Sometimes I spend hours

and hours trying to write a post.  I write one, delete it, write another, delete it, and finally I write nothing.

When all your dolls become LEs ...

I started with one doll, which was an MSD kit.  I had her assembled and painted by Volks, and she arrived to me posed in her little silver box.  She was the same cookie cutter sculpt with the same cookie cutter paint job that anyone in Japan could buy, but I thought she was lovely.

Gary Oldman = Pizza

Gary Oldman is one of those actors who is always good.  Even if a movie is kind of crappy, he turns in a stellar performance and creates a memorable character.

So he's kind of like pizza.  You know how they say that even shitty pizza is pretty good?  Right, it's that same kind of principle.  Even a shitty movie with Gary Oldman in it is watchable.

Eugene It Isn't

I like to occasionally take a look at the offender registries where I live.  I also like to check out my hometown, just to see if there are any more people I went to school with on there (current count: 2).

As I was scrolling down the page I realized that 10% of the individuals on my hometown's offender list have the middle name Eugene.  I'm not even kidding.  7/70 have the same middle name.  If you want your kid to live a life of crime, I suggest settling on "Eugene" for a middle name.

The number is a little skewed too, because there are a handful of women on there, and women are probably statistically less likely to have "Eugene" in their name.  Still, 10%.  If I throw out all the women on the list, the number is probably more like 11%.  

I double-checked and selected only the sex offenders (violent and drug were on the previous list).  I wondered if there were, say, more of them in one category than another.  But it turned out the list of sex offenders was 51 people, and 5 had the middle name "Eugene."  Still about the same.  

Now you know what not to name your kid.

You're welcome.  

  

Death Follows Me

Yesterday I passed a house that was surrounded by police tape.  There were police cars, officers, and a big ol' van all stationed outside, and I wondered what on earth happened.  I mean, especially since it was about a block (or less) from my house.  That's just unsettling.

While I'm complaining about fashion ...

There is a seriously disturbing proliferation of "mom jeans" at my workplace.

Can we just have every producer of fashion sign a pledge to NOT produce mom jeans EVER AGAIN?  I mean, I don't know who still makes ugly-ass (sort of literally) jeans, but STOP.

I'm sure that women will still dig them out of the back of their closets and wear them, but at some point they will become too old and worn out, and they will be recycled or tossed or donated.  Then the woman will go and buy some jeans that actually fit, and slowly those mom jeans will go out of circulation.  Slowwwwly.

Cropped Pants

I never understood this fashion phenomenon.  Either wear pants or shorts, but don't compromise.  (Capris are stupid too, but this is about cropped pants only.)

Back at Banana we had tons of cropped or "ankle" pants.  These are pants that, as you might guess, come to your ankle.  They're "high waters," in other words.  I tried ours on and found that the regular length was about 1/2 an inch too short for me to have them pass as regular pants.  But then they were also too long to look like crops.  So I just wound up looking like I was too tall for my pants.  And mine was a common problem.  Sometimes the shorter customers could get away with using a pair as regular straight-leg pants, but many fell into my issue of not really having the proper "petite" rise, but needing that petite length.

Now, you might say, "Duh!  Alterations!"  Yes, we did alterations.  But that takes time, requires having your pants sent off, no instant gratification, what if it's still wrong, etc.  And then there's the problem of shoes, since the length you need is going to differ if you wear heels vs. flats.  With a crop you're straddling that very fine line between "weirdly short pants" and "weirdly long crops," which can be a problem if you want to wear both kinds of shoes.

The shoe thing is a huge problem.  Sometimes with a longer crop you can wear a flat and get away with it, acting like it's just a normal pant.  But then you sit down and it hikes up to your lower calf, and you wish you'd shaved a little higher that morning.  (By the way, that was the other thing I hated--shaving my ankles to wear a pair of pants.  I know for a fact I'm not the only woman who avoids shaving anything that's not being seen.)  You might have better luck with any length when wearing heels, though if it's slightly too short then you probably end up looking like you bought pants for children or had them shrink in the wash.

I told you, it's a fine line.  The models kind of get away with it because they have long, thin legs.  If your figure is curvier (and this is not a euphemism for "fat," though it also applies if you're fat) or if you have short legs, you have to do a lot more to make your legs look longer.  Which means you don't want a lot of skin showing under your hem.  Too high of a crop can make you look shorter.  Heels will help, but not if you're 4'11" or have a wider frame.

And your shoe options suck.  I hate wearing shoes without socks.  Hate.  There is something very uncomfortable to me about the sweaty feeling of foot against shoe, and I need that barrier, whether it's a sock or tights.  I own a lot of boots, but I own some flats as well, and generally I'm wearing those flats with dresses and tights.  With crops you can't wear socks unless you're 85 and you don't give a fuck.  Fashion dictates that you wear a flat or a heel.  You might be able to do a boot, but that's going to depend on the boot and on how tapered the pant is.

I don't remember tons of people liking the crops.  I remember a lot of women complaining that they didn't want a crop.  They just wanted a pair of pants.  A lot of the shorter women tried to make the regular length crop into a straight leg pant, and many succeeded.  But very few were thrilled with that inch of pant missing.

So here's hoping that everyone gets their heads on straight and gives us our extra inch of fabric.  But I don't really have a lot of faith, considering how they keep trying to push and push and push all those damn skinny jeans on us.  (The solution to the skinny jean is a long, boxy blazer, btw.  JMO.)

Oh Horrible

Tonight there were guests over, and those guests had kids.  Two of them.  One and five years old.

There are already three kids in this house, with one of them basically demanding to be the center of attention and bossing the middle child--who just turned two--around.  So today we had five kids, two of whom could fully communicate, two of whom could toddle around, and then one who still does nothing but eat and poop and cry.

Tonight I was also pretty determined to be in bed by 8:30.  Normally the kids go to sleep at 8, but with the guests (still) over, that has been delayed somewhat.  And so has my own sleeping.  Delayed, delayed, delayed.

I'm so tired--lack of sleep and ladyproblems, plus the cold cold cold weather and my forever bleeding nose--that I just wanted to go to bed as early as possible.  To snuggle up with my fifteen blankets and sleeeeeep.  But nooooooo.  No sleep for meeeeee.  Hopefully in a few minutes I'll get there, but the kids are still up and having fits.  FITS.

How to Tell if You Live NOWHERE or SOMEWHERE

At work I had someone accuse me of being a "city kid."  While I find myself to be more of a city type, I was definitely not raised in one.  Yeah, it could have been worse--18,000 is kind of crappy but not TOTALLY crappy--but it still stands that we had to drive FOR-EV-ER to get anywhere.

For someone who gets motion sickness, that's the worst part.

Well, also the fact that my parents liked to not tell us where we were going.  So we'd get in the car thinking we would be going just down the road and then we'd go on an hour-long drive to God Knows Where ...

I digress.

The point is that I lived in the middle of nowhere.  Forty-five minutes in a car would get you to the nearest Real Mall, but the best shopping, movies, etc. necessitated a two-hour drive.  Taking an airplane anywhere meant 2.5-3 hours in a car, plus however long you had to spend in the plane.  Flying to Japan was essentially a 24-hour ordeal between driving to the airport and getting all the connecting flights.  Airports out here are good at getting you to Chicago or Dallas, but not much of anywhere else.

I had a friend try to tell me, "I feel your pain.  My town only has 4000 people."  That "town" was a suburb of Chicago.

Someone else tried to play that game with me.  He lived a half hour out of Dallas.  If your hometown can be considered part of a "metro area" that involves a million people or more, you do not get to say you live in the middle of nowhere.

Otherwise, here's a pretty good gauge:

Start at the center of town.  Drive (the speed limit, please) in one direction for fifteen minutes.  Are you still somewhere?  Then you live somewhere.

Drive in one direction for fifteen minutes.  Are you nowhere?  Congratulations!  You live nowhere!

Right now I do live in one of those metro areas.  It's nice, though I wish I lived a little closer to the city.  Living in a place like this is nice, but after spending most of my life with the inconvenience of sitting in the car for hours and hours, I like to know that Somewhere is always at my fingertips.