So Outrageous

SPRING BREAK, WHOO! Spring break for me means two months of bashing my head against the wall trying to make myself stop playing games on Facebook because I haven’t been able to find a job.

On top of that, I am poorly. Poorly and fully assimilating myself into life here by stealing their colloquialisms!

Now that my second semester here is almost over, I can really reflect on how few friends I’ve made and how little I’ve learned about myself or the culture here. I think if I had been drinking way more and more often I would have had a fuller experience but instead I spent the semester actually reading every single book set me and turning my coursework in on time like a sucker.

None of that matters, though, because I met goddamn Michael Palin and he said I was a lovely person. Completely unprompted. Except for that last part.

When I found out Michael Palin was having a book signing in Norwich I didn’t even know how to process the possibility of seeing the person who basically developed my sense of humor (and if you ever get to meet him, you can blame him). While waiting in line, I tried to think of what I could possibly say to him that did not involve the words “I would still bang you, just sayin”’ because that is extremely disrespectful even if it is true.

Having lined up an hour early with my friend Bonnie and someone who is no longer friends with me because I would not bang them, just sayin’ (he was not enough like Michael Palin), we ended up being fairly frontwards in the line. We heard we couldn’t take pictures with him so I took a picture with a Dalek instead.

I wore a cleavagey dress and covered it up with a grandma sweater. Strategy.

The time approached. One of my first and most heartbreaking celebrity crushes (SO MANY OBSTACLES), one of the funniest men alive, a friend of Beatles was right in front of me.

“Can I just say. You’re a lovely person??”

was the best I could do. And Michael Palin, being that thing I just told him he was, said, “You can say that as many times as you like!”

“Oh. I’m glad I asked permission. That’s not crass, is it?” Which I’m sure seemed non-sequitur or just inane to him, but was actually apropos to my inner monologue which was instructing me not to be disgusting towards him because he is not just a living legend, but in fact a normal human being who probably doesn’t like it when people are disgusting at him.

And he laughed. And he said, “You’re a lovely person!”

AND THEN HE COMMITTED IT IN WRITING:

Also don’t you say a goddamn word about Michael Palin’s grammar. If Michael Palin wants to put the possessive there he goddamn will.

Look I met Michael Palin this photo is completely undoctored:

I never need to meet anyone or have their opinion of me again.

Happy paczkicakegras!

Sometimes when I give into the more severe episodes of anxiety I have, I convince myself I am utterly alone in the world, and my feelings need to be fed.

UTTERLY ALONE IN THE WORLD

It is a perfect collision when these episodes interact with one or more eating-focused holidays. The English call today “Pancake Day”, but actually serve crepes. If pretending not to be French helps you sleep at night, I understand, and let’s carry on. Being a quarter Port Richmond consonant-enveloped Polish, I think of today as Pączki Day. Being a person who likes donuts and showing people her boobs, I also call today Mardi Gras.

I took myself to Biddy’s Tearoom because I saw on Facebooks that they were gonna be serving pancakes, and I ordered a Goat(s) Cheese and Watercress crepe. Pancake. It was one of the best crepes I’ve ever had! The caramelized onions were so very sweet and tangy, and I am not a girl who gets filled up easily, but I canceled what I thought were crystallized plans to get myself a dessert pancake. The lavender earl grey tea I had with it on a whim was lovely, as well. I lost my taste for Earl Grey after drinking four mugs of it in a row one strange evening an eon ago, but I was in the mood for something delicate, and the lavender sort of neutralizes the spiciness of the bergamot. It’s also not too floral! It hits a good balance. 

Look how goddamn cute Biddy’s is though:

They offer such cute things to go, as well, like homemade pork pies and scotch eggs. At one of the Norwich vintage fairs I had a haggis pie from Biddy’s pop-up cafe that was incredible! The wait staff are also super sweet and cute.

I did buy a gross donut or two or many from Gregg’s for later. Caramel cream! It’s Mardi Gras! After tonight I will give up giving things up for Lent for Lent.

I considered buying ALL THE ONESIES because really, what’s more important? A week’s worth of groceries or being able to dress like a pink unicorn? Everyone’s onesie game should be tight. Luckily my existential nausea overcame me again before I made it into the store.

Any time someone compliments me on something I wear, a favorite response of mine is to crassly yell, “THANKS! IT WAS ONLY $2! AT THE THRIFT STORE!” because my budget is definitely everyone’s business.

That’s why I can’t believe I’ve been in this city for nigh on five months and haven’t properly gone thrifting. Perhaps it was because every time I popped into a thrift store in the city, it only took a couple minutes for me to realize that, although the stock was beautifully organized by size and color, there weren’t any bargains of the Mennonites-in-Bumblefuck, PA variety.

Nope. No Mennonites here.

The majority of the stock in the average Norwich thrift store is from the past 5-10 years, pilling, and not particularly stylish. I didn’t feel like I gave Norwich’s charity shop scene a proper chance by just popping in a random store once a month, though, and decided today to start investigating it more fully. I armed myself in my best thrifting outfit: a blouse, skirt, belt, tights, and cardigan, the ultimate ensemble for swapping out items when I’m trying things on. 

I wanted my first stop to be the Happy Dog Charity on Queens Road but it was closed! No retail store should ever be closed on a Saturday. The window display had a handwritten sign that said “Seashells, £1.95 for 3″, which I guess is a very good bargain if they are SEASHELLS FROM THE MOON. So I guess I will find out next time if they might also have a 2-for-1 deal on gum from under a desk or maybe I can buy £3 for £6.

I backtracked to a block of charity shops situated under Supatone (Norwich’s most excellent music store), starting with Relief, but didn’t find any of the stock particularly appealing. Next I went into the RSPCA, which actually had a sign on the door begging people to bring donations in, as they were running out of clothing to sell. Unsurprisingly, that was another miss. I would have gotten the slightly faded floral Primark leggings they had except I already had a pair and I’m pretty sure I paid less for them.

The Pets in Need of Vets shop is the last and biggest shop before Queens Road turns into St. Stephens, and thankfully, it didn’t disappoint. Entirely. They didn’t have a rack of dresses, I suppose because dresses are too… summery?  I also don’t really understand why fairly beat up loafers get priced at £10, but their pricing wasn’t universally unreasonable. PDSA has a vintage/retro section, in which I found this beauty for £6.50:

Giant collar? Check. Velvet bow? Check. Weird scratchy wool material that probably won’t be optimal when I take it back to an actually temperate climate? SHUT UP I AM NEVER LEAVING. I also nabbed a black lace high collar top because I sure don’t have enough see through items in my wardrobe for wearing to pictures on Tumblr. PDSA gets points for having a vintage section but not pricing it way outside of its normal pricing range, which is something that a lot of stores in Philadelphia do.

Then I had to go into the enormous Chapelfields mall to pee and Chapelfields on a Saturday is a hurricane of strollers and 16-year-olds sitting in puddles of themselves on floors and holy god do I hate it.

Westlegate!

I went up Westlegate and stopped in Sam’s in the City, a tiny and relatively new Good Samaritan outpost. They had a lot of trendy and reasonably priced dresses, and I nabbed this guy for £2.50:

Bubble hems! Mesh! Weird snakey geometric print! Yes, ok, sold! I’m impressed with the dead look in my eyes in these photos. Mind you, I had just been in a mall. It does things to me.

My final store for the day was Big C in Westlegate, whose prices were ridiculous, and they also had a bizarre summer section that had velour and leather and suede items in it. Why bother separating your items out seasonally if you are basically going to concede that you don’t experience warm weather in this country?

I can easily come up with a number of reasons that thrifting here isn’t what it is in small-town Pennsylvania. The first is that the consumption of fast fashion in this country, as in the US, means that people will sooner buy a wardrobe that gets tossed after a few wears and washes than buy anything that’s resilient enough to be passed onto a second owner. It’s also pretty hard to price Primark stuff for resale when it’s so incredibly cheap to begin with.

The other reason is that Norwich has an incredible vintage scene, which I am definitely going to write about! While it’s wonderful that there are so many beautifully curated vintage shops around, I can’t help but think they source a little of their stock from thrift stores around here. It’s a totally reasonable thing to do! But if people in the know are buying up the good stuff and pricing it at what’s actually worth, it takes the thrill of the hunt out of it.  I do know that whether my money goes to a charity shop or a vintage shop here in Norwich, that it’s going to something worth supporting. I can’t help but miss my Care & Share in Souderton with tons of 80s dress for $2, though.

Slight disillusionment has only one cure, and that is a snack. I headed up to Harvest Coffee Shop, which I had often wanted to try for homesickness reasons, as it looks like any number of bakeries in Chinatown back home. I tried a BBQ pork pastry and a pudding-flavored milk tea, the cost of which was roughly 4x of what I’d pay at home (which still isn’t very much!).

What else can I expect when there aren’t 200 competing bakeries on the same block, though? The staff was really helpful and sweet, though, and the seating is better than any Philly Chinatown bakery.

I intend to give some of the more central and some of the more peripheral charity shops a try and see if location makes any difference. In Philadelphia the problem is usually that the shops are really picked over, but here it’s apparently just that no one’s donating! That’s fine, though, I prefer the feeling of knowing there’s nothing good to the feeling of having missed out on the good stuff to other people.

What a jerk.

I thought the North/South divide in the US was a palpable cultural split what with that war about whether it was ok to own people (“states’ rights”) but it’s entirely a different ballgame (football? soccer? BOTH? NEITHER?) here in the UK (cricket???). There is no equivalent Mason Dixon line indicating where people start being too Northern or too Southern. Hadrian’s Wall divides “the north” from “The North”, but it generally seems that anything above London is the north and is the provenance of idiots, idolators, incestuators, and Irn-Bru drinkers, and anything south, inclusive of London and Oxbridge, is a bunch of asshole snobs.

Norwich is somewhere in between (but not part of the Midlands. Because Mid=north?) but also a place with incest. And folksiness.

From my limited and stereotype-rooted observations, northernness is something to be beaten or teased out of you till you say “GRAHSS” like a proper human being. I love “the north”. I love the beautiful variety of dialects, regional foods, and perhaps the generally more relaxed and less aloof attitude of the people there.

AND I LOVE THE FIELDS FULL OF SHEEP.

On my train trip to York I saw an immediate change of landscape from the grey fens dotted with windmills in Norfolk to bright green fields. FULL OF SHEEP.

I booked a room at the wonderful Abbeyfields Guest House where I met a very friendly Australian couple and I threw all my stuff on my adorable pink gingham bed, quickly ruining what was once a very lovely view.

My first view of York, upon leaving the hotel to explore, was part of the city wall:

I grew up reading fairy tales with pre-raphaelite illustrations, and those young adult historical fiction diaries of princesses, and some actual medieval history. If I had the budget or talent to be the type of ren faire nerd who shows up in accurate historical dress, I would have done that every year. Norwich has its ugly industrialization and its quaint medieval streets side by side but York has its history enclosed within its ancient city walls. For someone who desperately wants to maintain her incredibly myopic view of what her trip to Europe should be, York is perfect!

My first order of business was visiting York Minster, the intimidating cathedral at the center of town.

York Minster is simply My Favorite Thing. Its exterior is fearful and imposing but the sheer magnitude and detail of it, combined with its age, make it a marvel of human achievement in my eyes. Probably just my eyes. Everybody else is like, “Whatever. My kid could do that if I gave him a bunch of marble imported from Normandy or whatever. Fuck off”.

Rude. The inside is just as magnificent. I don’t know anything about architecture. I know that York Minster is built in the gothic style. There is something fancy and cool about the naves. I do know that even as a non-believer I have a visceral reaction to seeing a testament to where human faith and achievement meet one another.

My favorite part of York Minster is undoubtedly the Chapter House, which is immediately stunning because of its stained glass windows:

The best part of the Chapter House is its carvings. Viewing something created 700 years in the past, I tend to separate myself from the humanity of the people who made it and the sacredness of the space interrupts my ability to connect to the human-made art within it. The carvings here are hysterical and very humanizing. It effectively reduces the scale of all human lived experience when you see something 700 years old that is funny to you now and was probably funny to the people who made it then. There is something very moving to me about the comical and the sacred situated beside one another because of the idea that they should not be mutually exclusive and in order to be representative of human experience they should coexist.

WHAT AM I EVER EVER TALKING ABOUT?

“LOL”, said the person who carved this.

“Amen,” said this dude.

I didn’t realize what I was getting myself into when I decided to climb the tower of York Minster. I thought 275 steps was no big, but it turned out to be incredibly scary, not just because of the physical effort involved (and oh god I hate effort generally), but also because of the very old, very narrow steps, and that there are people in front of and behind you so you are so stuck if you start feeling like you’re gonna pass out and die and fall down and knock all the people behind you down like dominos holy shit uaghhhhghhh-

OH WOW

HOLY SHIT I’M DONE I DID IT HURRAY

Oh god wait there’s more? Fuck. (THAT’S YOU. RIGHT NOW. READING THIS POST. THIS IS PERFORMATIVE BLOGGING WHERE  YOUR EXPERIENCE READING IS LIKE MY EXPERIENCE CLIMBING YORK MINSTER. YOU ARE VERY IMPRESSED WITH YOURSELF FOR GETTING THIS FAR)

Once you get to the top, though, you can see the entire city. Either the lightheadedness or reality willhave you believe that you have really ascended into something like heaven.

I spent a good couple hours exploring just York Minster, as it has several hundred years of additions and fun Renaissance-era statues and a crypt. Afterwards I wandered into a somewhat cheesy occult shop, which offered tours of an adjoining “haunted house”.

A haunted house in America is an attraction where actors wearing hokey makeup jump out at you and yell horrible dialogue in the dark, and it is the best. This was reputedly an actual haunted house, with real ghosts, but what I paid for was a self-guided tour with some boring stories and some pre-recorded sound scares. The couple whose date I was imposing on (this is a repeated theme with me) consisted of a lady who insisted she was filming ORBS and her husband who graciously humored her.

Whoa. What is going on with my right eye? Something easily explained by science? PROBABLY.

I then went on a ghost tour, which mainly consisted of my tour guide bragging about how he invented ghost tours and that everyone else copied off of him. Scary!

Before I went to York, I sent a message to Ragini of Curious Fancy as I had long admired her style, thoughtfulness, and intelligence. Luckily she didn’t think I was creepy stalker and agreed to meet me! We went out for a couple drinks and bonded about horrible OkCupid experiences, how we feel sort of excluded in fatshion blogging because we don’t have typically sexualized body types and how we both have a doll-like or fairy tale aesthetic, and we just generally had a good time gettin’ tipsy in some medieval pubs. Ragini and I have a lot in common.

photo credit goes to Ragini!

We have pretty much the same body, really similar styles, big eyes and big lips, round cheeks, we’re both a bit shy, analytical, and very literary. Both crass shit-talkers, as well! This is why it was obvious and rather alarming when we both noticed an ongoing pattern where, wherever we went, people would address me and completely ignore her. Ragini is not just a native English speaker; she is in England because she’s getting her masters in post-colonial English literature. It was devastating to me to see people repeatedly treat her in such a hurtful way based on whatever weird assumptions they were making about her. I also felt powerless and complicit because I would just watch these interactions happen and not know what to do. I’ve thought about it for months and it’s part of the reason I took so long to write this post because I didn’t know how to address it but I’d be even more of a coward than I already am if I just let it go.

I wanted there to be some easy lesson I could dispense about the dangers of assumptions or to try to give advice but I can’t. A key element in these interactions was people noticing my accent and talking about how much they loved America or wanted to go there and celebrating the type of otherness I brought with me, the type of otherness that is similar enough to be comfortable but different enough to attract attention. I know these words are inadequate. It astonishes me that people can see two such similar people and think, “the one that looks more familiar to me is the one I’m going to talk to”.

What people miss out on with this type of ignorance– this type of ignorance that is really the root of racism– is getting to know an amazing, beautiful person:

She wrote a truly amazing post analyzing where her aesthetic comes from and I hope you all go and read it. All of Ragini’s posts are thoughtful and interesting and great and there is truly no one whose style I admire more.

We spent the next day walking around York, visiting the crowded, misshapen little medieval alley called the Shambles:

and then we went to the museum gardens to take some photos. Not only is Ragini a perfect model, but she’s an incredible photographer.

The tippet was a present from my lovely friend Tyler, the top was from Greene Street size XL, the skirt is vintage from Etsy size 14, and the tights are from H+M.

Photo credit for all the museum gardens photos goes to the exceptionally talented Ragini.

I loved my trip to York. I get made fun of a lot by people here in Norwich for my exuberant love of what is a tiny little city that doesn’t seem to have a lot going on, and which isn’t terribly different from Norwich, but it has a lot of great history and beauty concentrated into one tiny little spot.

I’m also thankful for getting to meet and bond with Ragini, and I have to urge you again to go and check out her amazing blog, which has recently been featured in the New York Times and the Daily Mail!

My hair isn’t even this color anymore

Why I have been busy:

-Facebook

-Shittons of coursework deadlines that I think I keep in the back of my mind but when they arrive seem to have come out of nowhere

-Reading Thomas Pynchon’s “V.” in one sitting (NOT THE RECOMMENDED DOSAGE!)

-Trying to cure my homesickness by going out on too many dates (NOT THE RECOMMENDED DOSAGE)

-Not leaving the house and instead watching terrible tattoo reality shows, forgetting I live in fucking England and could be doing way cooler stuff. Ostensibly.

A whole month ago, I did go on a day trip with the other international students to Cambridge. It’s about one and a half hours from Norwich by bus, and the first thing we did was split up into different tour groups, getting first to see the iconic view of King’s College, with coos inclusive!:

King’s College. Learning is happening.

Our tour guide was an older gentleman who walked way more quickly than our tour group, which mostly comprised us lazy, non-walking Americans. We suck so bad, am i rite, all of Europe? Psyche, we re-elected Obama, you like us again. Tour Guide made only one allusion to how Cambridge is better than Oxford, and I was impressed with his reserve! As far as I know, we don’t really do much in the way of inter-collegiate pissing contests here at UEA, but I think I’ll arbitrarily start one with NUCA. You hear that, NUCA? You guys are good at art but not as good at fabricating climate change research! BURN.

Our tour guide fed us some made up bullshit about Newton testing the speed of sound right about here

We moved onto my favorite part of the tour, which was a quick visit to the Wren Library at Trinity College, which contains early Shakespeare folios, notes for Winnie the Pooh, and 12th century manuscripts. We weren’t allowed to take pictures and our visit was limited to five minutes, but I didn’t mind, because if it means the better preservation of rare books, I’m going to be a grateful fuckin’ nerd about it.

You expect me to know the names of every one of the 80000 buildings in all 800 of the colleges?

While I found Cambridge to be stunningly beautiful, certainly more picturesque than the UEA, it’s a small city that couldn’t accommodate the amount of tourists pounding the streets, and if I were a student trying to get my work done and get around I’d be pretty annoyed that people were gawking at me and coming into buildings that are only supposed to be for students and getting in the way of my bike. I got in the way of SO MANY people’s bikes.

We stopped at several buildings of historical significance, unsurprising considering the caliber of intellect associated with Cambridge, but I found myself irritated at the repeated celebration of Watson & Crick and how they “discovered the structure of DNA at the Eagle Pub” without even a passing mention of Rosalind Franklin.

I finished the day with the requisite punt trip down the River Cam. Since I got in line by myself I was put with a couple, and I felt sort of bad for them that they had to have their date ruined by a random American girl. Luckily I couldn’t ever ruin anything as bad at the punter did!

The view from the boat is pretty excellent, depending on the extenuating circumstances

Our punter (I LOOKED IT UP, THAT’S THE RIGHT WORD. IT DOESN’T JUST MEAN THE CLIENT OF A LADY OF THE NIGHT), about 5 minutes into the tour, threw up off the side of the boat. And apologized profusely. Wouldn’t even be a big deal if he hadn’t then gone on to yell at every other punter on the water for being unprofessional. He yelled at a young (and “fit: in both the English and American sense) shirtless punter because “no one wants to see that”, he told all the amateur punters they were doing it wrong, and generally made things much more confrontational than necessary.

He knew a lot about Brutalist architecture, though!

I think I could use a return trip to Cambridge when it’s less crowded to get a better sense of the whole town, but generally it was a good day to narrowly avoid being barfed on in this gorgeous medieval college town!

A month ago! It’s been a month now of living on my own in the UK. At 24, I’m doing what most people do at 18. Instead of flying the nest I kind of just stayed in my egg to the point where I turned rotten and became so unbearable that I had to be thrown across the ocean.

Because that is what people do with rotten eggs.

I had a rough three flights to get to Norwich and arrived exhausted and irritable on campus a day after I’d left home. There was a mix up involving my room key and no one communicated to me what I was supposed to be doing or where to go. I also encountered a problem when I was nearing the point of passing out and realized I didn’t have a pillow or duvet. The previous day I thought there would be no problem with packing 75 pounds of clothing and nothing useful, but it turns out that you can’t build some sort of makeshift fort out of dresses if you have just been in transit for 24 hours and smell kind of bad and just want a goddamn nap.

In the midst of sorting all of that, out, though I was forced to find my way around campus and take the bus to the city and really start learning my way around. I got myself a bus pass, which restored my sense of autonomy and reduced the amount of anxiety-attacks-per-second I was experiencing.

Norwich is a city unlike anywhere I’ve ever seen before, perhaps because I haven’t seen much of Europe. The lanes in the center of the city are so narrow that they only allow pedestrian access. Boutiques and cafes occupy timberwood buildings that have stood for hundreds of years, usually formerly as pubs. So many goddamn pubs. And churches.

the medieval Maid’s Head pub

There is a tendency towards the precious and vintage that verges on fetishism of a time where England was England and everyone was colonized by the English. And it was great!!! Pin up girls and tea cakes and no critical thinking!!! No, really, it’s cute.

As far as what the young people are up to in Norwich, they all seem to congregate outside of my flat at night screaming their heads off. I haven’t advertised any drink specials but everyone seems to think it’s a really good idea to go to “Prevent Mary From Doing Her Coursework Tuesdays!!!” and “Don’t Let Mary Sleep Thursdays!!!!”

Truthfully I spend a lot of time in my room because I am expected to read 2-4 novels a week, but it does mean every time I go out into the city I have somewhere new to explore since I never have time to cover it all in a day.

As far as culture shock goes, I find it really perturbing that no one listens to Yes or wants to make out with me. I find that people here have almost as little body awareness as I do and will not alter the path they are walking on even if there are large obstacles that threaten to occupy the same physical space that they’re heading towards, obstacles like people or cars. Norwich is a city that is congested by people who don’t understand that pavements are for walking on and not for congregating on for no fucking reason.

People actually talk in seminars without raising their hands. They get a fuck-off week in the middle of their already-only-3-month semester to just drink (“reading week”). There is a bar on campus and all of my modules end their semesters with a class trip to a bar.

As far as food goes, everybody is eating a baguette. I mean that in the present tense because as I type this every single person on my campus is currently taking a bite from a prawn mayonnaise baguette or a BLT baguette or a cheese and red onion baguette. The restaurants in town are mostly Thai, Turkish, or Indian, and even though I like all of those things, I am rarely tempted to buy my dinner.

Truly, I like it here. It’s taken me this whole month to start adjusting but I did leave my family, my job, my friends, and my certainty behind. I have to start over somewhere that isn’t particularly known for the warmth in its weather or its people, and I am shy and picky and not too welcoming myself. I like that the weather is cold enough for me to layer everyday, I like the landscape, the ivy on the red brick houses, being able to enjoy the mental privacy that comes from not being approached by strangers all the time like I am back home. It’s so beautiful here but essentially foreign to me. It’s not my history and the buildings seem to reject the newness and brashness I bring. Maybe as the months go by I’ll be eroded by the wind and rain, too.

Yo I want tacos, though

I’m not mad at summer being almost over. It’s still regularly muggy and 85-95 degrees here in Philadelphia and it doesn’t really mesh with my personal style. I like to layer and to not sweat over everything in a gross way. Summer is not conducive to that.

There are also fewer opportunities to wear fancy summer hats. You can’t wear them to indoor movies because it is both rude and unnecessary. So I called up my friend and said, “I need a place to wear a fancy summer hat, so please take me to a drive-in!”

My friend said, “Ok!” so I flipped up my hat in happiness.

MY FRIEND’S NAME IS BATMAN AND HIS CAMO PANTS BETRAAAAY HIM.

Superheroes require deep-sea sustenance!!

Spiderman doesn’t have a mouthhole so he can’t partake. Thus he is weak.

This movie was boring!

Batman: Party City

Spiderman: Wal-mart

Dress: Took in a consignment at work. Probably from the 90s.

Belt and hat: thrifted

It will soon be time to transition to a DIFFERENT kind of fancy hat!

In an effort to take the production value of this blog a little more seriously, I invested in a GorillaPod, a tripod with flexible legs that comes in a couple different sizes.

Previously I could never use a tree to aid me in taking Secret Internet Fatty pictures, but now I can do that whenever I don’t feel ashamed of having my neighbors see me use technology to show the world more of me than it ever asked for!

I bought it in the $20 point and shoot size, since I have a point and shoot, but I find the length in the legs to still be a little lacking. It’s probably better to get the DSLR size even if you don’t have one.

I probably could have gotten a better photo by going into the bank and asking someone tall to take it for me, yes. But the Gorillapod is the perfect thing for people like me who have social anxiety disorder and who are loathe to approach even people they know about taking their picture.

The dress is vintage, from Care & Share Thrift in Souderton, my favorite thrift store of all time, which I’m going to miss a bunch. According to the Retro Chick blog, which is based in Norwich, English charity shops have been experiencing a downswing in quality and upswing in pricing of late, as an effect of TV presenters like Alexa Chung and Mary Portas. The last time I was in the UK I found a pretty great dress at a charity shop but it was about $25 USD, WAY over my usual thrifting budget. Because mass transit in the UK services a lot more places, I’m hoping to get to some out of way thrift stores and see what they have. Because I need more things! I’m going to have my own tiny dorm room to decorate! I need horrible paintings of cats!!!

What a helpful picture, for fashion purposes. I hope to be able to stop wearing sneakers with everything soon. I have a sprained ankle that pretty much never completely recovered. Maybe when I stop being gainfully employed my health will return!

So first off, sorry for the long absence. I found out for sure that I am doing an 8 month study abroad in Norwich, UK starting next month so I have been focusing on getting my stuff in order for that. This blog will also be a place for me to write about my new adventure and hopefully some travels! It’s a special kind of stupid that enables someone to go live in a place they know nothing about and have never been to, and I am excited about it.

Secondly, the etsy seller thewhitewoods (who sold me the dress in the last post) has offered you all a hefty 25% percent discount on a non-sale item if you use the code FRIENDZ on your next purchase! She has some super darling things right now, so go take advantage of it!

Last November, at Re/Dress’s big finale fashion show, I got to finally try some of Domino Dollhouse‘s outrageously cute things. Ever since they launched I had wanted to buy pretty much every piece of every line they released. They’re a little out of my normal budget but that’s to be expected when you think a $10 dress from a thrift store is just too much. I decided that it’s beyond worth it for the kind of stuff in my size I had always wanted but had never been available to me, things that were over the top and youthful, punky and cute and not at all boring or matronly. Their models look sexy and are styled in a really fashion forward way, not in a way that covers them up or is focused on the nebulous concept of “flattering”.

When I got the chance at the trunk show to get a few items, I totally jumped at it. Unfortunately, by the time I got there, most of the items in 1x were already gone, but there were still a few things I really loved.

These are items that I did pay for myself and one of which is no longer available.

However, it’s been less than a year since I bought them so I hope it’s still representative of the products they make.

Does not come with cat, Betsey Johnson tights, or skinny belt

I was saving my watermelon dress from the Delectable Dresses collection (Cupcake’s Clothes has the original promotional pictures for it here) for a special occasion so for 7 months or so it sat in my wardrobe, waiting for the summer. I finally ended up wearing it to the Roots Picnic at Festival Pier.

It is definitely comfortable. As a size 16/18 the 1x provides a good fit, especially because it’s shirred in the back, so it wasn’t loose in the boob area like many dresses made in my size. It was the right shape to wear my squaredance petticoat under it for extra poof, but they also sell really cute meringue petticoats in different colors.

The only notable criticism I have of it is that the cotton it’s made out of needs to be ironed/steamed repeatedly or it looks a little schlubby. It’s very wrinkle-attracting, but it’s also the price you pay for having custom-printed fabrics that can be produced in large quantities and tailored easily, I think.

The design is amazingly eye-catching. I got a ton of compliments and a couple of people even took my picture. I am actually very shy so wearing over-the-top fashion is like creating an extrovert self that people can make friends with. The superficial is integral to my not being a lonely hermit!

Me in my natural habitat

There is so much from their current collection that I want but don’t currently have the funds for. I would say if it’s in your budget and it matches your aesthetic, DEFINITELY buy from Domino Dollhouse. They’re filling a niche that has been sadly vacant for so long: fun and often sexy plus size clothing that comes in a range of sizes. I’m excited to see what they’ll have in store for autumn and winter.

The other little thing I got from them was a pair of Robin Leggings in a size 1x. They don’t really fit me like leggings, as my waist to leg proportions are very off (I have much more of the former than the latter!) but they look pretty cute as just regular, stretchy pants on me. They’re AMAZINGLY comfortable. I haven’t figured out an outfit for them yet as I am terrible at pants, so here’s the only picture of me wearing them:

Damn I miss my ultraviolet hair. Probably gonna do that again before I leave.

So yes, Domino Dollhouse is for fine ladies of distinction who obviously have very full and rich social lives and not upwards of 1000 pictures of themselves in their Photobooths.

I also got to see two musical and fashional icons at the Roots Picnic:

St. Vincent, who obviously disregards seasonal clothing conventions as she was wearing a long-sleeved metallic shirt, leather formal shorts, and tights in the middle of summer, and who was AWESOME as usual. Gives me hope for wearing a watermelon dress in an English winter.

Andddd:

Merrill Garbus of tUnE-yArDs. Not a lot of hub-bub is made about her size and all the attention is paid to her musicianship in the stuff I’ve read about her– which is awesome! She’s an incredible musician. She also wears amazing stuff, like these neon majorette shoulderpads.

DE LA SOUL WAS ALSO THERE but their clothing wasn’t of particular interest.

I took the leap and went back to a natural hair color– not my natural hair color, but one that ostensibly exists in nature for a person. It took a week of leaving crushed vitamin C powder in my hair and washing with a clarifying shampoo to lighten the teal out of my hair, and though I used red hair dye, it came out brown.

Chocolate brown. It made me too hungry so I’ve ended up going back to red, but looking at it now it doesn’t look as horrible as I thought it did at the time.

I had the most difficult semester of my life in school– four literature surveys with some truly nightmarish teachers, but I made it out alive with a 4.0 gpa for the semester. I thought I deserved a little celebrating. Academic rigor calls for a garden party!

We started with mint juleps. I had no idea what “muddling” meant, but if you don’t have an actual muddler, it’s ok to get a wooden spoon and crush the mint and simple syrup together. My fatal flaw was that I should have absolutely filled every glass to the brim with ice and instead I ended up serving my guests each a 1/4 of a bottle of bourbon. I didn’t see the problem with that but apparently that’s not how it’s done.

The drink that I ended up appreciating the most was an off-the-cuff mixture of Pellegrino Aranciata and apricot brandy. Super light and refreshing, unlike a 1/4 of a bottle of brandy with some mint floating in it.

Any party I have involves a trip to Trader Joe’s beforehand where I spend far too much money but if you can’t pay for catering, I feel like Trader Joe’s is a reasonable alternative. I also happen to be extremely lucky enough to have a mom who majored in food science and a mom’s boyfriend who makes an OUTRAGEOUS tuna confit with lemon and avocado. It makes me cry.

The food table: vegetarian tarragon chicken salad, fruit salad in a watermelon bowl, curry chicken salad

 Artichoke dip made by Courtney, cranberry scones, aforementioned scary good tuna confit, cheeses!

Croissants, hummus made by my friend Kara, soba noodles with mango made by Annelise

I did have a dress code for the party: must dress fancy, with fancy to be defined by the wearer, and hats are encouraged!

I was wearing fancier shoes beforehand but I’ve been operating on a sprained ankle since April. My dress is a 1980s dress bought on etsy (I think I searched for “plus size garden party”) from thewhitewoods.  Vertical stripes! Flowers! Accommodates a petticoat! Pretty much a dream dress for me. The belt is Cynthia Rowley and has a bicycle on it. I took it in a consignment so I could buy it. The hat is vintage and was $6 at a thrift store in Glenside, I believe.

My mom wore a Yoana Baraschi dress from my work. And a side pony!!!

Kara proved you can go Gothy for Garden Party

HATS ENCOURAGED

So what do you do to entertain guests a garden party? Why, you make them listen to you perform songs in French!

From garden party