Another shot of the prepper plants, which are currently about 12 feet high, if not higher.
It's mid-week --- how did we get here? The days blink by so quickly. Tomorrow is pub night, the end of the husband's work week if not mine, then it's Friday. On Saturday we go to dinner with friends. Sunday is Mass, then the new week. Lather, rinse, repeat.
The Fire Son, we hear, is on the Montana-Idaho border, putting some fire or other to bed. He says it's not really a fire now, in any particularly worrying sense, and anyway, it's almost the end of the season.
The Viking is heading up a "24-Hour Theatre Project" at the University of Dallas. The Abbey's drama program has done this for years --- one year the Fire Son, then about 16, wrote a quite good one-act play, which we went to see. The idea is that a handful of writers, selected either by writing sample or invitation, have one night to produce a roughly-10-minute one-act play. At the Abbey I think they use photo prompts. Not sure how the Viking is handling his, but that's the idea. So the writers write all night, and in the morning, a group of volunteer directors are assigned a play each. They hold auditions, cast their plays, run rehearsals all day, and perform the plays that night. I'm very proud of him for organizing this event.
Here, it's another school and work day. I have writing and editorial tasks to do, in addition to the eternal dog-walking and housekeeping.
Apparently --- though I don't pay attention to these things --- today is the end of New York Fashion Week (in addition to being a more solemn observance). More Fashion Weeks, in London, Milan, and Paris, succeed this one.
So for Lincolnton Fashion Week, I ask not what I'm wearing, but whom. I guess here the big question would be whose pajamas you were wearing to Walmart, but that could get risque real fast.
Some big names here, people (I don't mean whose pajamas anyone is wearing, because this is not investigative reporting).
On the bathroom catwalk today:
*Secondhand Erika&Co. floral cotton-linen-blend pinafore, bought November or December 2023, last worn August 19. Total wears this year to date: 12
*Secondhand Eileen Fisher (okay, that is a name, albeit a sort of mid-level designer brand) pink merino tank, bought January 2023, last worn August 29. I'm not sure how many wears this item has had, because I've worn it under things, and I can't always tell from a photo that it's there. But I have worn it with satisfying frequency this year, after not wearing it that often in the first year I owned it. Sometimes it is good to hang onto things, especially if you basically love them and couldn't easily replace them if you passed them along.
*Secondhand O'Connell's cobalt merino cardigan, bought sometime in 2023, last worn August 13.
*Secondhand Birk Mayaris, bought in April, last worn yesterday
People say "homeschool mom" like that's a bad thing, but it's pretty much the vibe here. It's a vibe I earned, let me hasten to say.
I'm actually a little surprised at the frequency of wears for this floral pinafore, although I love it. It doesn't get as much wear as more neutral, core pieces in my closet, but for something this strikingly patterned, it gets a good bit of wear. I paid about $20 for it, so by now surely the cost-per-wear is starting to descend into the negatives, or will do soon.
Per my meditations of yesterday, about the cultlike followings that have grown up around certain brands (which, let me remind you, I actually love), I look at this secondhand dress and think: Oh yeah. There's actually an aesthetic in my mind, and I don't need a brand to tick the boxes. Natural fibers (preferably linen or wool; less preferably cotton)? Check. Soft fluid lines? Check. A whole kind of natural appearance?
Well, what do I mean by that? Natural fibers are part of the appearance, but I guess what I mean is something like unfussy. Or easy to move around in. Dressed without seeming dressed-up. Also gentle, unintimidating, approachable, not scary, not a girlboss. And interested in color and line, but not beating you over the head with that interest.
These are all things that both Wool& and Not Perfect Linen dresses achieve --- but so does this vintage secondhand pinafore that I didn't pay a lot for, that didn't hold any particular level of value, but was nevertheless what I wanted as part of a whole closet aesthetic.
I'd say the same thing about my purple April Cornell silk dress, bought more recently (and breaking my no-dresses rule, which let me tell you, is out the window now . . .). I wouldn't want to be so in the tank for a specific brand, or even a specific clothing fiber, that I shot my whole budget on that one brand and didn't consider other things.
And again, my budget is a little bigger these days (some months more than others) than it used to be, and my purchasing patterns reflect that. I'm not here pretending to be frugal, and anybody who reads here at all knows that I'm not aspiring to minimalism.
I am concerned with overconsumption and with the possibility of dysfunctional patterns in my own behavior around acquisition of things, but --- as I keep saying --- I have a religion, thanks. I don't need minimalism, or underconsumption, or anything like that, to fill a spiritual void. Now, I'm not accusing anyone else of having a spiritual void, because how would I know that, and in what universe would it be my job to police other people's souls? But I am saying . . . I think these movements appeal to people generally because our souls do want something. I just think that principles like minimalism or underconsumption are subsidiaries of the thing our souls really want: not bad in themselves, but not really meant to be our chief aspiration or identity.
And I have to watch myself, frankly, for the temptation to make those things an aspiration or identity, just as I have to watch for behaviors that are functions of dopamine-seeking --- it's no accident that people with ADHD are often compulsive over-spenders. This is useful information to have about yourself, if it applies. If you know about it, you can manage it. You can't manage things you're not even aware of.
ANYWAY. What I set out to say, before my brain took me down a long sidetrack, was that while I like certain brands, I think I like them because they fit an aesthetic I was already after. Coming across them has helped me define that aesthetic more clearly, and to have ideas about how to achieve it, but the brands are not the entire aesthetic. I can achieve the aesthetic in ways other than just buying those brands. Not that I don't buy them when I have a chance, because I do like them, but they're not the whole picture by any means.
If we agree that clothing is a social language, and that our clothing choices signal our belonging to a given group, what is it that we're signaling, or intending to signal? Maybe it's more accurate --- I think it's at least more desirable, to signal something more complex than simply that we're in an in-group. If I'm wearing a Wool& dress, then yeah, in the unlikely event that I run into someone else who knows about Wool& in the course of my daily rounds, here in pajamas-in-Walmart land, then yes, I am sending out the signal of the sisterhood. Same thing with NPL. But man, if that's all I aspire to signal to other people, then that's pretty lame. And I don't think it's what most people who aren't still adolescents mean to signal. We want to say something more nuanced about ourselves as individuals than simply that we belong to a club.
And again, we really just want to show up as our best selves in the world: at our prettiest, at our most self-confident, at our most at-home in our own skins. I remember once hearing a homily on modesty (right up there in the top tier of least-favorite topics ever) in which homilist claimed that the only reason to look attractive was to attract the opposite sex. And I simply do not think that this is true. It's certainly not true for women.
As I remarked yesterday, I really do think we dress for each other a lot more than we dress for men. That is to say, I think the validation of other women is more formative to our view of ourselves than the validation of men is --- even though we might quite naturally enjoy the sensation of being found attractive by a man. I also think that being found attractive is not the same thing as being an object of lust --- I'm friends with a lot of men, and I think we probably all enjoy the little frisson of attraction that sometimes ruffles the surfaces of our conversations, but we're not going to bed with each other. Furthermore, that frisson doesn't mean that we even want to, really. It's just there, because things like that are present in opposite-sex relations, and living with them happily is a far more appealing alternative to avoiding the other sex forever, or covering ourselves with a burqua in their presence, because we and they just can't deal.
But basically I think it's untrue that women --- and women were the target of this homily, even though it purported to be aimed at everybody --- dress the way we dress to attract men. We dress the way we dress because we want to feel beautiful, and feeling beautiful is not primarily a function of feeling sexually desirable. I mean, it's not just that, but it's also mostly not that at all.
We want to dress to feel good around other women, because for most of us, that's our primary and most lasting social context. It's the large tribe to which we belong, and I think at our most fundamental level we're a lot more concerned about signaling our belonging to other women than we are to attracting men. Men come and go. We tend to outlive them. And women who outlive their men are left with the company of other women --- which is generally comforting rather than not, it seems to me. We may love men (and I do), and we desire their love (which again I do), but they are not our overarching reality. We may bond with one man (or a succession of them) and enjoy sparkling friendships with others, but it's the big country of women to whom every woman really belongs.
And I say this having no illusion about how awful women can actually be to each other, and as a person who, if given the choice between a roomful of women and a roomful of men, would want to go with the men, even if she felt she really shouldn't. I'm not sentimental about being female, I do not think the world would be more peaceful if women ran it, I'm not at all sorority-minded, and I actively like men. But even given all that, I can recognize in myself my own need to belong to other women, and to have their friendship.
Every time I go to a parish funeral, as I did last Friday, I think about how these women and I will be at each other's funerals. At this last funeral, I reflect on a moment when I was holding hands with my friend Kelly, who is very dear to me, as we were talking, and the thought that comes to me is this: One day one of us will bury the other, and that will be a grief as profound as widowhood. Not the same kind of profundity, but equally profound. And there's a whole group of women, encompassing various communities in my life, about whom I would say the same. It's not the same exclusive kind of relationship that a marriage is, and it's not sexual. It's simply that these are my people, and I belong to them.
And that's what I think clothing is about for women. Men have whole other languages that we don't speak. But this is a language that women speak to each other, and I think it's not right to read it as aimed at men or intended to have a particular effect on them. It's nice when they notice and appreciate how we look, and I do pay attention to what my husband likes, but that's not the real reason why I put my clothes on. The man who loves you really thinks that unless you're naked, you're overdressed. He puts up with your clothes, even admires your taste, but prefers you au naturel. He appreciates the language, but it's not his language. It's other women who are fluent and, if they're your friends, both understand and applaud what you're trying to say.
Here's me, in the morning light at the window, wearing colors that make me feel alive.
I can explain this to my husband, and he can be --- and is --- sympathetic. He hears what I say. He appreciates that I say it. But it's other women who know the feeling.
LUNCHTIME UPDATE:
*Long walk with Dora in the sunshine. Today's high is 83F; it's 74F right now, warm in the sun but cool in the shade. We walked a stretch of the greenway trail, then looped back around through the little neighborhood on the south side of town, by the railroad tracks, where last Thanksgiving a big dog on a too-long chain rushed us from behind a house on the other side of the road. Today all was quiet, however, and we ambled along happily unmolested, all the way home.
*Ate the last of the cauliflower-topped faux-cottage pie I made the other night --- the husband has these leftovers in his school lunch as well.
*Considering that although I have frequently thought my bathroom outfit selfies were boring and limited --- as they very well may be, day after day --- one good thing about them is that I'm not framing them in some lifestyle context. If it's boring to see me standing there, striking silly poses, in my clothes before the mirror with my phone, day in and day out until I finally quit doing it, there's something to the notion that it's actually good that I'm not poetically milking cows, or standing among wildflowers, or looking pensively out a window at English rain, because unless my bathroom is aspirational in some way that I'm not seeing, I am not suggesting to you that my clothing is the key to a desirable lifestyle. I don't know whether or not I'm dressed any better than you are, but I can guarantee you that I'm not living any better than you are.
I don't blame anybody for capturing lifestyle photos, because I don't think anybody really means to sell a whole lifestyle, or the promise of a lifestyle --- well, let me just say that I cannot, in charity, attribute that conscious motive to anybody. Neither should you. The soul we have the care of is our own. And what we should be worried about is not what other people are doing, but how we respond to what other people are doing. If I actually think that buying a Not Perfect Linen dress is going to give me some misty romantic lifestyle I haven't heretofore achieved, then whose fault is that? MINE. That is my delusion, and I'm responsible for it.
So I'll enjoy other people's far more interesting images, but let's just be clear that the only way that an influencer can influence people is that people choose to be influenced. No influence, no influencer. You get to decide who has influence in your life and who doesn't, and on what basis. It's really just about that simple.
LATE AFTERNOON UPDATE:
*Finished and uploaded my three essays for next week
*Long phone conversation with the Texasgirl, during which I learned, among other things, that the Viking recently found out that he was in a friend's wedding (the Artgirl, who was the bride's freshman/sophomore roommate, has known forever that she was a bridesmaid) via the wedding website, listing the wedding party. "Oh, uh," the groom said. "Yeah, I meant to ask all my groomsmen in person, but then it was summer, and then we were doing the website, and . . . " It's the kind of comic thing that tends to happen to the Viking, but I sort of love that their friend group is like this. I also love that they have the kind of shared college friend group that means that they both end up in the wedding party for the same wedding.
*Walked the dog again.
*Decided to make a chicken curry with roghan josh spices for dinner. Really, traditionally, roghan josh is a Kashmiri dish made with red meat, but chicken is what I have, so we'll just approximate, and it will be delicious, and hopefully nobody in Kashmir will be offended.
*Firming up details around a lecture I'm slated to give later in the fall (the one for which I've been doing Walsingham research)
LATER STILL:
Well, I am making mango chicken curry, riffing on this recipe. I didn't have regular curry powder, so I used my roghan josh spice mix plus turmeric, extra coriander, extra ginger, and a little dash of cardamom. I also added two thinly sliced/diced cayenne peppers for heat. Cauli rice in a separate skillet to put at the bottom of each bowl when I serve it, and some cilantro to snip over the top. It SMELLS divine, like possibly the best curry sauce I've ever made.
Stay tuned.