Oops, I forgot a link:

Dustin pointed out this SO PERFECT Alternet article: Are Liberals Pathetic? My answer is a solid YES. Gotta love that Chris Hedges! This is a must read, for sure.

In an anarchist society, who will pick up the garbage? A spot-on, super quick read. (Thanks to Facebook pal DS for the link)

And from anarchism to my other love, thinking consumerism! A really great gift guide that the Bonbons were included in– I sort of want everything mentioned, particularly the quirky and lovely animal portraits.

And also

Good article in the NYT on the dangers of kitchen plastics and chemicals.

Also from the NYT, an article pretty much totally about my life, except that I don’t sell my wares on Etsy. And don’t make “more than $140,000 a year.” But still, it’s my business life down to a tee: a so-called perfect work life whose one big giant trade off is working every minute of every day, forever.

Oh, and! As previously mentioned, my farmer pal Kira got a sweet little write-up in the Times too! Oh, how cute is she? I’m amazed they got her to stand still long enough to take her picture—by far, she’s the hardest working farmer I know.  (And I make it a point to know farmers, so I know of what I speak.)

My fave band/performance artist, The Blow, is back from a little hiatus!

My BFF Christy introduced me to this lovely Portland blog. It’s super stylie, pretty,  & thoughtful—in short, delicious in every way. We both hate American Apparel and love hair dye, fermentation projects, and veganism, wooo!

Randy has a great post all about his fermentation 101 experiments (among other interesting life tidbits) and I’m not just saying it’s great because he mentions me favorably in it! Sample bit of typical Randy awesomeness: “there seems to be an unwritten exception to noise ordinances allowing any amount of racket so long as it is produced by gas powered tools designed to manage nature.” Oh god, so true.

This is a reminder, to myself (and maybe you too!) to save my copious amount of jars for the fine folks at Wintergreens when I get back to cooking next…decade!

Word on the street (that street being audubon.org) is that the excellent Audubon Field Guide to Mushrooms is soon to be an iPhone app!!!! My exclamation points runneth over! My dog-eared copy of the book hangs out in my car trunk, along with a battered ’shrooming basket, and the promise of a shiny new fabulous-sounding app (the bird one has bird calls!) is making me feel all tingly.

Tempest in a teapot totes terminated, OK, darlings?

I ITCH to discuss it more, I know I haven’t conducted myself well throughout the whole thing, but I can’t. I want to win this argument and convert everyone to my side and express everything so perfectly and elegantly that all the unpleasantness will fall away under the shadow of my brilliance, but we all know that’s not what’s going to happen.

Thus, I will give up.

Not so bad to give up once in a while, right? It’s only the internet, and just a blog post at that. It brought up some interesting issues related to veganism that I want to throw back at you soon, but we’ll get to that.

Can we talk about pretty things now though?

Non-transgressively girly things?

Like how these shoes hurt my feet so much I literally could barely walk outside in them and they don’t even go that great with the outfit and maybe the pretty beat-up blues would have been cuter?

Or, my eternal question, why are my knees so very pointy?

I had planned to write this whole post about how when I dress up all femmy I feel like I’m wearing drag, girl drag. Like *BOB,* you know her? “New York City’s self-described ‘female-female impersonator’”? Don’t we all feel that way sometimes? It’s fun for me, sometimes. It’s the gift feminism has given all of us—it’s optional. I don’t have the heart for the whole megillah of a post about it right now (I also have the sneaking suspicion said post might already exist), but you get the idea.

So, I got this coat.

The coat! Remember? In my head, that’s how I say it: “THE! COAT!“

Quite a smile there, little lady.

The first place I wore it was to the Roos Arts opening, and as I was getting it on to leave at the end of the night, the party stragglers all turned to look at me. Maybe I’m exaggerating, but as I recall, all conversations stopped and in one giant crescendo everyone descended on THE! COAT! So blue! So well-fitting! So flattering! So…not what you’d expect the Hudson Valley’s Most Scowly Vegan Chef to be rocking! The coat was petted, the coat was inspected from all angles. And yes, most of the admirers were gay boys and girl friends of mine, and yes, most likely the coat possessed the magic new clothes (particularly for those who rarely indulge in them) sparkle with, but STILL.   The coat is magic. So soft and cozy, yet fitted and pretty.

As I’ve mentioned, Leanne, the brilliant mind behind Vaute Couture (the V is for vegan!) and I did a little chocos-for-clothes trade, and the whole thing just made my heart sing.

I’m being 100% serious when I say that when I became vegan 16 or whatever years ago, I never dreamed of the amazing vegan businesses that would be sprouting up these days. I figured I’d be mail ordering uncomfortable Doc Martin knockoff mary janes from Vegetarian Shoes in England for the rest of my life, or wearing rope sandals or something. I had no conception of the glorious plethora of well-made, high-quality, non-exploitative consumer goods us thinking people could wrap our politics around. It’s giving me a chill, right now.

How proud I am to be contributing to this truly brave new world, how excited I am to see where it continues to go. Yes, the glitz of it has sometimes irked me, the Skinny Bitchiness and all that, but I recognize (BECAUSE I AM SO FUCKING MATURE) that the mainstreamy glitz is the downside (for me) of a truly flourishing movement, with many branches and lots of influence.

Things are happening, people. Can we stop infighting long enough to keep up the momentum? Probably not, but as usual, the losers will drop away and we, us, the amazing, multi-faceted ones, we’ll just keep plugging away with our thinking minds and our feeling hearts—and our pretty, pretty, pretty clothes.

Dudes (sorry sorry sorry, I try not to say dudes, because it means…um, dudes, but sometimes it just works, you know?). I have this giant file of shit I want to buy, because I am a huge hypocrite who loves owning things while bragging about what a non-consumer I am.

Or/and: we all need to buy some things, no matter how much we pride ourselves on our DIY chops/Earth First!esque nonconsumption/distain for sweatshop shit/refusal to own ugly mass-produced cheap crap. Making the choice to mindfully save up for incidentals as well as larger treats that are well made instead of brainlessly buying loads of Wal*Mart hideosities can be a way to fill our lives with meaning and beauty. (I can spin anything, I should work at the White House!)

Anyway, putting this all online means I can rid myself of a messy file of clippings and notes, so here we go. I’ve got other posts half done with lists of books, music, and a huge huge huge list of food-related shite, so if consumerism thrills you, prepare to be thrilled (and/or to question my sketchy taste) in the next few weeks. Thus:

MY MASTER WISH LIST!

Totebag lovers! I’m a totebag grrrl through and through, and I think this Muji pouch organizer is just what I need to prevent my totes from becoming the giant Bermuda Triangles of crap that they currently are. Plus, as a MOMA member I get a discount on it! On the other hand, I bet I could sew it myself in about 1/2 hour….

I wonder how this washi paper tape would do to label food containers? Right now I use painters tape for my meal delivery service, and it works OK. This looks prettier though. And maybe if clients put it in the dishwasher (as I have asked them repeatedly not to do, as it necessitates using goo-gone to remove the stuck-on tape glueiness) it would just magically dissolve?

There is another tape I have a note to look into, too: this 33-pack of masking tape in 11 colors!

Loomstate organic cotton jeans: I’d like two of each, please! (OK, I already own three pairs…)

Someday I’d like to make a Lagusta’s Luscious belt buckle!

Once when my sweetheart and I were going to have a cheesey commitment ceremony I wanted to get these rings, then we both realized that a commitment ceremony wasn’t for us…and neither is wearing rings. Still, they are rad.

A laptop case I’m interested in, most likely made in China, sigh.

And other laptop bags…

As long as we’re looking at things we’re not ever going to buy, how about a $360 mailbox? Yes, that’s it there above.

I’m dying for this tape dispenser!!!

Amazing handmade bike baskets.

Cuter gladrags than the plain-jane ones I have…also these!  (Why yes, I do wear washable menstrual pads that I then wash in my bike-powered washing machine, T*M*I, I know! And yes, I’m basically a 13-year-old girl with my terror of tampons, but whatever works!)

Cute lamp!

Good for photo albums!

Godless necklace, Y*E*S!

I already own this hanger necklace, but periodically it gets bent and I need to buy a new one. My pal Aaron has been making me ones for the past few years with little bits of copper he finds here and there (those are good because they develop a nice patina), but this is a good back up.

Do you know Resurgence magazine? I do, but would like to get to know it more, on more of a bimonthly basis…

Strangely alluring matches made from a single block of wood.

Solar-powered phone charger!

I’ve never grown phlox, as a matter of fact I don’t really grow anything much at all, but this “Peppermint Twist” phlox is so freaking adorable that it’s almost enough to make me into a flower grower.

Here’s what I like:

Holding two completely diametrically opposed ideas in your hands and your heart at one time and rushing out into the world, thrusting both in front of you, living as hard as you can through both of them.

I’ve come to like, in truth, being a big giant hypocrite: I talk such talk about not compromising, drawing lines in the sand, and purity, but every second of my life, pretty much by definition, is a compromise on shifting sands of impurity.

I live in the world, therefore I fail just a little. Most of the time this doesn’t bother me. I’ve come to understand that a nuanced worldview and commitment to focusing my energies where they will be best utilized is more important than slavish attention to purity. The purity game is a fun one, most of my 20s was spent in its clutches, but in the end it’s a sad, small way to spend a life.

Striving for perfection—while simultaneously recognizing its impossibility: that’s my game these days.

These rather abstract ideas have been floating around in my head more so than usual the past few days because of this great article in The New Yorker by Elizabeth Kolbert . The always-brilliant Kolbert writes about how silly and absurd those gimmicky blogs (and the books that inevitably follow) are where someone painstakingly catalogues their vainglorious attempts at eco-friendly perfection.

Specifically, she’s talking about that No Impact Man blog (which at least the dude, Colin Beavan, admits was a stunt all along), as well as two extreme-sports 100-mile dieters (who wrote a blog, then book, chronicling their year eating food grown within 100 miles of their apartment) and that woman whose blog I actually pretty much like who resolved to do one “green life-style change every day for a year,” ranging from selling her car to not using toothpicks.

Let me say this first: there is a place for them in the world. Useless extremism can teach us something, for sure. But as a genre I’ve been irked by all this for a while now. Not only because, as Kolbert so adeptly points out, they are all 100% stunts manufactured for publicity and book deals—I believe the authors all genuinely believe in their missions despite their complicity in the capitalist system, and though this might out me as a ridiculous Pollyanna, that’s OK—but mostly because they are actually doing the environmental movement, in the long run, a disservice on two fronts.

The first problem is the problem of nuance: lack thereof. The second is that the ingrained inequities and malfunctions of our beloved late-stage capitalism really don’t allow for your giant eco-leaps to mean much to the society as a whole. Yes, admitting that kinda sorta invalidates my entire lifestyle, but it’s a good reminder to me that all my organic jeans and local produce and composting don’t give me a free pass to stay home when I should be out smashing the state like a good anarchist.

First the first: Maybe they are fun books and blogs to read for those of us who consider ourselves grassroots environmentalists, but for the culture at large, to whom they are almost exclusively aimed, I think their projects backfire. If you teach someone that eating locally involves growing and grinding your own wheat when you can’t source it near your home, no one is going to want to eat locally.

What, exactly, are these capers meant to show? Why do they irk me so? I guess it’s a certain self-righteousness (and I of course, Ms. bicycle-powered-washing-machine and whatnot, don’t like competition in that department) and…what? It’s just media-savvy lefty thoughtful people trying to draw attention to a giant problem, right?

I think it boils down to this: nuance as a methodology for long-term sustainability.

Pop culture, by definition, cannot accept nuance, so we get these wild extremes. But if we truly want long-term solutions, we need nuance. We need, for example, salt. No one wants to live without salt, and it shouldn’t be seen as a virtue when you decide you’re going to go for a year without salt. Or, for that matter, cumin and coriander and cardamom and cloves (did you ever notice how many spices start with “C”?)—in short, the richnesses of the world. Having spices literally broadens our horizons and enriches our lives. There are smart ways to harvest and transport that which cannot immediately be grown in your neighborhood, just as there are smart ways to reduce your environmental footprint without reducing your life to such a tiny circle that one day you find yourself, as No Impact Man and his family did, to climbing fifty-four flights of stairs a day and eating endless amounts of, as Elizabeth Kolbert puts it, “cabbage slaw in the dark.”

Perhaps no one looks at these books and thinks, as I fear they do, “It’s too hard, I won’t even start.” Maybe your standard American housewife will buy Sleeping Naked is Green: How an Eco-Cynic Unplugged Her Fridge, Sold Her Car, and Found Love in 366 Days and will be inspired to walk to work more or turn down her thermostat, or something. Perhaps these quirky personal stories, a bit of medicine with a good deal of sugar thrown in, are what we need to turn our brain-dead populace into something closer to thinking, consciously consuming upright citizens. I sort of doubt it, but who knows.

On to my second point.

As Kolbert brilliantly points out (she can’t do anything non-brilliantly, have you noticed?) in the sort of commentary I’d expect to find in The Nation, not The New Yorker*, the primary problems are structural, not personal, and therefore personal solutions aren’t always (or, let’s be honest, ever) the best solutions (Ms. the-personal-is-political, are you listening?).

She puts it so much better than I ever could that I’ll just do a little copy and paste action:

So committed is Beavan to his claim of zero impact that he can’t—or won’t—see the deforestation for the trees. He worries a great deal about the environmental consequences of Michelle’s tampon use and the shrink-wrap around a block of cheese. But when it comes to his building’s heating system, which is apparently so wasteful that people are opening windows in the middle of winter, he just throws up his hands.

A more honest title for Beavan’s book would have been “Low Impact Man,” and a truly honest title would have been “Not Quite So High Impact Man.” Even during the year that Beavan spent drinking out of a Mason jar, more than two billion people were, quite inadvertently, living lives of lower impact than his. Most of them were struggling to get by in the slums of Delhi or Rio or scratching out a living in rural Africa or South America. A few were sleeping in cardboard boxes on the street not far from Beavan’s Fifth Avenue apartment.
What makes Beavan’s experiment noteworthy is that it is just that—a voluntary exercise conducted for a limited time only by a middle-class family. Beavan justifies writing about it on the ground that it will inspire others to examine their wasteful ways. On the last page, he observes:

Throughout this book I’ve tried to show how saving the world is up to me. I’ve tried hard not to lecture. Yes, it’s up to me. But after living for a year without toilet paper, I’ve earned the right to say one thing: It’s also up to you.
So, what are you going to do?

If wiping were the issue, this would be a reasonable place to end. But, sadly—or perhaps happily—it isn’t. The real work of “saving the world” goes way beyond the sorts of action that “No Impact Man” is all about.
What’s required is perhaps a sequel. In one chapter, Beavan could take the elevator to visit other families in his apartment building. He could talk to them about how they all need to work together to install a more efficient heating system. In another, he could ride the subway to Penn Station and then get on a train to Albany. Once there, he could lobby state lawmakers for better mass transit. In a third chapter, Beavan could devote his blog to pushing for a carbon tax. Here’s a possible title for the book: “Impact Man.”

Totally, totally, totally.

But! This is not to say, I don’t think, that personal solutions are no solutions at all. I think the trick is a mix of personal responsibility (cutting consumption, buying mindfully, etc) and massive societal structural overhaul. Sadly, I don’t think any of these books and blogs contributes all that much to either.

*The blow job to Bloomberg in the issue before reminded me what I was reading though, don’t worry.

“Don’t fuck with my French, yo!”

I feel the need to publicly shame someone. How wonderful to have an internet medium seemingly designed expressly for this purpose!

So, the other day a friend and I went to a certain kitchen supply store in a certain hamlet located between Rosendale and Marbletown, New York (fun fact: said hamlet is “94.90% white,” as of the 2000 census. I’d venture a guess that 92.5 of those whities are former residents of the Chelsea neighborhood in Manhattan, and this faggy flavor is what prevents the precious, richie town [excuse me, hamlet] from falling over the cliff into insufferability, in my mind.) My friend is in the market for a quality insulated travel mug, and I just like lusting after kitchen supplies and adjusting my mental wish list.

So there we were.

I asked the ultra-snooty store owner if he had a “chinoise.” His response: “You mean a chinois? I only order those around the holidays, I order two and they go fast. Do you want me to order one for you?”

No, I do not.

Because first of all the store, while pretty and whatnot, is aimed at city folk outfitting their zillion dollar upstate kitchens and I’m a damn commercial chef just trying to make my damn way in this hard cold world and really I was just browsing anyway, but also: you corrected my pronunciation, dude? For reals?

Two things:

1) How incredibly rude!! OK, if one of my clients asks me what is in a see-tan or keen-o-a, or tem-peh dish, I say “Sure, it has say-tan, and keen-wa, and tem-pay, and carrots and whatnot and it’s good and blah blah”—I just pronounce the words right, but I don’t correct them—argh! The snobbery! Who does that?*

2) The worst part is, of course, is that I am such a giant snob (also parce que I will be paying off my French minor for the next vingt ans) I have to point out here to the world that I was TOTES RIGHT!

I. Feel. So. Much. Better.

Well, just one more thing. I was also nosing around for a new peeler (after looking online for days and days for peeler blades that I could easily pop into my old peeler–why does this not exist? Have no peeler manufacturers ever had a conversation with any razor manufacturers? Could I somehow facilitate this talk?). Mr. Snob pointed me to two: a $15 monstrosity of clumsy design and heaviness, and the dreaded ceramic peeler.

I’m beginning to think I am the only person in the world who literally cannot make a ceramic peeler work. I’ve used two, and both were shamefully horrid. But other people seem to like them, so live and let live, I guess.

On the far other end of the spectrum, happily, is the Swiss Pro. If you’re looking for a dirt-cheap peeler that will never let you down, allow me to introduce you to Ms. Swiss Pro. She’s on a stamp in Switzerland, ok? That’s really all you need to know.

Of course, because no one sells them locally, I was recently forced to eBay my way to a fresh supply. See—I try to shop locally first, I swear.

Even when my intelligence is called into question.

Hrumph.

*Actually, this ties into a problem I sometimes run into: people who chronically pronounce my name wrong. I try to correct people right away, but sometimes it gets away from me and months go by and I have to do what I had to do last week and set up a giant sting operation where I get any pals hanging around to yell out my name in front of the mispronouncer. It worked last week flawlessly, can you believe it? All fixed up. No awkwardness, no annoyances. Just a quick “HEY LAGUSTA!” yell from across the room.

Our house is pretty much reaching a crisis point in terms of book-holding capacity, and I say this as someone who bought four books this week alone.

Tragically, though I keep buying books—new and used, fiction and poetry, graphic novels and cookbooks—my bizarro rushed life means I rarely actually read an entire book.

Still, it comforts me to have them around, and there could be worse habits (like, perhaps, scouting the world for vintage pantyhose packages).

Though Jacob’s office came equipped with nice built-in bookcases,

we filled those up in a second

and moved onto the pink room,

kitchen,

and living room.

Man & Woman: the Encyclopedia of Adult Relationships is just about the most awesome encyclopedia set ever, FYI–and it’s not nearly as heteronormative as you’d think! It’s all amazing 1970s ridiculousness.

I even took all the yellow and orange cookbooks to my yellow and orange kitchen down the road and noticed not a dent in the cookbook collection.

So! Though I’m not particularly handy, when I came across this recipe* for quickie shelves in Readymade (which is helpfully not online, but it’s so easy I’ll just walk you through it), I literally left the house immediately to get the supplies.**

I had the shelves on the wall inside of two hours–that’s the kind of house project I like.

Basically, you just buy a bunch of corner braces in pairs plus screws (and drywall anchors, if necessary) that fit them. Then you put the braces on the wall using the screws, stack your books up, and go have a beer.

Unfortunately, I hadn’t bought enough corner braces, so it ended how most of my house projects end: with me half-assely finishing it and not being particularly proud of the result. I also put a few of the braces the wrong way so they were visible, which was not my intention.

A few days later, however, I bought more supplies and fixed it up right.

Though the shelves have the downside of not making the books themselves particularly accessible, I’m not really concerned.

I’m not planning on rereading The Bell Jar or, for that matter, To the Lighthouse, again for a while.

*OK, here’s a question: what do you call it if it doesn’t involve cooking? Recipe does not seem right. Plan? Technique? Blueprint??

**In case anyone thinks that my endorsement of this one idea constitutes ringing praise of Readymade, I would like to issue the following statement: The newish Readymade redesign (which coincided with the seriously fucked, pretty-much-ousting of founding editor-in-chief Shoshana Berger, whose columns I so enjoyed) is so painfully stultifying, stupid, simplistic, slick, and SAD that I can barely bring myself to give it a cursory glance. I’ve been a Readymaker since issue #1,

but man oh MAN their new design/corporate takeover is horrid. All models (am I wrong that once upon a time they used real people in their photo shoots?) and shit to buy, with no interesting projects whatsoever. [This is adorable, however]. UGH.

Sorry to end on an annoyed note, but SERIOUSLY.

The shelves, however, are pretty cute, no?

]]> http://lagusta.wordpress.com/2009/09/05/diy-shelves/feed/ 9 lagusta _IGP9421 _IGP8485 _IGP9396 _IGP9397 _IGP9398 _IGP9399 _IGP9401 _IGP9400 _IGP9409 _IGP9411 _IGP9412 _IGP9410 _IGP9415 _IGP9395 _IGP9387 _IGP9417 _IGP9422 _IGP9423 _IGP9463 _IGP9424 _IGP9425 _IGP9426 _IGP9465 _IGP9406 http://lagusta.wordpress.com/2009/07/25/superchunkie-locopoppy-mergey-vintage-shoppy-magnetic-fieldy-spoony-obersty-wardy-fun-fun-and-shoes-too/ http://lagusta.wordpress.com/2009/07/25/superchunkie-locopoppy-mergey-vintage-shoppy-magnetic-fieldy-spoony-obersty-wardy-fun-fun-and-shoes-too/#comments Sun, 26 Jul 2009 00:26:19 +0000 lagusta http://lagusta.wordpress.com/?p=2833 ]]>

Hmm. So I was wrong about that “having a lot of time to blog” thing: as it turns out, I’ve been having fun instead of sitting in front of the computer! Imagine that. Summery fun in the North Carolina (and Philly, and tourbussy) sun! And I’ve got five more days before the iron curtain of work casts its looming shadow over my life—what a gift.

You can follow the summery fun link above if for some reason you want to follow my little adventures, but I have to get something off my chest here: shoes.

More shoes. And you know what? Now that I’ve come clean about my horrible shoe collection to the internet, I feel the need to admit (and possibly atone or tithe or something) every time I buy a new pair. So I’d planned to blog these weird femmy shiny hurty rather officey green mofos, and, um…these other Target-bought-at-the-Salv ones,

when today I acquired these.

My awesome travellin’ pal Mary is sporting the black flats here, the bizarro scroungy vintagey mismatchey blues are my 1-hour-old (to me, at least) FORTY-NINTH pair of shoes. Actually…they might be number 50. I’ve sort of lost track!

All three of the newbies are too small, in truth. Why does the world keep pumping out size 8 shoes that I keep buying when my size is truly 8.5-9?

Luckily, I have a shoe stretcher.

Yes, it’s actually a shoe widener, which I don’t ever need, but it does a pretty good job of stretching out shoes lengthwise too. And I inherited it, how neat is that? Yeah, money from my grandma would have been nice, but a house full of vintage things like shoe wideners, candlesticks, linen tablecloths, and handmade lace is pretty rad too. For some reason I’ve had all this in boxes for the past fifteen years, and lately I’ve been beginning the excavation.

Treasures! They’re everywhere.

Heya sweethearts!

As is my custom, I will balance out my intense screaming anger below with this sweet post.

Look at this box!

It made my day of lawn mowing and housecleaning and Sotomayor-whining all sparkly and lovely for two reasons:

1) How stoked would you be to get your gorgeous screen printed t-shirts in a box with a Howard Zinn quote on it? I’d be super duper stoked. Even better:

2) This quote has been my email signature for years (I think I copied it out of the Zinn Reader, but I can’t find it right now), and even if it’s not true, I’m going to say that the super radical (on all levels) screen printing VG Kids peeps, from whence this box comes, were first pointed to its wonderfulness by me when I ordered some super rad pins (yeah yeah, I have to order more so you can buy them, I know!! It’s on my list!) from them in 2007. This quote gets around, I tell ya: once I did a Freecycle deal with a cute local girl, then the next time I saw her post on the Freecycle list she had the quote in her email too. I think that’s wonderful–we all need more inspirational Howard Zinn in our lives. Anyway, even if the VG Kids didn’t get the quote from me, I’m still overjoyed that they found it and put it on their boxes. Oh, small lovely companies, how you do my heart proud.

Spread the word: use VG Kids for your printing needs! Order all your swag from them, bands and companies and festivals! They are in Michigan and lovely to work with and political as all get out.

]]> http://lagusta.wordpress.com/2009/07/14/everyone-awesome-loves-howard-zinn-end-of-story/feed/ 4 lagusta 3583253678_9bba2dc81a http://lagusta.wordpress.com/2009/06/13/of-t-shirt-bras-and-men/ http://lagusta.wordpress.com/2009/06/13/of-t-shirt-bras-and-men/#comments Sat, 13 Jun 2009 07:02:43 +0000 lagusta http://lagusta.wordpress.com/?p=2592 ]]>

Womens!

Have you heard of this thing called a “t-shirt bra”? I just bought one, and it’s like I’m fucking fourteen years old—every time I go to the bathroom I have to lift up my shirt to check out how amazing my tits look.

As I have previously gloated about ad infinitum, I do not buy sweatshop clothes. I don’t really buy new clothes at all, except from small companies and cool designers as a special treat a few times a year. But I spend more time thinking about clothes than someone with the hardcore anti-consumerist views I have rightly should. Sometimes I am walking past, say, Rambling Rose on Main Street in my little town, where the pretty dresses are arranged so artfully, and I get a surge of “I want to buy clothes” that electrifies my entire body. If I had the cash, I would spend a lot on Etsy and with other good small designers, and if I had the time I would thrift shop my way into many times more clothes than I have now. But I have neither, so new clothes are a big thing for me, even thrifted ones.

Enter Target, that vast wasteland of post-apocalyptic American stinkall. Because of the containers debacle (my business is all about debacles, I tells ya) I am constantly making furtive horrible trips to Target, which I once explained in this post but I’ll explain it all again anyway. Right now most of my cooler bags and containers for my meal delivery service are 3-5 years old, so I’ve been replacing them little by little as their shoddy craftsmanorwhatevership gives out. I’ve looked into ordering both wholesale, but it is actually more expensive than buying them at Target, can you believe that? So I go to Target. But they have this policy of stocking no more than 8 or so containers at a time, so I have to constantly pop into any Target I happen to be passing.

I’m usually pretty good about not buying excess plasticky shit there, but I usually have to walk past the horrid siren song of the clearance women’s clothes rack. This is super dangerous. The clothes are so cheap! And not as cheaply made as you might think! And, I’m so humiliated to be admitting this, but….they are, some of them, anyway, sort of….super duper rad.

So sometimes things happen. I don’t take drugs, I’m not an alcoholic, I’m not a major asshole—so maybe every few months I put like $30 (I swear to god, $30 gets you ridiculously far in that 75% off rack! It’s against everything I stand for in the whole world, but the allure of a $4 tank top that is insanely awesome still makes my heart beat fast!) into the pocket of Target, is that so bad? It sort of is, because there is a Goodwill 15 minutes from my kitchen that appears to be the final resting place for all the clothes that Target can’t even sell for 75% off. Has anyone else noticed this weird phenomenon—that Goodwills are sometimes filled almost exclusively with Target stuff? So I should just go there, but anyway anyway anyway, sometimes things happen, and what happened last week was this cute bra and panties set thing and believe you me, dearest internet, I am not a person who likes that I just wrote “panties.” My god. I wear “underwear.” Not panties. But these have a fucking bow, two in fact, so I guess that makes them panties. (As a saving grace, they are a sedate blue.) But for $10 I got a matching bra and since the only other bra-like contraptions I have are those annoying American Apparel (pre-AA ban, I should add) sports bras things that smush everything into an unappetizing uniboob (because everyone knows: boobs must be appetizing!), this bra is a fucking revelation to me.

Everything about the bra amazes me. I don’t know why this seems so fancy as I know that all bras have this, but I love the three sets of hooks so you can basically decide just how much of a girl you want to be that day. How much discomfort are you willing to trade for tits that defy gravity to ever more ridiculous degrees? (As I’ve learned from you peeps, though, some women want to wear bras because they are actually more comfortable, and I bow to you.)

That’s not the best feature of the bra, though. I’ve never owned one of these t-shirt bra deals before, because I thought that padded bras were ridiculous. I’m proud of my 32-As! I’m not going to plump them up at all. But the minute I put it on I realized that they have another benefit: nipple protection. Women! WOW. Yet another thing my mom declined to tell me about: padded bras don’t just exist to make your breasts look bigger, they are there to hide your scandalous nipples and evenly round out any scandalously pyramidy or pointy boobs you might have. (My mom mostly wore tube tops when I was growing up, and when she went into the supermarket she would throw on an old short-sleeve work shirt sort of thing. I’m sure she wore, and still wears, bras to work—dingy white mom-type stretched-out affairs—but all I remember are the hilarious and highly embarrassing tube tops.)

I personally love it when women walk around brazenly with no bra on and it gets cold and they just don’t care who notices. But I don’t love it when it happens to me, because you know the deal: people notice! So I always carry a hoodie, and that gets dumb. Today I was parading around the cold health food store with my thin t-shirt dress and my magical cheap-as-shit t-shirt bra in total confidence that no skanky hippie dude would be flirting with me because everyone knows that having a little headlights action going on means anyone can flirt with you.

It was wonderful.

Well, a hippie dude flirted with me anyway.

But his opening line was the blue in my hair, not my fantastic rack (speaking of, what’s going on with my dress in that picture??). Have you ever noticed that hippie dudes are the worst flirters in the whole world? The whole affair was a bit of a fiasco, as those types of things always are. I left wondering, as I always do, what all women always wonder: that mixture of “was I gracious?/Did I send clear enough ‘NOT INTERESTED’ signals?/But was he maybe just making conversation and not flirting, and if so, was I a giant asshole?” Repeat repeat repeat.

I don’t blame the bra, though. He was just a flirty hippie dude. My dips into the world of femininity do seem to have upped my propensity to be flirted with though. Which reminds me, I need to write a post about leg shaving. I’ll tell it to you in a haiku, instead, ok?

you never told me

about smoothness and texture—

softness, so quiet.

10 years of not shaving my legs, and one day (because a band who was staying chez moi left a razor and shaving cream in the shower, actually) I just did it. TEXTURE! Wow. I didn’t mind my hairy legs, they weren’t all that hairy even, but I am wildly in love with the smoothness of my brand new legs. I’m telling myself that it’s all about texture, and mixing things up, and fucking with people who think of me as a hairy-legged bitch. But I’ve been girling-it up pretty hardcore for a while now, and I can’t quite explain why. It’s fun, and that freaks me out a bit. Feminism is about having choices, right? Right?

by Will Bryant

You know how I, like, hate dudes?

Of course, there are a few dudes I like. My boychik, like three other straightish boys, all my gayboy friends, and that’s about it. For all those bros, and for womens who like reading about thinking/hipstery/sweetly awesome boy-things, do you know about The Discerning Brute? You should! Good vegan products and info written by vegan gadfly Joshua Katcher—check it out!

I was pointed to it, weirdly, by two people within five minutes, both blog readers! Kara emailed Joshua & I to see if I could donate some chocos to an event he’s involved with (yes! Also, this event is at Peter Max’s studio, and his wife Mary Max used to be a client of mine, ah, that small NYC vegan world…), then in the next minute, Dustin emailed to tell me he had a cute little piece up on Joshua’s site.

Fate, mofos! I has it.

At any rate, I also has a fondness for boy shoes, so I am excited to make TDB a stop on my regular internet rounds. Yay!