Fashion for Writers

Last night, I went to a sports bar and ate ten blazing hot hot wings in this white dress (teared up only once because of spice,) packed a second dinner for myself and Michael, drank a $3 martini at a bar that only plays the kind of music where every song is a bad remix of a good song that sounds the same as the previous bad remix of a good song, and every item on the menu is some kind of annoying ‘fusion’ food or drink, snuck a six-pack of wheat beer into the movie theater and sobbed through the last half hour of A Prophet. Please watch it if you want to feel something/anything/everything.

Is it beyond egotistical and vainglorious to say that I came out of the movie feeling a little bit like a prophet? I was explaining ‘passing‘ to Michael before the movie, which turned out  to be very much about ‘passing,’ and about the prison industrial complex, and about the violence of dehumanization and the dehumanization of violence.

Not that we were discussing any of that prior to the movie. I was thinking about passing in a much looser context, like all the times at Stanford when I was invited to a professor’s house or to a fairly formal gathering where I sensed I was supposed to present myself in a specific way–dignified and composed and restrained and polite and solicitous. I would often feel as if I was just ‘passing,’ and at any moment, someone would sense my real self–clumsy and crude and bizarre and disheveled and accident-prone and unresponsive and unmoved by ceremony and manners and ritual.

Even wearing a white dress makes me feel like I’m passing for someone more elegant and refined, which is maybe why I like wearing white dresses so much. It’s fun to participate in sartorial deception. It has several sheer tiers, one of which I ripped in the first hour of wearing it. I overscratch all of my mosquito bites (all fifteen of them!) and did I tell you that I dropped my new camera into a dirty mud puddle two weeks ago, right before I was supposed to leave for San Francisco? I was taking outfit photos for a guest post on Starr’s blog at the time! There’s plenty more I could tell you.

Dress from yesstyle.com; DKNY heels from Gilt, bag from India and was a gift; vintage bracelet and earrings from an adorable store in Romania.

I just bring all this up because it seems like maybe there’s a need to acknowledge the deception that goes into any blog where the blogger has allowed herself to be part of the thing that is given, and I think I’m part of whatever it is that I’m giving you–what do I give you? Anything? Do I sound ridiculous? Do I make any sense? I know lately my photos and writing have been lackluster–I blame today on last night’s antics and the gin and tonic nightcap I shouldn’t have had. I’m just bummed out about my computer and scared of the changes that are happening in the next month–moving out of my apartment, moving to New York for a month, moving to France for a year where I’ll be living in a small town, population 12,000 in the South–and I’m terribly grateful to all of you for coming back here and reading these rambling, little posts.

One of the things Meggy and I talked about in San Francisco is how we have the best readers in the whole wide world, and I know it’s like when mothers think their own children are the best children in the whole wide world, and how every mother thinks she’s right and everyone else is deluded. But seriously, we really do have the best readers in the whole world, and anyone who doesn’t think so is totally deluded.

Love, Jenny