman year of high school until college), but not quite the latter. I'd been trying to find this kind of shoe for years, but kept wavering. $240 is still too much! Or is it? Yes! Or is it? Gah!

Finally, I realized that my lack of proper boots was causing, like, day-to-day inconvenience (the ice!), and when the boots dipped down once more to their lowest price, I hit "purchase." And then was like, maybe that was a mistake? So much money! But you can't cancel things so easily on Amazon once you've ordered them (I wouldn't think you could at all, but they offer this as a pseudo-option), so I figured, maybe forces greater than myself thought I should get the boots.

And then, lo and behold, the boots! So beautiful! So... enormous. For some reason, this company considers a 40 a U.S. women's 8. I'm a 7.5/8, which is more like a 38-39, which means these were not any kind of improvement over my existing footwear which, if nothing else, mostly fits. These basically slid off as I walked in them. So I put them back in the box, and sulked over to the mailroom with the return label and the boots.

Well, the return shipping label. Because I almost never shop online, and when I do, generally keep what I've bought because the process is so daunting, I'd forgotten to include the label that goes into the box. Much panic, much apologizing, and much humiliating myself before the mailroom staff on my second visit, I think I got the package right, and that the boots will be returned. Will I be ordering them in a smaller size? I think not.

An open letter to the gnome in the computer selecting my ads

Dearest Gnome,

You have correctly figured out that I'm in the market for some brown leather hiking boots with red laces. Alpine or traditional hiking boots, they're called. What you may not know is that these are to replace a pair I got at 14, and that I'd worn out by maybe 17. I've been looking since then, on and off, and yes, I tried the place where the initial ones came from. (Roots, the Canadian store.) I've found almost the right ones in a variety of places, allowing for the likely necessity of buying the red laces separately. (I'll confess to being swayed, though, by photos of the right boots with the laces already included.)

I have talked about this quest at dinner parties. (I'm sure that if you're reading this and had been thinking of inviting me to one of your gnome dinner parties, you're now second-guessing that.) I have looked for the boots online, obviously, which is how you, Gnome, learned about this. I really, really want these boots, but they're never quite right. Or they're close enough, but far too expensive. Or they're perfect, but only in men's sizes. Or they're on eBay for a reasonable price, but non-returnable. $100 for boots that fit is acceptable. But what are the chances they would, really? And these $50 pairs from the 1970s on Etsy - are any shoes that durable, to make it from someone's "Bob Newhart Show"-era closet to the 2014 woods? I want fashion and function. I want the theoretical option of hiking, or at least comfortably walking on trails.

So you see, Gnome, that while your ads may inspire me to return to the various pages - Sierra this, Amazon that - with the most promise, I've spent approximately half my life trying to track down the Platonic ideal of these boots, and so far, no luck.

You think you want it, you think you need it

Bisou wantied a chic sweater, but this argyle Rick Santorum number was what they had in her size.

I continue to adhere to Kei's concept of the "wanty." But I've been experiencing a weird variant of it. As I may have mentioned, I live in the woods, the most remote woods, and while, granted, it's a nine-minute drive to a mall with Sephora and H&M (but no Uniqlo or Zara - for that you need Bridgewater or Edison), I find the whole drive-to-and-park-at-mall experience stressful.

To be clear, it's not the stores themselves. Manhattan had very much mallified by the time I came of age as a shopper. To the point that I never even thought about which were the mall stores. They were just... where clothing came from. It had to come from somewhere.

No, the issue is that I'm still newish at driving, but more than that, it's that my sense of direction fails me when presented with the maze that is a mall parking lot. You exit a main road onto something called Name-of-Mall Drive, and then what? It's a mess of trying to park somewhere not too far from the mall itself, trying to remember where you parked, because there are no landmarks, and trying to find your way back to the main road after. Or there's lower Broadway, or lower Fifth, or (ugh) 34th Street, where this can all be done on foot, which is so much easier.

So I tend to store up a lot of wanty for occasional trips to New York, some of it wanty that could, in principle, be satisfied closer by. I recently swooped in and devoted a few hours to wanty-exploration. I made a checklist, even, because the woods-to-city trip rules out spontaneity. While the U.S. doesn't have the official sale months that some other countries do, it amounts to the same. Thus the recent $30 jeans (usually $125) from the J.Crew in town. I was optimistic.

But I discovered, to a mix of disappointment and relief, that the more outrageous wanties, however much they glowed with wanty-ness from my computer screen in NJ, are, up close, nothing special.

The first wanty did go as planned - a black turtleneck cashmere sweater from Uniqlo, whose steep discount ($50, from the usual $80) I'd already noticed online. It's so chic, and so new - it had been a while. A second "wanty" - if we can call a discounted t-shirt that normally goes for about $12 a wanty - was also fulfilled: a cap-sleeve black t-shirt from the Muji store. These are the best t-shirts. Or they're just the easiest to buy - a store with very little selection or decoration takes care of that. Muji appeals to the inner government-issued-potato-sack communist in all of us.

Next up, wanty-wise, was a trip to look at the Into The Gloss-promoted shiny makeup at (of all places) ABC Carpet. I wasn't so much interested in the luminizer itself, which costs ten trillion dollars, as the "lunar" eyeshadow, which goes for a mere one trillion. And it was... fine. Shimmery, pretty, and a texture that makes more intuitive sense than powder. But someone unconvinced she'll ever wear any eyeshadow does not require the $28 non-toxic (I think that's what you're paying for?) variety. I doubt my life will be meaningfully shortened by the unpronounceable ingredients in a beauty product I wear maybe twice a year.

Knowing I wouldn't be dropping $30 on goop meant it was time to move down the list. Ever since learning that there were galaxy-print leggings made to be used as actual running pants, this has been on a wanty. Ever since the Sweaty Betty ones went on sale, I've been thinking about it. The store had them! In my size! And they were kind of awful. Armpit-level rise, weirdly baggy in the area such pants are meant to flatter, and in a very fashion-leggings fabric that didn't seem at all right for running.

Which... pretty much knocked out the wanty list. Only Alpine hiking boots - brown leather with red laces - remain, but New York wasn't coming through on that front. It never does.

Peasant-chic

After the notorious $89 bra got a hole in it - this before I'd even washed it! and not even somewhere where it might have been pulling! just bad construction (Made in France, I had such high hopes) - I'm extra-reluctant to "invest" in things that can snag. Similarly, I "invested" in a pair of not-the-absolute-cheapest white canvas sneakers (Superga, because those fit and the Converse didn't, even though I liked the Converse more), with the goal not so much to keep them pristine as to have them not full-on drenched in filth. Shortly thereafter, an incident with an especially poodle-friendly (and unfenced/unleashed) golden retriever took care of that. I now have a greenish-brown pair of sneakers. Inevitable, but still, sooner than expected.

The combination of dog-adventures, ubiquitous mud in the "with-it city" I live in, and my capacity to ruin a garment just by looking at it, suggests it's time to go the navy-potato-sack route of head-to-toe denim.

But I'm kind of obsessed with the idea of a Romanian peasant blouse. A white one with blue embroidery. Like Suzanne Pleshette wears on this one episode of "The Bob Newhart Show." Very 1970s. Cultural appropriation? I'm going to say that as someone of 1/4 impoverished-Romanian ancestry (Jewish, but not sure how that impacts the blouse situation - plus the current likeliest contender ships from Israel), I'm if anything culturally appropriating when not wearing such a shirt. However, a shirt along those lines has the impressive potential both to snag and to acquire every stain imaginable. This will now need to be mulled over for a few months, as is my way.

Loot

Today's spur-of-the-moment trip to New York (expensive train ticket, but I do work best on the train, second-best work in coffee shops with good pastry) was probably my most successful shopping trip ever. I now have, or had:

-Two bunches green garlic.
-Two bunches ramps.
-One big bag of excellent-looking arugula.
-One bunch each, chard and broccoli rabe.
-One City Bakery chocolate croissant.
-One sake oyakodon, Sobaya.
-One (discounted) book I'd been looking for, Strand.
-One package frozen tofu skin, Sunrise Mart.
-One massively discounted Tsubaki Damage Care set, same store. Yes, that's right, a set. For $27 - giant shampoo and conditioner and a normal-size tub of the hair mask. The mask itself is normally $20.

What this tells us:

-Almost my entire non-necessity budget goes to food. Allium if at all possible. Glanced and Uniqlo and Sephora but was unimpressed.

-I'm under the mistaken impression that I'm Japanese.

-Farmers markets in Central NJ-to-Philadelphia don't open until May, and supermarkets around here don't seem keen on stocking decent produce, local or far-flung. It has indeed come to this.

-I had the opportunity to get coffee out, at any number of HMYF establishments, but simply forgot. To be fair, I had to get back early because there was a talk by a famous historian on blogging and French history, preceded by a wine and cheese reception, aka a WWPD dream (free!) event.

Friday's assortment

-We've established that Rejected White College Applicant is entitled, just as we caught a similarly barrel-dwelling fish when we confirmed that Princeton Mom is simultaneously sexist and elitist. But if there's any message to take from this high school student's cringe-inducing essay, it's absolutely not that young people are entitled if they don't take (often unpaid) internships.

-The famous writer who's lost it and his particular brand of losing it is Gucci. Sad, really. That GQ essay now joins Zola's Ladies Paradise as the document to read if you find yourself with a shopping urge, however slight, you'd rather not have. I had, as you all remember, lost even the vague interest I'd ever had in Lululemon yoga pants once the scandal broke. I ended up with some much cheaper running tights, and none of the deer I pass on my jogging route (the ticks, the ticks!) have remarked on the material. But I did have my eye on a bottle of $8 pale-blue nail polish. Now? No.

-The New Brooklyn involves houses with space for the wife to "get dressed and go to work in the morning without waking [the husband] with the sound of clomping Louboutins."

-What was that you said? You want something about something I didn't read or listen to? Something from... life? Not as much material at the moment. My husband and I had a fun dinner party last weekend, and lately I'm taking a break from Chapter 7 to work on the Conclusion, which means having to reread Sartre on The Jews... which is almost identical to Zola on The Jews, which seems relevant. 

$90 yoga pants revisited

In a recent post on materialism, I gave Lululemon yoga pants as an example of a desired but not that desired purchase. I would like to be able to readily afford said pants, but can't. But the pants themselves, eh. If they were my dream item, I'd have bought them and scrimped in other areas over the course of however many months. They're not, and I haven't. But knowing that perfect workout (lounge) wear exists, and that I'm not in a position to upgrade, reminds me of my, ahem, life choices (grad school, the light, the end of the tunnel...), and thus makes said pants more special than they'd be if I were in the $90-no-big-deal income bracket.

Well. Shortly after that post, not merely Lululemon, but the very pants I was referring to (actually more like $98) became the center of a scandal. Not only were the black yoga pants recalled for being too sheer (inspiring an internet-wide laughing fit), but the stores are apparently so inept at PR that they're asking customers to bend over and show just how sheer the pants are if they want to return them. There are evidently still more problems with the pants (pilling, dye-bleeding), such that we who own inferior workout (lounge) pants get to be all smug.

In any case, scandal and personal-finance concerns aside, I also realized that the pants I was quasi-coveting would be no good for another reason entirely: they flare at the bottom, and I live in tick country. If I'm going to run in the woods (or justify the purchase of loungewear with that twice-weekly occurrence), I need to wear something in the leggings/running tights family. Which are never incredibly flattering, and thus not worth spending much on.

Bringing glamor to the woods

Below, three recent or recent-ish things I bought but did not need:

-Galaxy-print leggings. At long last! And $20! Which might seem like a lot for what are effectively multicolored tights, but I promise, it's a great deal for this sort of thing, if it's what you're set on. Which, as you all know, I have been since forever. But not quite enough to send off for the pricey version from Australia.

-Neon-pink lipstick. A more recent and somewhat less challenging to track down wanty. (Didn't exist at Sephora, which was ultimately for the best, as MAC is ever so slightly cheaper than those brands.) I was mostly inspired by this Sartorialist photo - a bright-pink lip, a bit of blush, and (contrary to my usual approach) mascara (or nothing) rather than eyeliner. It just seemed like, yes, this is the look. The bare-face-bright-lip combo is one that usually seems better in theory (or looks better on someone else), but this seemed like a pared-down, everyday version that does not require the wearer to be a stunning Lithuanian, while at the same time, a bit more out-there and unexpected than a basic red. To be determined - haven't actually tried it on yet. If it makes me look either stunning or Lithuanian, you, WWPD readers, will be the first to hear about it.

-Iridescent-glitter nail polish. The best of these is apparently a discontinued Chanel, but such is life. It's fabulous and holographic in the right light, but like all glitter polishes, refuses to ever entirely come off. 

The wedding not dreamed of since one was a little girl

On today's Savage Lovecast, Dan advises a mother (who's anonymous - this is not a post about parental-overshare) who thinks her 11-year-old daughter might be a lesbian. In the course of their conversation, Dan decides that the girl is a lesbian, and there's this neat aha moment where the expert convinces the parent of the truth right before her eyes. And... while I'm totally on board with Dan's advice on how to raise children who might or might not be gay (i.e. all children) to feel as though either is great, I'm not at all convinced that this girl is gay. For one thing, there's no mention whatsoever of the girl being interested in other girls, which, if there were, would be something of a giveaway. Why, then, do we think she's gay?

-She has announced she doesn't want to marry or have kids.
-She's closer with her father.
-She's bullied for something (unclear what precisely), but is the "queen" of the mostly-male alternative crowd.
-She's sarcastic.

She is, in other words, a Daria. A Liz Lemon. A brain rather than a princess. What I'm getting at is, when a boy shuns conventional masculinity, this might tell us more about his burgeoning identity than when a girl shuns conventional femininity, because much of conventional femininity is kind of unappealing to anyone with half a brain. She might turn out to be a lesbian, and it's great that her mother wants to be prepared should that be the case, but the odds are against.

As the owner of exactly half a brain, this has, at any rate, been my experience. Frilly clothes, squealing enthusiastically or being passive, 'just a salad for me', who needs all that? And I say this as someone who was never a tomboy. Just not a girly-girl. I mean, I'm not not sarcastic (heh), and boots like these (and not those dreadful Louboutins) are at the tippy-top of my curent wanty list, but... yeah.

(You can read more of my musings on male beauty here or here - how's that for discreetly-segued self-promotion?)

But back to this eleven-year-old. She doesn't want to marry or have kids - this is Exhibit A? In our culture, there is this huge pressure on girls to dream of adult female "desire" (i.e. for a husband, kids, a well-decorated home), to act out wedding scenarios, so that as adults, they can go on "Say Yes to the Dress" and talk about the wedding they've dreamed of since they were a little girl, and how if this one dress has an empire waist but not a sweetheart neckline, the dream shall never come true. Well, not all women who grow up and happily marry a man were the kind of girls who dreamed of weddings.

Indeed, the trappings and scripts of conventional female heterosexuality can be repellent not just to women who like women, but also to women who do quite straightforwardly like men, who will be expected to want not a man, but My Big Day. (This totally came up on the Lena Dunham "Fresh Air" interview that I listened to on the previous poodle outing.) It can all seem like a mockery of what one is experiencing, thus - as I've said approximately 10,000 times on WWPD, why many straight women claim, half-joking, to be gay men trapped in women's bodies.

Or, the short version: there are so many reasons a girl of eleven might find womanhood and what it seems to entail off-putting that have nothing to do with being on the LGBTQ spectrum that this seems a bit of a leap, in a way that it might not if the parent of an eleven-year-old boy came to the equivalent conclusion.

Adulthood Studies: how do you buy pants?

I've decided I don't have a problem with leggings, or even leggings-as-pants (despite having once received 15 minutes of fame for complaining about the style). No, my problem is with the legging-ification of all women's pants, and British readers, I mean "pants" in the American sense. They are now all stretch pants. Jeans, yes, but other styles as well. I checked, and my corduroys are stretch. They are not legging-ish at all, and yet, 2% stretch. Because these corduroys are on the ancient side (but not that ancient - they're from the post-spandex era), the spandex bit has ceased to function, making them baggy in precisely the most unflattering way possible.

I understand why this is meant to be a good thing - women's clothes are expected to fit just so, yet human beings' weight/shape tends to fluctuate. And the stretch-jeans will, at least when new, fit perfectly. But... I don't want to wear leggings all the time. Or if I'm going to do that, I might as well throw in the proverbial towel and get a really nice pair at the Lululemon in town, and wear those to all occasions, formal and informal. Leggings that aren't pretending to be regular pants, these I respect. But I want some regular pants that wouldn't inspire theoretical Daily Mail reporters to write that I'm flaunting my curves. I don't want to hide my form, I just want normal pants, like men get to wear, and like women got to wear until polyester-and-spandex had to be woven into absolutely everything. And this did once exist! I can't find a full-length image, but the ones Teri Hatcher wears on "Seinfeld" - very flattering, not "mom jeans," but definitively pre-jeggings. (Wears? Wore. I might be stuck in what was apparently 1993. 20 years ago. Yikes.)

And yes, I've tried the men's department. Despite being short, there are lots of men's jeans in my size - something to do with women having longer legs, and perhaps with waist sizes for men being less vanity-based than for women (and also: the lack of stretch). And... actual men's jeans are not like "boyfriend" jeans for women, but designed to flaunt - or at least comfortably contain - that which cisgender women haven't got. If you are such a woman and you've had luck with men's jeans, more power to you (and do tell me where), but the one's I've run across might ostensibly fit, but I wouldn't want to leave the house like that.

This quest, this eternal quest, has led to some possibilities. A.P.C. proved useless, but whatever these are, I tried them on in a store in Philadelphia, and the very moment I cease to be horrified by $112 jeans with $9.50 shipping, maybe? (Must I, god forbid, drive to Philadelphia? On the highway? And parallel park when I get there? Avoiding this is worth $9.50, right?) These (via) sure look spectacular, but are they, and if so, at $225, would I even want to know? For the most part, though, the search leads either to mom-jeans (which I did order last year, and which are now a perfectly adequate pair of cutoffs) - and these days even those mostly seem to have stretch - or to some kind of patriotic cult of denim. These jeans will not only be Made in the U.S.A. (and all-cotton jeans seem to be, as a rule) but compatible with "concealed carry," which, no thanks.

Cheapness made easy

Ever since Kei invented the idea of a "wanty list," I've used this concept in my own life and spending-or-lack-thereof. At any given time, there's a list in my head of things all of which I'd own if money were no object, but it's kind of more fun staggering them according to my budget (or so we tell ourselves). But even more fun is when a pricey, unrealistic wanty proves undesirable upon in-person examination. Such was the case recently when I decided to see once and for all if A.P.C. jeans are as fabulous as they say. (I did once have a $5 thrifted pair, but they weren't the style I wanted, and at any rate long ago succumbed to the inevitable shredded-inappropriately problem of preowned pants.) 

What instigated this latest revival-of-wanty was, I'd tried on these, also all-cotton, deemed them almost perfect, and started wondering if almost-perfect exists for $112, maybe perfect costs $185. All of this, to be clear, was highly theoretical, what with the actual jeans I wear being a $30 pair from Uniqlo and another $30 pair from Levi's, neither of them purchased within the past year or close. But eh, I've stopped growing, and if I were to find the perfect pair, maybe I'd... try to find them on eBay or something. $185 is almost comically too much for pants. $112 comes close, but these at least claim some labor superiority to the $30 variety to which I'd grown accustomed. 

But what if these A.P.C. ones were the most beautiful jeans ever? I had the compulsion not so much to buy said pants as to know. So I was running errands on campus and figured what they heck. I entered A.P.C., said hello to the guard (because this is Designer) and the various gamine and gamin store employees, making my way to the back of the store, where I confirmed that I was interested in "denim." I first heard the sales pitch for the denim, but had come in knowing what I wanted to see, and off to the dressing room I went. But before this even got to the point of, a) will I fit into these, and b) if so, will they do me any favors, I couldn't help but notice that they were made out of some incredibly thick canvas-type material, like a sail or tarp or something, such that they could basically stand upright on their own. I maybe half-tried them on, before deciding that even if I could get into them and they looked amazing (both unlikely, although sizing up may have dealt with the former), they were just awful. Pretty but awful. Fine, jeans are better if not all-out stretch pants, but they shouldn't be of a texture more suited to the Arms and Armor Division at the Met. 

And I was thrilled. OK, pleased. No $185 jeans, not now, not at some unspecified date three years from now. I not only can't afford them but don't want them. This freed up a slot for another longtime wanty: holographic nail polish.

Echarpe rouge homme

This afternoon I indulged, from the can't-believe-the-semester's-over-but-need-to-get-back-to-work-soon-anyway-but-oh-it's-nice-to-just-read-novels-with-a-poodle couch, in a wanty: a red scarf like the ones French men wear (see the first Google Image result for french man red scarf, although the men I'm thinking of tend to be a bit older, the scarves a bit less chiffon-ish). This required a certain amount of research, namely establishing a) that for anything this basic/specific, you need a department store, not a thrift store/Uniqlo, and b) that in this day and age, there's no need to actually go to a department store in person, no offense to the Macy's in the Quakerbridge Mall. We'll see. I at any rate plan on not losing this winter scarf, as I did the previous two, because this semester I plan on not waking up at 6:15 to cross state lines and teach a class, reserving all awakeness for that enterprise.

This wanty, though, made me think of how my various and ever-evolving fashion personalities often end up requiring a physical appearance unlike the one I possess. Haut bourgeois Parisian socialist dude of a certain age, philosophe... that's not me. Nor am I anywhere close to the height clothing is generally displayed on - menswear-inspired or not, clothing always looks different on 5'2". Nor am I gamine, etc., but this one - 50ish Frenchman - is a particularly long shot.

But it doesn't exactly bother me - I don't want to wake up with a different build, let alone a different gender-and-age-and-nationality. And when I think of styling this scarf (of utmost importance now that I'm back to being hermit-in-the-woods, at least until finishing this dissertation), I picture clothes I own, which are consistent with this theme, but which are not really drag of any kind. Like a fitted camel sweater, or coat.  Or a white button-down shirt, but not ala BHL, more of a rounded-collar, discreet-Peter-Pan look. With clothing, I never do just want some thing in isolation, because it's nice or cute or whatever. There's always, always a concept.

The day thus far UPDATED

-Car and train trouble, both likely weather-related, but somehow made it to class on time.

-Not just in time, but with time enough to inhale a chocolate croissant from the convenient bakery. The very Old New York (pre-tip-jar, pre-hipsters-make-your-food, pre-good-coffee) one, which appears to cater mostly to elderly gay men who've had this routine since forever. The Margot Patisserie of the Christopher Street area. I like the idea of it, although the pastries themselves are borderline utilitarian.

-It had been a while since I'd taught, and the class-presentation visuals these days are higher-tech than I'd remembered. I allotted 15 mins for each 8-10 minute presentation. Had to hold over one presentation till tomorrow. Hate doing that. On the plus side, my students now know the conditional.

-Bought - finally - a winter hat without pom-poms. I somehow always end up with pom-poms, always spend the winter walking around feeling ridiculous, always find bits of pom-pom on the floor, poodle-related or otherwise. The new acquisition: an intentionally nondescript piece of cloth from American Apparel, because that's what's between where I teach and where my office is, and is exactly how much I could be bothered.

-Contemplated future wanty: A red (cashmere? non-itchy?) scarf, like the ones French men wear. One of those illuminating undereye concealers that make you look awake. It's the point in the semester when I might be awake (thank you, Oren's) but definitely don't look it. Does it need to be the $40 YSL one? Should I compromise and go with a $20-ish one from one of the lesser Sephora brands? Or at that point is it drugstore time? Is it 9 hours sleep or is it Maybelline? Also sought: a professional haircut.

UPDATE

After quite the marathon of grading, I spent a while (20 minutes? an eternity?) browsing Sephora in search of under-eye illumination. The thing with skin-color makeup, which I'd noticed before, is that it only comes in a series of shades that range from somewhat tanned white person to very tanned white person.  Useless if you're dark-skinned, but also, without the political implications, for the very pale. I kind of think a product I don't want to use as concealer is one that would, on me, be a bronzer. I remain not remotely luminous, which, for a weekend in the woods, is just fine.

Ruby slippers

While I was away, I noticed that the shoes were reduced from $150 to $90. And available in the half-size I take. So it had to be done. They have arrived. They are spectacular.

By "the shoes," I mean a pair I've been obsessed with for years, although in a sense since childhood: ruby slippers. I guess the classic comes from Repetto, but Bloch is a notch less dainty (i.e. more practical, comfortable, cushioned, less on the verge of being worn through) and yeah, maybe a touch less expensive-looking, but also so much less expensive. If I had $270 ballet flats, I would need to put them into a museum display case.

The schmancy Repettos, via Polyvore.

The Blochs I will in principle not find too special to wear, but thus far, I can only get myself to admire them.

Bloch ballet flats, patent leather, in "Formula One." Via Amazon.