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TTDNST: Shoes
Thursday, April 16th, 2009 | Author: Erika

For today’s Things That Do Not Suck Thursday, I’m going to give in to my girlier side and wax a bit poetic all at the same time.  I’m not going to assault you with a haiku or anything, but I do want to talk about shoes for a brief moment.  In my opinion, there are very few other things a modern woman can rhapsodize about other than shoes.

You see, I can look at shoes for hours without feeling bad about my life or my finances.  Clothes?  Not so much.  I was tempted into browsing Old Navy’s site the other day and looking at all the reasonably priced clothing made me despair.  Jeans for $10!  Shirts for $7!  The cuuuutest summer dresses for a pittance!  All around me these affordable clothes swirled, enrapturing me with their so-close-and-yet-so-far accessibility.

You see, I buy clothes once per year.  I spend the first six months enjoying my new clothes, loving them, giving them preferential treatment over the other clothes.  As they fade or fray, I start the grim cycle that is my decision to buy new clothes.  I’ll set benchmarks for myself: I’ll buy new clothes if I see a good sale in October.  Sales will drift by and a new benchmark will be set, met, and overrun.

On and on until my clothes are in tatters a year later and I force myself to set aside a tiny amount of money to buy the essentials: a new pair of jeans to replace the one with the holes, three new pairs of shirts to take the place of the ones that are either too frayed or too faded to wear in public anymore, maybe a package of socks so that I’ll own socks that don’t have holes in them.

Then, because I only buy enough clothes to last me for half the week, I end up wearing my new clothes twice a week and they’re all worn to bits come one year later.  Every year I tell myself I’ll buy more clothes for myself next year, and every year I’m proven a liar.  Browsing through clothes is like a thousand tiny reminders that my wardrobe is less than half as adequate as I’d like it to be.

Shoes, though.  Shoes are different.  I can browse through shoes without feeling avarice because looking at shoes feels more like admiring art than shopping.  Shoes, in all their myriad styles, heights, colors, fabrics, and decorations are beautiful to me.  I like them on my feet obviously, but I like them nearly as well just about anywhere.

I ran into these shoes the other day and knew I had to share them, if for no other reason than they match the daffodils from yesterday:

Oh yum.

Oh yum. Yes please, and thank you.

They’re Christian Louboutin.  I love Christian’s shoes but I could pay a mortgage payment with two pairs of these beauties.  He has a way of crafting shoes that do the same thing everyone else has been doing for centuries, just better.  Some girls have a thing for Manolo Blahnik (thanks, Sex and the City), other ladies prefer Franco Sarto or Prada or Nine West.  For me, it’s Christian Louboutin.  His shoes, and these shoes in particular, are this week’s Thing That Does Not Suck because you don’t have to be able to afford them to admire them.

Category: Fashion, Lifestyle, Things That Do Not Suck  | 10 Comments
Erika Mitchell and the Case of the Vanishing Weekend
Monday, January 12th, 2009 | Author: Erika

Can you help me find something? I swear, I just had it around here a second ago, and then I turned around and poof! It was gone.

It had two days, I didn’t have to work during it at all, I was supposed to spend it relaxing…I’m pretty sure it’s called a “weekend” but darn it, I seem to have mis-placed it! I suppose I’ll just have to wait for the next go-around in four days.

We made it through the (mysteriously missing) weekend, but only barely. After the rehearsal on Friday evening, the wedding all day on Saturday, and church on Sunday, we barely even had time to switch outfits before we were bustling out the door again. The next time Wes and I are in a wedding, we’re taking a day off work to recuperate because man, is that exhausting.

So fatigued was I, in fact, that when I tried to style my hair this morning it totally flipped me the bird and told me to go do something unmentionable to myself. I had to bobby-pin my bangs back and call it a day because there was no coaxing those suckers out of entropy. Not with any amount of hairspray and profanity.

As tired and disheveled as we are, though, we at least made it through. Wes ushered people into the church with aplomb, and I managed not to faint while reading Scripture during the ceremony. It was certainly not for lack of trying, though.

I have a wee bit of stage fright that manifests in the usual way: increased blood pressure, freezing cold hands, desperate desire to run screaming from the building.

My stage fright this time, though, was momentous. My blood pressure was so high that I got white spots in my vision and afterward had to sit down for two hours in order to feel right again. What a wreck!

Supposedly, I read my passage of Scripture well enough, but I don’t remember it. For all I know, I could have read the copyright information at the beginning of the Bible and everyone is just telling me I did well so that I don’t bolt before they can book me a room in the “Special Needs” motel.

Through it all, though, Wes and I made it out the other side just fine and even managed to spend some quality time together yesterday. One afternoon with my husband isn’t enough to redeem an entire weekend bursting with people/places/faces, but it is enough to keep me going until the next time I can hole up in my house for a weekend of recharging.

For two exhausted people, we manage to clean up pretty nicely. If I do say so myself.

Please note the amazing little black dress, courtesy of my mother-in-law, that prompted no less than four little old ladies from church to tell me I looked hot.
Wes even took it a step further by telling me I looked “movie-star pretty”. If it were possible, I’d marry him again.
Category: Fashion  | 4 Comments
Starting the New Year Off With a Bang
Saturday, January 03rd, 2009 | Author: Erika

This, ladies and gentlemen, is why you should never vacation too long:

You start getting all kinds of strange, crazy ideas in your noggin that can segue to life-altering consequences. This photo that I’m sharing with you here is the first in some shocking evidence I just received: I have bangs.
For the first time since I was 10 years old, I am sporting little tiny hairs at the apex of my browline.
It all started with a fabulous Christmas present from my in-laws. An innocuous little cut/color appointment to start my New Year off right.
The appointment weighed heavily on my mind all week, daunting me (I obviously need more important things to worry about). Should I go long? Short? Dark? Light? Bangs or no bangs.
I ran the bangs idea by my stylist and she took it from there. An hour later, my hair was cut, colored, and I had no idea who the person in the mirror was. I thought she looked sassy, but she didn’t look like me at all.
Now, I’m home and the realization that I have bangs is slowly dawning on me. What have I done?! My hair is really cute, but this look is so different I’m having cognitive dissonance just from looking at my face (This is, needless to say, why I will probably never do plastic surgery. Think of the therapy bills!)
Regardless of how unfamiliar I now look, I am very pleased with the results. It’s something I’ve mulled over for a long time and I’m glad I took the plunge. I don’t want to die without any scars, so to speak.
Wes is a big fan as well. He enjoys the fringe benefit (Ha! You see what I just did there? So terribly punny) of having a wife who gets her kicks from changing up her hair, which is that it’s kind of pleasant to look at the person you see every day with fresh eyes. It certaily doesn’t hurt that my stylist is a maven with coloring and cutting my hair, either.
Whichever way you want to slice it, my hair is bangin’ now (Yet again with the bad pun. You can stop reading if you feel nauseous) and I get to live with it until it grows out again. As far as brash style choices go, this one turned out alright. It could have been worse, I could have embraced Hammer pants or, even worse, leggings as pants.
Category: Fashion  | 6 Comments
Stain Magnate
Tuesday, September 09th, 2008 | Author: Erika

Wesley’s parents gifted him with a most timely and necessary birthday gift this year: new clothes. They voyaged with him to the outlet mall yesterday and bought him some much-needed new t-shirts, sweaters, and pants.

The reason these new clothes were so needed and thusly so appreciated is that my husband has an inexorable relationship with stains. Try as he might, his body exerts an unseen magnetic-like attractive force that invites every crumb, splatter, and splotch to land squarely somewhere on his personage. I can honestly say that he tries to avoid staining his clothes but it’s like trying to butter a piece of untoasted bread with cold butter: completely hopeless.

He showed me his new acquisitions last night and we began the delightful task of removing the tags from the clothes (clothes really feel like they’re yours when you get to remove the tags, don’t they?). As I was reviewing the care instructions on all his new clothes, I realized that when you bring a new item of clothing into your wardrobe, you have to form a kind of relationship with it.

You have to learn which of your other clothing items it looks sharp with and which it looks schlumpy with. You have to learn how to care for it (Would you like to be tumbled dry on low heat or laid flat to dry? Can I interest you in some fabric softener? How about a nice steam ironing? Care to take a trip to the dry cleaner?) and make room for it amongst your other clothes. You have to deal with the ensuing emotions that come from introducing new clothes to your old ones (personally, I always like my existing clothes a little less when I see how frayed/faded/dated they are in comparison to my shiny new clothes.)

Therein lies the danger in buying new clothes: they severely decrease the chance that you will wear your older clothes again. This is partially the reason we never buy new clothes. We figure that as long as the clothes cover our bodies and are decent to wear in public, they’re probably fine and don’t need to be replaced.

Luckily, our annual trip to Goodwill with unwearable clothes is coming up. This means room in the closets for new clothes and more than one pair of pants for me to wear! I’ll be sure to fill you in on my sticker shock as I confront the prospect of spending money on something as stainable and transient as clothing. It’s sure to be a hoot!

Category: Fashion, Just plain nonsense  | Leave a Comment
Clothed in Good Sense
Wednesday, July 30th, 2008 | Author: Erika

At the behest of a friend of mine, I checked out a blog today that offers advice for women about how to dress at work. I thought it would be a site with some advice about how to dress your figure and when you should or shouldn’t wear open-toed shoes. What I didn’t count on was it being filled to the brim with adorable dresses, coats, and shoes so cute that I considered going out and finding a high-paying job just so I would have an excuse to wear them.

As I’ve said many times, working in sweatpants is fantastic. I love that I can take breaks to fold laundry, cook dinner, and play with my puppy if I so desire (and I frequently do.) I wouldn’t trade that freedom for anything.

However, cute shoes will not be ignored.

There, now that I’ve just spewed girliness all over your monitor, here comes the pragmatic side that Wes loves so well. Some of these dresses cost upwards of $300.

Wait, that figure needs more emphasis…$300

When I first saw that price-tag, I wondered if the dress came with a personal valet who would handle its care and mending. I mean, wow, that’s just a lot of money for clothes.

The way I feel about clothes is pretty conflicted. I love clothes, I love shoes, and I have been known to squeal when confronted with cute purses, but I think there could not possibly be a worse use for money than expensive clothes.

Think about it: One wrong turn o’the wrist with some red wine, one unfortunate sharp edge on an open drawer, one ice cream too many and your $300 dress is now useless. It’s too much of a gamble to have nice clothes because there’s no guarantee you’ll get your money’s worth before the garment becomes unusable.

Shirts in particular bedevil me because shirts seem to incur the most damage of all, don’t they? They catch all your crumbs, they absorb most of your sweat, and they are usually the first to tell you that perhaps you should consider switching to sorbet. I love cute blouses but I just can’t, in good rationale, justify spending loads of money on the untrustworthy shirt.

Pants are a bit different, because a good pair of jeans is worth its weight in gold, but not by much. I’ll never, ever, spend hundreds of dollars on jeans because, really, what is the point? I can get jeans from Old Navy for $30 that cover my bits just as well and no one but maybe .005% of the population can tell the difference. No, no, will not spend loads of money on pants, which at a moment’s notice can rip at the knee and leave you debating whether anyone can possibly pull off cut-offs in this present age.

Don’t even get me started on expensive jewelry. I have trouble seeing the point here as well because there’s no guarantee your umpteen thousand dollar jewel isn’t going to fall off after your ring/earring/necklace catches on an unfortunate piece of cashmere. I’d much rather fly to Paris for the weekend than have a diamond necklace.

How about you, are you a clothes-horse or do you consider an expedition to Ross the ultimate big-game hunting?

Category: Fashion, Lifestyle  | 3 Comments
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