from neo-hippie to yuppie

9/15/99

My job just gets boringer and boringer. I feel like I loose IQ point's with evry, passing minite.

!!!

When I was in school it was death to wear certain color combinations. Like green and red together. Wearing green and red to school in second grade got you nothing but derision and taunting, all day long. "Christmas colors! Hey Christmas colors!"

Worse: red, white and blue. 'Cause, you know, red, white and blue makes a monkey out of you. I was scared to tears that some detail of my clothing would miss my inspection and I'd be the monkey all day. I examined myself every morning, making sure there was no blue stripe in my shoes, no red in the embroidered flowers on my overalls.

The only way to save one's social standing after a monkey allegation was to disprove it, somehow. Insist that the stripe in the plaid is green, not blue. Of course, a sharp-eyed accuser would call you on Christmas colors then.

I was an overly sensitive child.

Anyway, Tara came into work today wearing a flourescent yellow windbreaker over a bright yellow Tommy Hilfiger shirt, earning herself the name "Old Yaller" for the day. I own no yellow clothing, and I am glad.

End of an era: I finally hacked up my rainbow skirt. This skirt is/was totally amazing. It's sort of a crepe-y black thing with red and pink flowers, but the bottom has about a foot of velvet. Garish, bright velvet blocks, sewn together like a crazy quilt. It defies the imagination. Some of those blocks were tie-dyed, primary colors. I think I have a picture of it around here somewhere.

My mom got the skirt out of a bin at the church, when she was searching for velvet and satin pieces for a crazy quilt. She hated that I fell in love with the skirt and wore it. I wasn't allowed to wear it to her house. Turns out John didn't like it much, either.

I wore it when I was feeling crazy. It really was a ghastly, horrid thing, but I loved it. Lately...ahh...I just haven't felt the right sort of crazy. I've outgrown my skirt, the same way I've outgrown most of my hippie, Ann Arbor impulses. On a brash whim, I took a pair of sewing scissors and snipped off the velvet. I figured it would make a good surprise package for my mother.

I'm only a little bit sorry. I miss it, but really, I miss the way I was when I wore it. Any more, I only wore it when I was out of clean laundry.

Great thing happened the other night, and I keep forgetting to write about it. Julie discovered the mirror. I've always tried to get my cats to look in the mirror, and they never caught on, so I gave up.

I got out of the shower and John and I were getting ready for bed when I heard Julia mewing in the bedroom. I peeked in and she was staring at me from the mirror. She was sitting on the desk, facing the mirror, and looking at me. She could hear me laughing from behind her, but she could clearly see me laughing in front of her. What a puzzled look on the poor cat's face. When John came in, Julia looked back and forth between us, perplexed. She'd turn her head and see us, then turn back and, well, see us. And the look she had, my god, she looked totally disgusted.