I swear I did something or other today and I was going to tell you all about it, but then I talked to the Colleague on the phone for like an hour and a half, and if I have any brain cells left, I have no clue where they trooped off to. I'm all about the foundation garments today anyway, but first, let's see ...I got a haircut, so that's something. I went to Circuit City to return the bad headphones and the police and fire department were leaving as I got there and letting all the employees back in, and there was some nasty chemical stink in there like a whole roomful of plastic melted, and though I was only there for three minutes, I left with some hellacious headache. I hope they closed the store and let all the employees go home.
Then there's the saga of the homeowner's rebate and the House Papers. Every year, we have to fill out this form to apply for the NJ Homeowner's Rebate -- it's like $150 or something -- and one of the questions was to fill in your last year's income from line something or other on your state tax return. Which would be ... where?
It was time. I had to approach the Dreaded House Papers and put everything in a reasonable place and throw out crap. I went to the Container Store last week and got the appropriate ... well, containers, and today after the haircut I set to work. I still need to file and sort this year's papers, but now there's a place for everything, and the garbage is gone. I found the tax return. (It was in an envelope on top of a pile of other crap under my desk, in the knee-hole.) I went online to fill out the application and got to the place to put in the income figure and got a message: Our records show that you completed a tax return for 2005. The figure will be automatically entered on your application.
Ah. Well. At least now I know where my high school diploma is.
When I was a little girl, I could be sure that there were certain things that would be part of my adulthood, things that would mark me as a teenager, even, and no longer a child.
- I would shave my legs.
- I would wear real stockings held up by garters, and not wear tights anymore.
- I would wear a girdle.
The first one came at 12, which I would think is much older than most girls start shaving their legs these days. I was a fairly dorky kid, and my mother figured that I had no need to shave my legs until ...
I needed to wear stockings. Not that we didn't wear dresses or skirts to school every day, but with socks, generally knee-socks, and our dresses were knee-length, so there we were. But when I was 12, I went to a Bar Mitzvah and had to dress more or less like a grown-up, so she let me shave, and gave me a pair of stockings and a garter belt. This was not some sort of racy garment, but a utilitarian device that had these rubber clippy-things that held up your stockings.
So that was two out of three. Within two years, mini-skirts were in, garters were out in favor of pantihose, which you could wear with mini-skirts (garters would show), and nobody under 50 was wearing a girdle. The natural look was in. And I, you can be sure, was in it.
So you can imagine my surprise, some 40 years later, to discover that those things were not just worn for convention, but for a reason.
Not that I bought a girdle, or even saw any real girdles in Kohl's yesterday. Everything is much more subtle now. But you can get all kinds of stuff that holds you in, or up, one way or another.
It's really eerie how all kinds of weird shit that my mother used to do is starting to make sense to me now. A little unsettling, you know?
