Aldi tomatoes (still waiting for my home-grown ones) in one of the little bowls my daughter made in her introductory ceramics class at college. I have a whole stack of these and will use and use them, I can tell.
Here's another, with carrots, and an attempt to show, via overexposure, the design on the sides:
All v. cool. I'm also massively relieved to have sent away my entire outbox to Goodwill with her yesterday --- I had thought was going to Poshmark some things, but it was becoming clear to me that that was a paving stone on the downward road, so yesterday I just bagged it all up and let it go. I kept one pair of wide-leg Gloria Vanderbilt cobalt-blue jeans and one off-white lacy-knit pullover for further consideration, but the rest: GONE.
This daughter also purged a lot from her room, including a shoe rack, which I have appropriated. I culled my shoes a little, getting rid of sneakers I just am not going to wear, ever. So that's the start of a new outbox season --- it didn't stay empty long! I am also eyeing various closet items that I haven't yet worn, wondering whether I ever will . . . now that the big pile is gone, I feel more able to cull the closet again.
Here's how it all looks:
For me, a not-congenitally-tidy person, this is like top-level organization. I can see what I have, which is the main thing. If I can't see it, it is as if it didn't exist.
In other news, here's a brilliant but unsettling poem from Morri Creech in the latest New Criterion. At the Sun, we have a week of living poets coming up next week, featuring Rhina Espaillat, Dana Gioia, Andrew Frisardi, Lisa McCabe, and A.M. Juster --- got to get busy writing my introductory essays!
I'm also planning a video about copywork for the new Mater Amabilis YouTube channel. Hoping to get that done today as well.
Wearing today, at least one closet item that I'd wondered whether I would ever wear again:
Throwing on a swing dress becomes such a default, but I LIKE these thrifted shorts. The sage green just sends me, always. Meanwhile, I've had this thrifted Indian cotton tunic since at least 2015. I have worn it a lot, but not so much in recent years. Today I thought that the blue would be lovely with the green of the shorts, and that a drifty boho kind of shirt was what I needed on top to balance the structure of the bottoms. The blouse is a large, and I was afraid it would look too boxy, but honestly, it does have enough flow that I don't feel too swallowed up by it, especially as the shorts are tapered and fitted.
Second-day hair just kind of there, but whatever. Thrifted Birks on my feet, because there they were, where I'd stepped out of them yesterday.
Blue, as always, a good color for my skin tone and eyes:
UPDATE: I realized I hadn't even included this blouse in my wardrobe tracker. Omission rectified. Adding in the two items I wound up keeping from the outbox, too.
Once again, I'm basically schlumping around the house getting things done, but I feel dressed --- I could go out to dinner like this and be fine. Yet it's all as easy as wearing a ratty tee and gym shorts would have been: no extra effort involved.
This makes me think of what I was saying the other week about Elyse Holladay and effortlessness. By effortlessness I mean what she calls The Myth of Effortless Style. What I want to focus on here:
*the fact that getting dressed today took me no more than five minutes, inclusive of time spent thinking about what to wear.
*the fact that I feel good in what I'm wearing and that this means
1. the colors flatter each other and me
2. the shape flatters me
3. I feel very much myself in what I'm wearing ---
a. I know who I am in this outfit, and
b. what's more, if you ran into me, you would know who I am, too.
This was effortless in that reaching into my closet and pulling out these items and putting them on required zero effort on my part.
What it wasn't, however, was accidental.
I have made the effort to purge my closet down to a fairly reliable choice of things that look good with each other and on me. I'm still working on figuring out combinations, but the fact that, for example, I have zero colors that don't look great on me represented in my closet means that my chances of success are a lot greater than they would have been if my color collection were haphazard.
I have gone to the trouble of studying both what colors look good on me and how colors look in combination with each other.
I have watched some videos about styling principles --- how combinations of "masculine" and "feminine" elements balance each other, for example, as you see here. The shorts: twill, structured, tailored, "masculine." The shirt: gauze, embroidered and detailed, flowing, unstructured, "feminine." I can't wear a plain boxy tee with these shorts. I wouldn't wear harem pants, probably under any circumstances, but certainly not with this shirt. I feel confident about this outfit at least in part because the kinds of energy it manifests, for lack of a better way to put it, even each other out.
None of this was really something I thought about too much when I decided what to wear. I just pulled out these two things, thought, "Yep," which was really shorthand for all of the above, and put them on. Now I'm ready to roll.
Is this empowering? Yes, it is. It's especially empowering because it's the kind of thing I thought I'd never be able to do --- I didn't have natural style, so would be doomed always to wearing awkward, weird things that never quite work and make me feel awkward and weird, especially in social settings. Today I do not feel awkward and weird, and the absence of those feelings is in itself a great feeling.
Does this make me a stylish person? Really, I don't know. I'm not sure it matters. What matters to me is that this outfit ticks my own personal boxes. I feel casual but not sloppy. I feel active but not sporty. I feel bohemian/artistic but not like an explosion in a patchouli factory. I'm wearing color, but it's not overwhelming me. If I want to show up as myself, and why wouldn't I, I can do that today. I don't feel like a cliche of any personality or style type. I just feel comfortably like me.
So now I had better go do some me things. After all, I did dress for that.