One thing I will always find curious are the articles of clothing people seem to misplace. By misplace I mean leave awkwardly, yet understatedly strewn in public. I can’t say I particularly believe in Bigfoot. However, I am inclined to believe there is an illusive community of naked people running around wearing one sock, possibly passing around a singular laced boot depending on whose birthday it is. Even in the small community I live in, on my strolls around town I have seen bras, underwear, socks, t-shirts…a hairbrush (somewhere somebody’s hair is staggeringly unkempt.) It’s perplexing because, really, how does that happen? How does a shoe just fall off, but more importantly, how do you get home one day, pull down your pants and be like, “Ah, crap, I lost my blue Hane’s briefs. Must’ve been when I was walking down the middle of 4th street.”
I am one of those annoying people who takes care of her stuff. When I say annoying, I mean knows exactly where everything is and tend to borrow only to an elite. My collection of widowed earrings is residue from lessons learned the hard way. I find I am often chastised by my friends for what I prefer to see as an admirable attention to detail. If they look at something of mine, they’ll put it back and say, “Is this where it was?” Move it three centimeters and say, “Or is this where it was?” Smartasses. (…actually it’s two centimeters to the left.) I’m joking. But maybe I’m not.
I do not forget. I do not loose. If anything, I am more inclined to drop and run over, like the St. Patty’s cellphone incident of 2010. I don’t want to talk about it. And though it may seem my closet sees greater turnovers than when I play Madden, I actually hold on to particular things and sometimes still wear certain stuff from high school. So when people leave behind a jacket or a nice, new pair of Jordans in a locker room, I think, HOW? It makes me wonder if their stuff was wove out of the finest Andrew Jackson greenbacks if they’d leave it behind the same way…because, basically, it is.
I understand others don’t rule tyrannically over their stuff like it appears I do. But perhaps their parents and grandparents never put the fear in them. I accidentally left behind my favorite feather pillow at a motel once. There was zero sympathy. Many birds were inevitably plucked in vain that day. I was always blessed to have nice things, but in return BELIEVE we were to take care of our things (nice or not). Because as my friend so intricately put it, “It was the ONLY one we were gonna get!” The biggest lesson in taking care of my stuff sits on my finger and has been a daily reminder for 24 years.
For whatever reason, my grandmother has always let me do pretty much anything I wanted since the day I was born. Like watch The Bodyguard in second grade because I was obsessed with Whitney, or wear lipstick to school when I was 9. So when I liked my great grandmother’s wedding ring, she let me wear it. I was 4. Believe it or not, I still wear it every day. It has been resized about 3 times and a diamond chip replaced once. However, it doesn’t rest on my finger void of a story. That ring has been the closest thing to a boomerang I have ever owned.
When I was 5 I was playing jewelry cleaner and wrapped my few rings in a perfect, square little tissue and left it lay on the sink to dry. When I went looking for it mom had thought the Kleenex was garbage. It wasn’t just sitting in the wastebasket next to the sink, it was sitting on the end of the driveway in the can with Max’s diapers, old food and other crap waiting to be picked up by the garbage man. Mom had to dig, but she found it eventually. Lesson 1 in taking care of your stuff: do not leave important things lying around disguised as garbage.
Lesson 2: if you’re going to give something away, make sure it’s not important like a family heirloom. I have always been a sharer and love to give. So when my babysitter told me she liked my ring, straight up gave it to her. When mom realized I wasn’t wearing it, I told her the babysitter thought it was pretty. She had to go next door and explain that I wasn’t allowed to share that particular belonging and needed it back.
If there was any doubt that ring was supposed to be on my finger, it was put to rest. Lesson 3: Do not wear important things to the swimming pool. I did. I wore that thing everywhere, all the time. I never took it off and still don’t. Only now I’m pretty sure it doesn’t come off. In complete mortification I had to explain to my mom that I lost the ring at the pool. It was pretty much concluded that it was a goner after we combed the entire place and no one turned it in by the time summer was over. At that particular moment I was never more sure that I sucked at life. That’s the thing about Zwarts’. We require little punishment because no one is harder on us than our own selves.
A few months into the school year, one of my grandma’s students came into her title room wearing the ring like it was something she popped out of a quarter machine. When grandma asked where she got it, she said she had found it in the pea gravel by the swings at the pool. The odds anyone found it is a miracle in itself, given the fact the silver of the ring probably blended in with the grey pea gravel about as good as a fart in a hog barn. It took a little coaxing, but she eventually handed it over to my grandma. After vowing to never feel like a loser again, I shoved that thing back on my finger like I was nailing down a railroad tie.
Honestly, it’s a pretty simple rule of thumb: respect and appreciate the stuff ya got. Ahem, teenagers who think your parents are just going to replace those Uggs you left behind…shame on parents who actually do. No matter how little you have or how much, there will always someone who has nothing. You are lucky enough to wear $180 boots. Act like it. Plus, I’m sure there’s an illusive naked person who would loooove themselves an Ugg to put with that sock.
I made up a destroyed Denim Company for a semester of branding. This was one of the ads. When we did the photos the cops came. Someone thought my friend was being kidnapped. Then the newspaper came because they thought we were protesting something.
My trade show promo piece was, ironically DIY…a destroy it yourself kit.
I have to start by saying that today’s age has made me hate acronyms and abbreviations. I think it’s rude to assume everyone knows what the sam you’re saying. While you save time and brain wrinkles not spelling out words, the rest of us live in a fog until we can get to a computer with google because our flip-phone is the intellectually challenged cousin of the smart phone. That’s right. I’m 28. Literally a child of technological revolution, social media and the information super highway (kids today are like whaaaat? The internet….it’s the internet.) Still, I refuse to upgrade. For that, I feel my brain continues to function well in manual and I am present in life for things like stimulating conversations and enjoying a rainbow through my eyeballs instead of an instagram square from my camera phone. But on with it before I start to wrinkle, acquire 80 years of piss and vinegar and really start to complain about kids these days.
Aside from my seemingly turn of the century mobile (hey, I can text tweet), I am a with-it person. Pretty quick. Down with it. But like any human I have had moments. Two maybe. The day I finally voiced how sick I was of seeing that feat. guy in everyone’s music videos, I got schooled by my roommate that feat. meant featuring…after she stared at me for 30 seconds trying to figure out if I was for real. Yeah. I was for real.
So when my soon-to-be-sister-in-law kept referring to things as DIY, I would just nod my head and be like, “Oh, yeah, cool!” and then wonder why in the world I haven’t heard of them. I would rack my brain through new designers I’ve seen in Vogue. A store? Target’s featured brand? No, no. Just a lovely new way of dumbing down a complex set of words: Do. It. Yourself. Now that I figured that out, I’m glad to be a participating member of society once again.
Growing up we had other words for DIY. Crafty. Resourceful. I feel like it was less trendy and cool back then, though. I didn’t sell a whole lot of old rummage clip-on earrings with my own puffy paint designs no matter how many doors I knocked on. I think that particular enterprise made me 47 cents and some Dutch mints. For a short stint in high school I used Hello Kitty bandaids to hold together rips in my jeans…and my mother was a seamstress. Sometimes I’d just wear one on the knee of my jeans even if there was no hole. I thought it seemed cool. Nouveau. It never really took off.
It got me thinking, though, of DIYs that probably should never have been DIY-ed. Taking a scissors to clothing seemed to be a reoccurring theme in my thought process. My dad loves to cut the sleeves off almost anything. I now have to preface with “don’t cut the sleeves off this” after a few things I’ve bought him underwent Ron shirt surgery. The man hates sleeves. Tumors for shirts.
In college, destroyed jeans were huge. Hollister and Abercrombie had to have made a killing from student overage checks those years. It was a trend that gave my grandmother heart palpitations and possible night-sweats. “You mean those are brand new?! You paid for them! I could just give you some of grandpa’s work jeans.” If you asked for some for Christmas, believe you were NOT getting them. The alternative to paying was…of course…to DIY. Grab a scissors, some sandpaper, do your thing then throw them in the wash a couple times. The whole idea was alright. I didn’t mind a little distress in my jeans for a certain look, but I realized the trend had no chance at longevity or dignity the day one of the most consistently inebriated girls on campus wore hers to a basketball game. It was basically a belt with some dangly stuff that wrapped around the legs a few places. Either they were just really worn out (which, feel free to throw away then) or she was the kid in first grade who always ended up over-cutting her construction paper hearts (not so much a heart anymore). She was asked to leave. I assume to find actual pants.
For me, taking a scissors to clothing has always been a wrong and unpleasant experience. I should have just stuck with that sentiment. But one night before us girls went out I had this great idea to turn one of my favorite t’s into a cropped I-don’t-know-what to wear over a tank. Cropped was in and so were Ed Hardy cut up t-shirts. A few weeks later looking at pictures, I blamed my roommate for letting me go out like that. She said she didn’t know what I was doing, but thought I had a vision. “Yeah, it wasn’t your best idea,” she said. No, it wasn’t. It should have been somewhere with a can of pledge dusting a coffee table. It will perpetually haunt me.
Really, unless it’s Ed Hardy or any denim between 2003 and 2006, a good rule of thumb is just to trust the intentions of the person who made it. If there isn’t a gaping, frayed hole right below your butt cheek, it’s probably because there shouldn’t be. And if your jacket isn’t crop rows of crystal studs, it’s probably because you’re not a disco ball. But shooting up your clothing within an inch of it’s life with a Bedazzler is possibly a whole other story altogether.
[Published at hellogiggles.com: a positive online community for women.]
It’s funny to me when people comment on other people’s shapes like they’re establishing something that’s never been discovered by human thought before.…except the rest of humanity with functioning sight. Aside from maybe the girl wearing jeans 2 sizes too small and a t-shirt that won’t stay down because her jeans are squeezing the last bit of toothpaste out of her, no one is more aware of her shape than the person staring back at us in the mirror. We females as a whole are so aware of how we morph that it, often, borders illogical. I couldn’t count the amount of times I’ve told my mother or one of my friends that no one is looking that close and then commence in the same detailed pick-apart of my own self. As females, it’s just how we do. And it doesn’t make it right.
I was born 8 pounds 6 ounces and had rolls like a bakery. From that point forward I pretty much only grew vertically and no other direction. I started getting boobs in 4th grade. Stopped getting boobs in 4th grade. I weighed 57 pounds for virtually years on end despite my continuously stretching height, and have literally been caught in a stiff Minnesota wind and blown a few feet sideways. People lie and take off pounds on their drivers license, I lie and add 20. I’m skinny. Been skinny. Gonna always be skinny. Thanks or no thanks to genetics, I have virtually zero percent body fat and a ridiculous metabolism. By no intention, I like to eat healthy food just because I love how it tastes. My poor-man’s meal in college was just a can of beets with a ton of butter and a look of disgust by my roommate. (Don’t get me wrong, I could also put away a 1300-calorie Hardees thickburger.) On top of that, I have a disease that likes to eat protein more than a South Dakota beef farmer. Pretty hard to fill in skin without muscle or fat. So when people tell me I’m skinny, I think, “Congratulations, you have the gift of sight.”
In virtually all scenarios in my life I can tell you exactly what I was wearing. It’s how I distinguish one event from the next, it’s how I trigger memory and it’s how I define periods of my life. My scapula (shoulder blades for the less technical) have always winged out from lack of muscle strength. I remember wearing a loudly floral, knit jumper (loved that thing) one summer while walking through the Pipestone Monument with my brother and a couple other kids. Because the back was lower, one of them made a comment about my blades, only to be met by my 5-year-old brother’s rebuke (in years that I was generally a butt to him). One thing about siblings, we can send each other through the ringer, but others better not mess.
In elementary school, one of my good friends admiringly told me I was so cool because I was like a stegosaurus. Epitome of what every girl wants to hear. He would often touch my shoulder blades and collapse to his death from puncture wounds. It was funny. And weird. The desire to be a dinosaur runs stronger in boys. I found the idea of being a prehistoric lizard who cuts people with their back spikes less aspiring.
One particularly defining moment for me came when I was standing in line for the diving board at the pool one summer. A kid behind me says, “You’re really skinny.” Exactly in the way I stated before, as if this was completely brand new information. As natural as a knee jerk to the groin would have been, I turned and instantly retorted, “I LIKE my body,” with hardcore sass. The only thing missing was a snap in the air and a pop of the hip (which I believe had yet to be introduced into pop culture.) I climbed the steps and jumped off into the water feeling like I had just burned a bra or refused to shave my armpits. I was 9.
Thing is, I did believe it. I did like my body. But every time I waited in the diving board line I didn’t feel like educating the rest of the pool rats on body image. So from that point forward if my suit didn’t cover my blades, mom would sew a spandex bow from one strap to the other. And so that was how it became. The idea of having to explain slowly made me cover up over the years as I got skinnier and skinnier. When I hit junior high I had picked my insecurity, which I believe they hand out at the door in 7th grade along with your class schedule and deoderant samples.
The last time I wore short shorts was in 1996. They were black Zana-dis and only worn twice the day they were thrown into the abyss that is Goodwill. Call me crazy, but I’ve often wondered if they ever made it out of the vat of dejected clothing only to be worn again. I didn’t say call me not crazy. The last time I wore a lone t shirt was probably junior high. I’ve now spent the greater half of my life creating the illusion that I am not as skinny as I really am. I probably shouldn’t quit my day job to become an illusionist. I am the lunatic wearing jeans and a trendy blazer to a 95-degree baseball game. Delusionist.
It has gotten less easy to convince myself that what I have is okay. It’s a constantly changing form. When I get used to how my body is, more muscle leaves. Not only my shape changes, but also my ability. I like to think if it would just stay the same, I wouldn’t feel like pulling my hair out some days. With a body that could be a live diagram of bones and insertions for an anatomy class, I truly believe it’d be easier and more acceptable to be overweight. These are just truths. We all have our truths.
Ultimate truth: At the end of the day I don’t want any other person’s body but my own. I don’t want any other person’s life and I don’t want any other person’s insecurities, because, man, chicks have some diluted messes going on up in those brains! I know how to handle my own stuff and I don’t think any one else could. We are built exactly for what we got. That’s the thing we forget amidst it all, we have everything we need to be everything we need to be. Just as we are. God knows I have to tell myself that thousands of times a day. Ladies, we would save ourselves a whole hell of a lot of time if we would just believe it already.
I guess my point of this less funny blog is to hammer away at the illusion that we aren’t okay as is. Because if we weren’t, we wouldn’t be this way. It’s good to seek a better version of yourself. It’s ungood to seek a simulated version of someone else. After all, that’s what we’re doing most of the time when we wish we have what we don’t. Or what I’m most guilty of, wishing I had what I had (just as unproductive).
In December, I will hit 28. When I was a little girl I would sit in my room and imagine how I would look when I was older and what kind of woman I would be. I would watch other grown brunettes and pick and choose things I admired. Long hair, great clothes, pretty shoes, accomplished, charm, class, confidence. But out of everything, I knew I wanted to believe in who I was most of all. As I near my golden, while I don’t particularly know where I’m going or exactly what I should be doing lately, two things are for certain: I’ve got a closet full of fabulous and I have always and undoubtedly believed in who I am. So there you go, little T. Hope I’ve done you at least part proud so far.
I am a sentimental shopper. I have a tendency to buy things that remind me of things. I also have the quirky habit of naming my things. Meet the Tonkasins. The newest addition to my too-small-of-closet.
I had moccasins once before. When I was 10, my grandma bought me a pair at Fort Pipestone. They were white leather with a beaded Thunderbird on the top of the foot. I loved them.
I am perpetually consumed by watching people walk, especially watching their shoes as they walk. Back then I was still able and often preoccupied watching my own feet move in that crisp, white leather.
Possessing a fully-loaded imagination, I was sure the Native American who shaped and sewed the leather and wove the beading still lived in a teepee and wore a head dress. And because my schoolbooks portrayed a gumdrop and lollipop relationship between white settlers and Native Americans, I didn’t see any reason why all moccasins in the world wouldn’t be made by Native Americans (and all nylon snow boots made by the dumb white settlers). When in reality, my Minnetonka moccasins were made by some white dude’s company with zero authentic Native American roots, whose ideas don’t even come close to predating things like the Battle of Little Big Horn. These moccasins were a brand established essentially as a tourist souvenir for nature wandering Americans following WWII.
Ugh-merica.
Depending on the geography of their territory, Natives wore moccasins so the soft bottom would allow them to feel the earth and leave behind the least possible damage on nature and plant life. Wearing them was like going bare foot.
This was pre-concrete. This was also pre-gum.
In the 15 years that my legs worked I was able to experience the wide array of walking wonders.
- Slivers. Too many. You’d think I made a point of playing only on wood no one ever sanded or varnished. (Later to be dug out by the master sliver digger. The man with the hollow needle and a Flinstone vitamin, my father the construction worker.)
- A nail in my instep. (Actually, just an uneducated karate experiment.)
- Pins and needles. About as much as slivers. (Took me entirely too long to learn not to go barefoot in my mother’s sewing room. Whoever had troubles finding a needle in a haystack obviously never tried using their feet.)
- Stubbing my toe so bad I was sure it fell off.
- Stepping barefoot in dog feces. (Believe it or not, in a dash to save my brother who fell off his bike. Pretty much took a bullet. You’re welcome, Maxwell.)
- Stepping in glass.
- Getting blisters.
- Spraining my ankle.
- And…stepping in gum.
We’re not just talking a chiclet-size goob here. We’re talking a wickedly serious wad of Bubbleyum. Whoever chewed and hocked that hunk definitely did a double. And of course, I was wearing my not-even-a-week-old, pristine, white mocs. I believe soles of nobbed rubber were made only to ensure complete gum stickage.
Most things in life you learn by folly. I learned the only way to get bubblegum off a moccasin is to put it in the freezer next to the bag of peas and pound of hamburger. Even then, you sometimes don’t get it all. What’s left then is to be proactive. Instead of watching your feet, watch the ground your feet are on. Most of all, stop the ugly chain of ill-disposed gum. Trash it or swallow it.
One thing is sure, the Tonkasins won’t be seeing gum wads, large or small. One of the few benefits of never touching ground is never stepping in stuff…bare foot or new-shoed.
When I was little I was obsessed with being a witch for Halloween. I didn’t like the Wizard of Oz. I was infatuated with it. My tendency to purchase anything remotely red or glittery I believe to be overcompensation for the fact I never had ruby slippers, no matter how many times I wished upon a star and worked it into my nighttime prayers.
You think I’m joking.
You’d be mistaken.
My nightly conversations with God often went, “Now I lay me down to sleep [ruby slippers]. I pray the Lord my soul to keep [ruby slippers]. Guide me through the night [ruby slippers] and wake me with the morning light…and ruby slippers. I will never ask for anything else ever again. Amen.”
They never did divinely appear on my feet when my brown eyes opened in the morning. And if the psychology of a 4-year-old went beyond thinking shoes could complete a life, it could be concluded that was the singular reason I portrayed the Wicked Witch. Solidarity.
In 1991, I was 7 and in my fourth year as a little necromancer. My cackle was killer. That year Mother Nature also donned her black hat, long nails and green makeup, misinterpreted treat for trick and unleashed a gigantic blizzard on the greater Midwest the night of Halloween. Minnesota winters have always been the bane of my existence. (Yet, somehow I’ve managed 27 of them.)
It didn’t matter. I was determined. There would be no room left in my Scruff McGruff reflective candy bag. I was on a mission to eat so much sugar in one sitting that my dentist’s tears would weep tears of weeping tears. This was happening.
I was in the middle of shoving on my black nails when my mother informed me that I had to wear my snowsuit underneath everything if I wanted to go trick-or-treating.
No.
Unacceptable.
Being the smaller, yet still very detail-particular version of myself, I explained to my mom that I was not wearing my snowsuit. It would be uncomfortable and it would make my costume look funny. An indirect way of saying that it was not true to my character.
I did not win that debate.
I came out of my room a puffier, less mobile version of the Wicked Witch, but none-the-less black from the top of my satin hat to the tip of my patent leather maryjanes.
I would give anything to go back and see my face when my mother told me I wasn’t wearing those shoes and had to put on my snow boots. Equivalents:
- dousing me with a bucket of water.
- dropping a house on me.
I hated my snow boots. Snow boots went with no outfit. Ever. People were going to SEE my snow boots. Most of all, how could I say, “I’ll get you my pretty! And your little dog, too!” and be taken seriously in something that one astronaut guy wouldn’t even wear on the moon?
I was positive a small piece of my wicked cred died that night in footprints shaped like Pamida special snow boots, but I did survive (even if it was only by the tips of the 3 black nails left on my fingers). I vowed that I would never make myself wear those nylon, stinky things when I was old and no one was the boss of me. Every time someone opened their door holding a bucket of candy, I was sure I felt them thinking the same thing I hissed to myself with every stupid trudge…”Witches DON’T wear snow boots.”
