Capsule

It’s about ten days into a new season, meteorologically speaking. Whenever the season changes, I find myself thinking about outfits and jackets and dresses that will somehow transform me, or I start looking for that one handbag that will fulfill every requirement that I have for a handbag, making all others unnecessary and obsolete. I’m not going to buy any handbags, or any clothes (except maybe a dress) but I’m noticing them. I’m thinking about them. 

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Merino wool dresses, for example. You’ve seen these dresses, right? The 100-day challenge dress, a simple merino wool shift that is allegedly resistant to microbes and so will supposedly be as clean and fresh and free from odors on day 99 as on day one, assuming that you want to wear the same dress every day for three months. And I find that I do, actually. 

Until recently, it had never occurred to me to shop for dresses in merino wool knit. I must have clicked on an ad for merino wool clothing at some point; or maybe I just whispered the words “merino wool” in the middle of the night when I was off in the woods somewhere, all by myself. (That’s metaphorical speech. I’d never be in the woods all by myself, much less at night.) Either way, my social media feeds are now filled - filled, I tell you - with merino wool clothing ads. 

The photos and stories are very appealing; women take the same simple dress and style it differently every day; some days with a turtleneck or t-shirt underneath, sometimes with a jacket or sweater over top. Dressy with stockings and heels; casual with leggings and flats or sneakers. Jewelry, scarves, bags, jackets - combinations of all of these make the same dress look different, look 100 different ways. Or maybe 20 different ways, but that’s still a lot of outfits based on just one dress. If you have 20 different outfits to cover 100 days, you’re only on repeat about once every three weeks. That’s just math. I’m probably going to buy one of these dresses but I’m paralyzed by indecision - it’s down to one of three possible styles and 3 or 4 possible colors. 

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Here’s another thing I’m noticing, though I’ve never seen an ad for one - yet. The Marc Jacobs Tote Bag (capitalized because the bag is printed with the words “The Tote Bag”) seems to be all over the place now. On Friday night alone, I saw three of these bags, all carried by millennial women, who are young women as far as I’m concerned. That’s the thing about being my age. Everyone is young.

These bags do not appeal to me, for several reasons. First of all, I don’t like the imprint. I don’t know if it’s supposed to be funny or ironic or what - I just don’t get it. Even worse, one of the bags that I saw on Friday wasn’t even really a tote bag. It was a messenger bag, emblazoned with the bold and erroneous claim that it was a tote bag. I’d feel silly carrying a tote bag that screamed to the world “Hey, look at me - I’m a tote bag!” I’d feel like a gosh-darn idiot carrying a messenger bag that calls itself a tote bag. 

And even if I liked these bags, I can easily imagine buying one and carrying it and growing tired of it within days. There is no possibility that this bag could ever become THE bag, the one that I’m always looking for, the bag to end all bags. It’s a flash in the pan, that self-proclaimed Tote Bag. 

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There’s this sweater, too. I can’t stop thinking about this sweater that looks like it could solve several of my sweater problems. It’s a cardigan, open front, but not too long. That’s the mistake I’ve been making with cardigans. I buy them too long and I look unbalanced. The length on this cardigan is just right and it has pockets, outside AND INSIDE. On the other hand, it only comes in gray, and I’m not a huge fan of gray. But the shape is just right and those pockets keep calling me. I imagine slipping my phone into one of the inside pockets and then shoving my hands into the outside pockets and going about my business. 

The thing is, though, that I can also go about my business without that sweater. Witness - I’m doing it right now. 

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Not long ago, I was part of a conversation about work clothes. One of us said that she needed skirts and pants for the office. Another person had plenty of work clothes but she needed workout wear. Yet another person was searching for a perfect rain jacket. The oldest woman in the group waved a dismissive hand. "Oh, I have enough clothes. I just need to repair a few things." This woman is probably about 70 or so and it occurred to me that when she said that she had enough clothes, she meant forever. Is that not a thing to aspire to? Is that not #goals, as they say on the social media? When I’m 70 or so, I hope to be in a similar conversation with young (or at least younger) women, and then to drop the mic with a casual “Oh, I have enough clothes. Forever.” 

And that woman was right, by the way - she really doesn’t need any clothes. I see her almost every day, and she always looks nice. 

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The thing about early spring, much like early fall, is that the weather is much more changeable and less predictable than usual, even for Maryland. And that is why I couldn’t figure out what to pack for a weekend trip last week. We went to Virginia Tech to see my son swim in a big-deal swim meet, and I drove myself darn-near crazy with t-shirts and leggings and shorts and pants and a nice top and a sweater and jeans and maybe a dress and one pair of sneakers or two and flip flops or not and a rain jacket for sure because it was supposed to rain all weekend (it didn’t) but what about another jacket? Do I need another jacket? I didn’t bring another non-rain jacket - a mistake - and I also brought clothes that were almost 100 percent wrong. I was unhappy with almost every single possible outfit combination that I could possibly assemble from the collection of way too darn much stuff that I brought with me, except for one dress and sweater, and a pair of shorts and a long-sleeved t-shirt. I should have brought those things and only those things.

I read this French fashion book once, a long time ago, when I was young and thought that the French knew everything. I remember almost nothing about this book except for its distinctly bossy and dictatorial French tone, and a quote: “You can’t dress well if you have too many clothes.” I have too many clothes. This is why I feel like I never have anything to wear. This is why I can never figure out what to pack for a 2-night trip and so I pack it all, ending up with too many clothes and nothing to wear. To a swim meet, for crying out loud! 

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Seasonal changes and packing for a trip - those are the two situations that always make me want to replace everything I own, and just start the heck over. During these wardrobe crises,  I’m very susceptible to marketing pitches. 

The “capsule wardrobe,” for example. If you're on the internet at all, then you have heard of this new idea, which is first of all completely bogus and second of all not even remotely new. Back in the 80s and 90s, fashion magazines ran pictorial spreads of "mix and match wardrobe essentials" or whatever they called them. It was always a jacket and pants and skirt with a sweater or two, a blouse or two and maybe a t-shirt. By mixing and matching these key pieces you were supposed to be able to assemble an almost limitless number of outfits. The difference between those magazine spreads and the capsule wardrobe (why “capsule"? I don't know) is that the items in the magazines were from lots of different labels. The 2023 internet capsule wardrobe consists of a single label's pieces. Buy them all with one click, and you’re done. 

So why is this bogus? Setting aside the sustainability issue and the sheer ridiculousness of simplifying your life by BUYING MORE STUFF, it’s just impossible for one small collection of clothes - 15 pieces or so - to fulfill every clothing need a person could have, even a normal person who can get through the day without overthinking every conceivable course of action (and by the way, it’s also ridiculous to even think about weaning the same gosh-darn dress for 100 straight days). But wouldn’t it be nice if you could find the ONE perfect dress, the ONE perfect sweater and shirt and t-shirt and pants, and then just maybe buy a few of each in different colors and then never buy anything again? 

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I didn’t buy the merino dress but I bought another dress from a company whose dresses I really like, and I wasn’t disappointed. I now have three of these dresses, all very similar in cut and fabrication, in three different patterns. I’m probably set for dresses for the summer. Those three dresses will form the core of my summer work wardrobe. People will get sick of seeing me in those dresses. “There she goes again,” they’ll say. “Didn’t she just wear that one two days ago?” Count your blessings, imaginary colleagues - at least I’m not wearing the same merino wool dress every day for three months. 

And I kept checking on that gray sweater, too. I put it into my virtual cart a few times, and then closed the browser tab and walked away. Then the silly thing went on sale, so I just went ahead and bought it. Now I just have to plan another weekend trip. This time, I’ll know exactly what to pack. Or maybe I’ll just never leave the house again. 

Sectionals

It's Sunday morning and I suppose I should write about what's happening this weekend. I'm sitting in the stands at the Christiansburg Aquatic Center, home of Virginia Tech swimming and venue for the Speedo Eastern Zone Sectional Championship swim meet. 

Although he's been swimming his whole life, my son came to club swimming late. Baseball was his priority until just last summer, when he decided that he wanted to swim in college. Most potential college swimmers begin year-round swimming at age 7 or so and have already committed to a college team by junior year. My son joined a club team just last September at the start of his senior year and made the PVS and Eastern Zone cuts his first year. I'm given to understand that this is a big deal. 

He's been here since Wednesday (again with the craziness of kids missing school to compete in a swim meet) and we drove down on Friday afternoon, 4.5 hours of mostly very pleasant driving through scenic central and southwestern Virginia. It's pretty here, mountains and valleys and clean fresh air. 

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Blacksburg, where we are staying, is a small college town. Virginia Tech drives the economy. I don't know how many people work at Tech but the hotels and restaurants and stores serve the Virginia Tech community and its guests, all of the alumni who attend sports events, all of the high school kids who come to visit the campus and the families who come to visit their children. I hate to boil people down to sociological and political ideas but it's hard to be here and not see that there are a lot of poor and working class people working very hard to take care of a lot of middle class and rich people. 

On Friday night, we had dinner at a local chain restaurant. Our waitress was lovely, so kind and cheerful, taking care of a ton of tables in a professional and efficient manner.   She was also missing a few front teeth. It made me sad to think that people are probably sometimes unkind to her because of that. And it made me mad to think that someone can work really hard and make a valuable contribution, and still not be able to afford dental care. Welcome to America. Teeth are for rich people. 

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Every hotel in the area is filled with swim teams and swim families. There are clubs from Maryland, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, West Virginia and North Carolina. My son's club is staying at a Holiday Inn. Because I am a new club parent and not as tuned in to the meet schedule as more experienced parents, I didn't realize that I should have booked a room the moment he got the qualifying time. Instead, I just waited until he signed up for the meet and then found that almost every hotel room in Blacksburg and Christiansburg was booked. I was finally able to snag a room in a just-barely two-star Comfort Inn. 

This would have been fine, really. I don't care where we stay as long as it's clean and free of vermin. And trust me when I tell you that I checked the beds very carefully when we arrived. It was a simple double room with a decent bathroom, a little refrigerator, a TV so my husband could watch the Sweet 16, and a nice view of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Totally fine for a two-day stay. 

We came back to the room after Saturday prelims to change (and I did such a terrible job of packing, but that's a whole other story, which I'll probably tell you at some point). It was 1:30 PM and the room hadn't been touched. I asked about this, thinking that our room had been inadvertently overlooked, and the front desk person told me that room cleaning was sometimes late. Then when we returned from lunch and sightseeing and bookstore shopping, and the room still wasn't clean, he told me that they were short staffed and that they weren't cleaning rooms unless the guest was checking out. Note that we paid surge pricing (230 a night for a room that usually goes for 79).. Here's an idea - if you're charging surge prices then pay surge wages, and then maybe you won't have a hard time keeping your hotel staffed. I shall be making exactly this point when I speak to the hotel's general manager on Monday to request a 50 percent refund. 

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Holy cow, the woman sitting in front of me is carrying a giant backpack and she is putting things into it and taking things out of it every 15 seconds. A lip balm out and a sweater in and a wallet out and a bag of snacks back in and a water bottle out and a water bottle back in and the sweater back out. Exhausting. I need a nap after watching this for ten minutes. 

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This is a big deal swim meet but it's also pretty much like every other swim meet. Parents in the stands comparing notes, and abruptly dropping out of conversations when their kids' heats are called, swimmers elated after best-ever swims and sad after disappointments in the water. Most of the parents were cool. There were a few of the type who hold forth loudly on qualifying times and college scouts and officials and whatever else that they know more about than anyone else, but only a few. 

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On Friday afternoon I spent the first 30 minutes of the drive thinking about everything I needed to do st home and how I wouldn't be able to do any of it from Blacksburg. And then I stopped thinking about that. I looked at trees and mountains. I flopped on the hotel room bed and read my book while my husband watched basketball. On Saturday we took my son for lunch at a deli on the Virginia Tech campus and then took him back to his hotel so he could rest before the evening session, and then we wandered around Barnes and Noble shopping for books and drinking paper cups of tea. We watched a lot of swimming. It was a good weekend. I need to get out of town more often. 

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As for the swimming my son was neither elated nor crushed. He did fine, and scored a relay spot on the last day. He enjoyed the camaraderie and the giant catered breakfasts and dinners and the cool sectionals team gear. Meanwhile, I sent a very polite email to the hotel manager, who responded with an even politer email apologizing for the housekeeping situation. She processed a 50 percent refund to my credit card. I didn't even have to fight city hall. Swimmers aren't the only people winning around here, I tell you what. 

April, come she will

I’m finished with Edna O’Brien’s Country Girls trilogy, and not a moment too soon. Poor miserable Baba and Kate were getting me down. Now I’m reading Barbara Pym’s An Unsuitable Attachment, which is right up my alley. I read Barbara Pym for the first time last year, when Excellent Women was one of my favorite books of the year. An Unsuitable Attachment is more of the same, really - English clergy families in post-war Britain, women young and middle-aged and old preoccupied with class and busy morning to night with church bazaars and household affairs and - of course - food. Every single English female novelist of the postwar era wrote in great detail about provision gathering and meal preparation and serving. Food was scarce and they probably all thought about eating a lot. 

I was the only person home this morning, so I picked up my book to read as I ate my very Barbara Pym breakfast of soft-boiled eggs and a piece of toast. I was sure that food would appear within a page after I opened the book, and I was not wrong. The young librarian from the good clergy family was taking a Christmas parcel of chocolate, chicken breasts in aspic, and shortbread to the recently retired elderly library secretary. I’ve never understood the whole idea of meat jelly, but at least I’d heard of it. I had to look up fairy cakes, which appear in another scene. They’re basically British cupcakes. I learn something new every time I read Barbara Pym. 

I’m about a third of the way through the book, and the characters - the vicar Mark and his wife Sophia, the canon’s niece and librarian Ianthe, the veterinarian Edwin and his sister Daisy and all of their friends and connections in and around the Anglican church, are preparing for Lent, which they observe with rigor - no meat or sugar or butter, and not just on Fridays but every day. I’m also observing Lent and it’s hard enough just giving up sweets and sugar six days a week and meat on Fridays. Post-war Britons lived an abstemious life already, even without Lent, and a certain moral imperative surrounded their choices regarding what and how much to eat and what clothing to buy and wear and whether or not to turn the heat on. Read Barbara Pym or Muriel Spark or Elizabeth Jane Howard and you’ll find that all of the characters in the books that take place in the immediate post-war years and throughout the 1950s are preoccupied with thoughts of material comfort - not wealth, but comfort, because the moral imperative to live frugally and simply and rather uncomfortably applied even to the rich. 

I thought about this this weekend, the third weekend of my own personal Lent. After an unusually mild winter, it is of course sharply cold and damp, long days of gray dullness and chill, unrelieved by sweetness, not so much as a single Hershey’s Kiss, which would go a long way toward brightening up this rather dreary March. Yesterday was Sunday, so I had some chocolate but it’s Monday again, the Mondayest of leaden gray Mondays. My energy is so low on days like this. I took a walk around the track at the base today. It was more like a trudge. I took a trudge around the track, wrapped up in my coat and scarf, as two young Air Force officers practiced kicking soccer goals. These young people and their energy. 

But just as I’m settling into the cold early spring London gloom of a 1950s Anglican Lent, Mark and Sophia and Edwin and Daisy and Rupert and Ianthe and Penelope are all about to abandon me, flying off to the warmth of Italy where presumably they’ll look at paintings and eat pasta and drink wine and Rupert will probably fall in love with one of the two single women (Ianthe), while the other one (Penelope) falls in love with him and they’ll all revel in a romantic, sun-drenched, wine-soaked holiday and forget about Lent altogether. Protestants, I tell you. But it’s all good because it’s already March 50th, so we’re a third of the way through the third and longest month of the year. 

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It’s Tuesday now, just as cold as yesterday - maybe even more so because it’s very blustery today - but at least the sun is shining. I worked from home and now it’s 5:10 pm and I’m looking at a parallelogram of sunlight (that is Ian McEwan’s phrase, not mine, sadly) on the carpet, and rejoicing in the second full day of Daylight Savings, which means that we’ll have daylight until about 7:10 PM. We’re paying for it on the dark black coffee-bitter mornings when my son gets up for swim practice in what seems like (essentially is) the middle of the night, but it’s almost worth it. The days will get longer on both ends, and the warm days will be more frequent, and the figurative postwar gray London of early spring in Maryland will give way to the sunshiny Italy of summer, and I’ll stop complaining for five minutes. But now I’m going to go for a walk. I’ll need to bundle up first. It’s freezing out there. 

Housekeeping

Wednesday was one of those days, one of those work all day and come home and work some more days that draw me into my own little vortex of I-work-so-hard grievance, all cranky and huffy and put-upon. It took me 15 minutes just to get out off the base and then another 30 minutes on Connecticut from Jones Bridge to Randolph (IYKYK) so I would have been cranky already but I was really cranky because I had so many things to do, so much food to cook and laundry to wash and dry and fold and compulsive housecleaning to do. And I had to call our old lady to get her shopping list, too. Why me? I have to do everything around here! Sheesh.  

I hung up my coat and washed my water bottle and thought about each chore that I had to do, ranking them in order, the most odious to the least; and then I project-managed my way through a plan to work through my rank-ordered list and just get shit done. And yes I’m aware that I could have finished at least one and maybe two of these chores in the time it took me to rank them by relative odiousness and then plan out a whole PMP-certified Gantt chart timeline but then I’d be a whole other person and you wouldn’t be reading this. 

Long story short (yes, I’m aware that it’s too late), that totally worked. Not only did I get everything done in record time if records existed and they should, but my mood improved and my perspective returned and I was clearly able to see that I’m actually not the most overworked working mother in the whole world and that my life is actually pretty easy, relatively speaking. And relatively speaking is all we have, right? 

Sinead and Edna

It’s a rainy Friday, a WFH day for me, and I’m still in my pajama pants, though I am wearing a respectable business casual sweater and could pass muster as a working professional from the neck up, if an unplanned teleconference forces me to show myself. I was going to change out of the pajama pants but it’s almost three o’clock now and I have no plans to leave the house unless it’s on fire so I think I’m dressed (or half-dressed) for the day. 

The thing is that I’m tired because I was out until after midnight last night, a rare occurrence for me on a Thursday night. The AFI Silver is hosting an Irish film festival and last night’s feature was “Nothing Compares,” the Sinead O’Connor documentary. I suppose I could have rented it but an Irish film festival seemed a better venue than my couch. An opportunity to see it with my people, so to speak.

The evening did not disappoint, although full disclosure, I did fall asleep for a bit in the rather long interval between our dinner at the Limerick Pub in Wheaton and the 9:45 movie time. We arrived at the AFI at 9 o’clock, to an almost empty lobby. The box office person told us that the early screening was running late and that our show wouldn’t start until 10, leaving us with an hour to sit and wait. An hour at 9 PM, which is when I always hit the wall, especially after a hamburger and 1.5 Smithwicks. And we were sitting there in the nearly deserted lobby, on a pair of comfortably cushioned movie theater chairs, and there was nothing stopping me from closing my eyes for a few minutes, and so I did. My husband sat next to me, scrolling through his news feed. He might have napped for a few minutes, too. I don’t know because I was fast asleep, sitting right in the middle of a movie theater lobby in downtown Silver Spring. 

And then another movie let out and all of a sudden the lobby was a whirlwind of Irish film festival energy, and the ushers and concession stand employees were strolling amid the crowds handing out pints of Guinness in plastic cups. 

My husband, who is not a documentary film fan nor a particular admirer of Sinead, was very impressed with the free Guinness, although “free” is a pretty loose term considering that the movie tickets cost $22 each. I thought for a moment, as I held my free plastic pint cup of Guinness, which I don’t especially like, that maybe as lower middle-income parents of college students, we might have been wiser to just stream the movie at home. But sometimes you need to get out. 

I’m a very very very introverted person but that doesn’t mean that I don’t love people. I love being out among people. I have to plan ahead and muster my energy and maybe take a nap in public just before the people descend upon me but with enough preparation, I can really enjoy a crowd. I was wide awake as soon as the people filled the lobby, the people leaving the early showing and the people arriving all at once for the later showing, all of them excited to be out on a Thursday, dressed in jeans and sweaters and skirts and t-shirts, some in Irish sweaters. It was cold, so there were lots of interesting jackets. Women outnumbered men by 2 to 1 or so (not every man is as good a sport as my husband) and so there were also lots of interesting handbags. People were laughing and talking and hoisting their “free” pints of Guinness. There was lots of energy. It was something of a scene. 

The movie was excellent. I read Rememberings last year, and most of the events depicted in the movie were covered in the book (including the now-infamous SNL performance, though why infamous I don’t know because what did they think that Sinead O’Connor was going to do, just stand and look pretty and sing her little song and go home?), although not the reverse. The movie didn’t get into Sinead’s difficult professional relationship with Prince, except for an ending credit explaining that Prince’s estate refused to allow the filmmakers to use the song for which the movie was named. But that’s not my favorite Sinead song anyway, and there were lots of clips of performances during her early stardom, when her extraordinary voice was at its best. She really is one of the greatest female singers of the 20th and 21st centuries. Definitely worth leaving the house on a cold Thursday night in March. 

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And Sinead is not the only rebellious Irishwoman on my radar this week. I’m reading Edna O’Brien’s Country Girls trilogy and although I can see its literary merit and can understand why it has become a modern Irish classic, I also cannot wait to be done with it and will not miss Caithleen and Baba, not one bit. Or rather, I won’t miss the mid-20th century Irish misogyny that shaped these two hot messes in female human form. 

Caithleen (Kate) Brady and Brigid (Baba) Brennan, although they both live well outside the very restrictive circa 1955 Irish Catholic social norms, do not enjoy their rebellion. Kate, in fact, is not rebellious at all; she’s just a book-smart and street-stupid girl with no emotional self-control who falls for the wrong man and proceeds to make her life miserable over him, and his as well (spoiler alert - he deserves it). Kate’s lifelong friend Baba is the spoiled daughter of a prosperous Irish country veterinarian. Baba is hilariously funny, as mean as a snake, and completely without morals of any kind. She is almost nihilistic in her lack of normal human sympathy and her boredom with everything and everyone. Baba is also married to a terrible man with whom she lives a miserable loveless existence. 

The trilogy was apparently extremely controversial in Ireland when it was published, and it’s still shocking in places. But the most shocking thing about it is that it’s not just a whole novel, it’s three whole novels, about two characters who are so unlikable that they can’t even stand themselves. I kept reading until the end because I generally do that, and because the trilogy has enough page-turning need-to-know-what-happens-next appeal that I wanted to keep going. But I will not miss these books or these characters at all, and I can’t wait to not read another Edna O’Brien book, pretty much ever again. 

I didn’t plan for this to publish on International Women’s Day but here it is, a serendipitous coincidence in which I finish a post on the perfect day to publish it. St. Patrick’s Day might be just as appropriate but if you have seen “Nothing Compares,” or if you’ve read The Country Girls and its sequels, you won’t feel much like celebrating Irish culture, especially if you don’t have a Y chromosome.