This took WAY the fuck longer than it should have to post… I may end up back on Xanga after all (who knew it would turn out to be the logical blogging format?)

D.C. has always been one of my least-favorite cities.  Granted, that’s not necessarily saying much, since every city besides New York and Tokyo is one of my least-favorite cities – and I’ve never been to Japan.  But Washington strikes me as being very much like Atlantic City, only with Really Important Papers instead of chips.  It’s like a huge movie set, where great attention is paid to the stuff they want you to look at, and the rest just falls to crap around the edges.  Plus it has the most infuriatingly dunderheaded subway system ever conceived. 

Nevertheless, we had a good time.  We missed the cherry blossoms by at least a week, and the weather went from variably meh to decidedly horrific, but it held long enough to see all the major monumentary sights, plus the parade and the street fair.  It didn’t start raining biblically until today, so, having already seen everything we’d come for, we spent the day in Baltimore – another of my least-favorite cities - at the aquarium.  I’m proud to say that Evie only threw up three times (once on the curb and twice in aquarium trashcans) and didn’t get any of it on her shirt or shoes.  Some may call these lowered expectations; I call them realistic. 

And also, I totally win at stinkeye.

Me:  No, that’s Christmas.  When Jesus was born.

Bill:  Well, this is a resurrection day… it’s kind of a birthday… like his rebirth.

Evie:  Who?

Me:  Baby Jesus.

Bill:  Not baby Jesus.  Adult Jesus.

Me:  The big JC.

Evie:  I didn’t know there was an adult Jesus.

Bill:  What, you didn’t think he grew up?

Me:  He grew up, and he was killed.  And this is the day when he went to heaven.

Evie: (confused)

Me:  The story is, when you die, your soul goes to heaven.  But Jesus was supposed to have gone to heaven with his whole body.  Which is, you know, unusual.

Evie:  What’s a soul?

Bill:  It’s what black people have…

Me:  (madly clutching head)  Oh my god we are SO unprepared to educate the children in the ways of the force!

Evie:  Now your hair’s all messed up.

Billy:  And you spit on my face.

To say that I am not exactly on the cutting edge of fashion would be fairly generous, I think.  For the most part, fashion strikes me as scary, confusing, and stupid – politics, too, and for that reason I do my best to avoid both.  The only item of clothing that I’ve ever bought ahead of the popularity curve was this pair of shoes, because I needed closed-toed footwear for a lab course I was taking, and I thought they were cute.  (They were cute, and only a half-size too small – a fact that was woefully unapparent in the store, but made itself known to the tune of four separate blisters the first time I actually wore them.  We suffer to be beautiful.)  

The vast majority of other items in my wardrobe were purchased a year or more after their particular style first hit the stores; it’s usual that I need to get used to seeing a look before I’ll consider wearing it, and some things (think shrugs) I refuse to buy even if I like them, because it’s obvious how stupid they’ll look once the fad ends – and I will wear something I like until it falls off my body in shreds, I don’t care how last year it is. 

Don’t get me wrong; I like clothes very much, and I love to shop.  But my body is kind of a caricature of itself; I have the upper half of a six-foot-two runway model and the lower half of a 5-foot-nothing garbage man, and finding clothes that fit can be challenging.  Summer shopping is easier and more gratifying than winter shopping, because below-the-knee skirts hide all my municipal waste-collector attributes, while tank tops and fitted tees allow for long thin arms and neck.  Add a good push-up bra and we’re set. 

The big problem is the timing:  you have to shop for summer while it’s still technically winter, and vice versa.  It’s a pretty simple matter to walk into a store in, say, September, and step out of your flip-flops and shorts to try on a pair of corduroy pants; it’s another thing altogether to go shopping in March, and have to take off your coat, scarf, knee-boots, over-the-knee socks, and that pair of cords you bought last September, to try on a pair of shorts (or try to, since the ultra-low waist barely makes it over your ample ass…) 

And in the end you can’t really gauge how you look anyway, between the cruel and unusual glare of the overhead lights, the funhouse (now with 75% less fun!) dressing room mirrors, and the fact that it turns out you couldn’t be bothered to take off those socks after all, so you’re standing there with your garbageman butt barely covered by the biggest joke the Paris catwalk ever played on the female asscrack, while the item that was meantto be shorts is ending somewhere below your knees and damn those short femurs anyway, and the rest of your legs are covered in green-and-orange striped socks, because who really thought you’d be taking off those boots after you left the house – and the overall effect is kind of like if you stuck legs on a gourd and sent it off to clown college. 

I think I’m just going to start showing up for work wearing a sandwich board and those cute little shoes.