Work Clothes

It’s a sad truth that a lot of my decision to become a lawyer was motivated by Legally Blonde.*  Wearing pink, practicing law, and teaching everyone about gender discrimination: that was the dream.

For awhile I was pretty pleased to be at least 1 for 3 on that - practicing law.  And the truth is, I don't have the fashion stamina of our fictional friend Elle.  I didn't go to class in law school in designer dresses; I went in yoga clothes regardless of whether I was going to pretend to do yoga that day.

In sum, I like style but I’m horribly inattentive to it. I generally treat it about the same as my high school boyfriend treated me - sometimes I spend time on it but other times I completely forget about it because I’m off playing laser tag with my friends.  (This is the most accurate metaphor I’ve ever created, and I was a poetry major.)

So I go through these swings, particularly at work. I’ll have times when the only thing I wear to work is the work pants I bought because while being cut like work pants, they are actually pretty much made out of black sweatpants fabric. I have a similar skirt that I bought at Costco for $12 which is, again, made of sweatpants fabric.  Maybe literally, though I'm not sure.  Okay, okay, I actually have two sweatpants-skirts: one in gray and one in black. I wear them a lot. I have five plain white blouses. I have some long-sleeved t-shirts with just enough detail on them for me to I call them "work shirts" and wear them to work, silently daring anyone to call me on it.

At some point in the last year (and after having spent my first year out of school wearing a boring suit every day) I decided to switch it up. So now there are select times when I decide to wear very impractical things that I stubbornly decided are what a lawyer should look like, mixed in with the fact that I actually hate how boring lawyers look.

N.B. Most of my coworkers are dudes and you can’t tell them apart other than by hair color/quantity because they are all wearing the same grey pants and blue or white work shirt. They actually get kind of mad when I point out when two or more of them are wearing the exact same outfit on any given day. "Hey, you guys match!" It’s a fun game for me.  

Question:  If you line up three in a row of them wearing the same outfit, will they explode into points of light, vanish, and award points like in the jewel game on my phone?

Whether I’m dressing stylishly or not is, I think, inversely proportionate to the number of billable hours I worked three days before.

And when I do decide to hang out with style, I go in unique directions. For instance, my new work pants are awesome wide-legged white pants with pockets (a la Veronica Corningstone)...

which I recently wore with a baby-pink ruffled shirt and a beige lace cardigan and a belt with a bow on it. I looked a little like Louis Quatorze via 1973:

 Yesterday I dressed like I was going to a Republican summer picnic campaign fundraiser - ie red sleeveless dress under a white linen blouse with tan sandals. I have a pink, blue, and green flowered blouse with a black sequined collar; several enormous statement necklaces I wear like ties (and occasionally I will just jack Husband’s actual ties and wear those, since they’re very cute and he never wears them); varying dresses in teal, hot pink, and patterns.

This whole situation is aided and abetted by my grandma, who is a very stylish former model who likes to buy clothes that are too big for her and then give them to me. It’s from her I got my leopard-print silk blouse and the red sleeveless dress and the bright yellow blazer.

I think it’s my one rebellion against the severe gray-panted, white-walled, blond-wood office aesthetic I live in where we get e-mails from the office manager instructing us to put plastic lids on our ceramic coffee mugs to keep from spilling coffee on the coffee-colored carpet. If I’m going to wear heels to work, they are going to be my hot-pink patent leather ones.**

...or my beige 4-inch-heeled Mary Janes. Or the gray Cuban heels. I have black pumps (also with four inch heels - heh) but those are only for court, and no one ever takes me to court. So there.

The net result of my swings in style is that I alternate between excessively boring and functional and borderline caricature of a lady lawyer. So I dress, on average, like a usual attorney - the standard deviation’s just higher than you’d expect.

* It came out when I was in 8th grade.  Like that's an excuse.

** Sassy came to visit last week and when she drove up she looked at my outfit (black blouse, black mesh eyelet overskirt over a hot pink underskirt, hot pink heels), she marveled, “Did you wear that to work today? Wearing pink and lawyering? You are living the dream!” Sassy always makes me feel better about my life decisions.

Working on Memorial Day

If you have to do it, this is the way to go. Happy Memorial Day!

The Narrator

I love generating narratives.

For example, I have always wanted to buy a Roomba and a Scooba, and program the Roomba to vacuum the carpet parts of the floor, and the Scooba to wash the hard parts of the floor, and then name the Roomba Romeo and the Scooba Juliet and they could have this forbidden love, divided by the invisible boundary and their neverending task to clean only their own parts of the floor.

And of course I love scripted TV (other people generate good narratives too!) but I like reality TV for the opportunity it gives me to impose my own narratives on what I’m seeing. Reality TV editors are somewhat constrained - they have to pick and choose from the material they get from the participants. Often, this means more narrative suggestion rather than being INFORMED OF FACTS LOUDLY BY THE SCRIPT. This is a barely-exaggerated example from a TV show I actually quite like:

Bad Agent: Why are you so mad at me?
Good Agent: You are HYDRA! Which, in case you haven’t been watching the show or the tie-in movies or reading the comic book series, is an EVIL organization that was founded by Nazis! Including [insert name of Nazi character here]! So I am mad at you due to that! National Socialism not cool!
Bad Agent: But I want to kiss you. Due to my romantic feelings I have. For you, I should specify.

With reality TV having no explicit script, I have the opportunity to imagine and project onto these hapless figures on my TV screen.

Case in point: I became obsessed with Dancing with the Stars* this season, which I started watching because a) dancing rules and b) they did a Disney episode, so I had to watch it. But I kept watching for the narrative I got to project onto it, which was that a certain supermodel-dating male dance professional had unexpectedly fallen in love with a certain lady Olympian ice dancer and could not figure out to manage his feelings other than to 1) stare at her intensely, 2) give fierce interviews about how she is the best dancer in the competition and everyone must know it, and 3) choreograph insanely torrid dance numbers about problematic love stories.

Liz: “Look at him! Look at how he is staring at her like he is the Phantom of the Opera and he wants to marry her and lock her away forever in his dungeon palace underneath Paris!”
Husband: “mmhmm.” clicks on e-mail
Liz: “Are you even watching this with me right now?”

three minutes later

Liz: “Look at how she is like the only thing that soothes him when he starts raging about their samba scores?”
Husband: “Hrmmm.”
Liz: “Your e-mails canNOT be this interesting.”

Thus when the finale of Dancing aired on Tuesday night, I was definitely interested to see if Said Olympian and Said Danceman won** (because they were unquestionably the best dancers) but I was MORE interested to see if my imposed narrative would prevail: if he would be forced to acknowledge that, even though she wasn’t a leggy blonde, that the tiny fairylike ice princess had completely stolen his evil Russian heart.

Incidentally, there is so little adjustment needed to make this story a feature-length musical.

Perhaps I’m relying on shipping reality TV participants for narrative fix these day because now that I’m older and out of school, I get less of this material from the people in my own life. At school there’s always a good chance that someone has a story going on - when there are enough people thrown together for long enough, someone is going to fall in unrequited love with someone, or develop a deep animosity to someone, or have a secret about someone that they can’t admit. There’s something going on. But my own personal life has become, for the most part, very uninterestingly happy (it’s why the fairy tale doesn’t bother describing in detail the “happily ever after” bit). My conflicts these days are largely internal:

• Liz vs. Liz’s Desire to Eat Cookie Dough For Dinner
• Liz’s Budget vs. Liz’s Preoccupation With “Free” With Purchase Makeup Samples
• Liz’s Job vs. Liz’s Wish She Was a Sitcom Writer, or, While We’re Wishing, Sitcom Star
• Etc.

And my friends are all very mature people with children and careers and other qualities that make me a highly unsuitable companion for them and make it difficult to craft short-term narratives about their lives. (Without them getting mad at me for fabricating things. Heh.)

This is why my favorite time of year at work is the summer when we get a bunch of interns who are still in school. Let me tell you that the narrative potential of all my coworkers is LOW. We are an extremely boring bunch. A good percentage a married; an even higher percentage are married to their work; and if anyone is dating each other, they are keeping it entirely secret, which would make sense in light of the fact that lawyers are very careful about sexual harassment. It’s terrible. No material at all.

But the interns! They are still young and in school and there is always the potential that two of them will start dating each other, and even if they try to keep it secret they will fail. Or one of them will develop a crush on another one, and that one will like a different one. Really, that any of them might do anything human at all would be a huge ramp up. Ideally, something like this would happen:

The odds are low based on demographics alone - and even fledgling lawyers have a much higher-than-average ability to rein it in and act professional - but a bored gal can dream. At least until I can afford two expensive cleaning robots and a seamstress to sew tiny Elizabethan outfits for them, I need something to narrate about.

*Huh, isn’t ABC doing very poorly in the network ratings these days? I may be single-handedly keeping them afloat with my viewing habits.

**Of course they won. Because they were the best. And because I voted for them 10 times like a crazed teenybopper watching The Voice. I have no shame.

Nearly Unmoved: In Which Superman Fails to Help

How do you move a six-thousand pound car that’s split into several large pieces and has no wheels?

A.  Put it back together

B.  The murder weapon was a giant icicle

C.  It represents mankind

D.  To get to the other side!

E.  A lot of hamburgers

If you selected choice E, you’re correct, and yet likely still confused.  

This story begins almost seven years ago.  I was a senior in college and becoming essentially too cool for school, insofar as I was dating a very sophisticated older man with a job.  That sophisticated older man is, of course, the gent you know as Husband.  And that man had meaningful disposable income for the first time in his life.

I’m not one to begrudge someone a few indulgent purchases upon entry to the real world and the drudgery of work - I myself made some pretty ridiculous purchases upon law school graduation.  So when Husband bought stuff like a backyard hammock complete with stand, or $250 cowboy boots (? seriously, ?), I didn’t say anything. 

But then he bought the Buick.

To be precise, he bought a 1956 Buick with enormous fins, an airplane hood decoration, and such serious rust damage that you could watch the asphalt rush by underneath your feet as you drove it.  It literally had holes in the floor.  Like a Flintstones car.  Seriously.

It wasn’t going to be the first car he had restored; he’d restored an old mustang in high school.  But I was still skeptical when Husband brought the Buick back to the house that he was then sharing with two other dudes (before the mold was known).  I had questions.

Liz:  I mean, how long is it going to take you to finish restoring this car?

Husband:  I don’t know, like a few years probably.

Liz:  A few YEARS?  Are you kidding me?  That’s forever!

Husband:  No more than four, I mean.

Liz:  FOUR YEARS?!?!?

Flash forward to six years later.  The Buick was not done.  The Buick was not only not done, it was not, in any meaningful sense, ASSEMBLED.  I had unwittingly enabled this state of being when I helped husband build two work benches.  He used those work benches to set the body of the car on after he removed the body from the frame.  I had never personally realized that you could take the body of a car off the frame, but you can, and I was reminded of this afresh whenever I went to the garage to do laundry and rammed my arm into a tailpipe hovering five feet in the air. 

THAT state of being had been achieved by bribing fifteen of our friends to come over and pick the body up off the frame and move it six feet to the left on to the tables.  The bribe had been a barbeque.  

This strategy had evidently worked not wisely but too well, because now, when it came time to move the entirety of the vehicle, Husband was of the opinion that all we needed was our friends to pick it up.

To move an entire two thousand pound car, which notably did not have wheels attached to it in any sense whatsoever.

I thought we should rent a crane, or commission an army of sherpas, or perhaps sell the entire vehicle piecemeal on Craigslist before we moved.  But apparently none of that was an option.

Husband sent out an e-mail to literally everyone we know who still lives in the area, and some who (as husband knows perfectly well) live several time zones away.  In exchange for helping to dead lift an entire automobile, carry it onto an auto trailer, carry it off an auto trailer, and up a driveway into a garage, we offered... burgers.  Including veggie burgers for those inclined.

I did not think that was a particular attractive option.  I thought we would have no takers.

But our friends are all spectacularly giving and wonderful people - so much so that I felt even worse about how we were abusing them.  When the appointed day came, we had around 20 people show up to lift.  

The first task was to back the car trailer onto the driveway in a suitable fashion.  I did not think that was an achievable goal: it was a 20 foot long trailer, the wheels of which were nto controlled by a steeing wheel, and the only way to back it was by pushing it with the car it was attached to.

Husband assured me that he was "good at backing things up."  I gave him a look that attempted to convey my lack of certainty that that was a thing.  At all.  That anyone was good at.  

But it turns out even after seven years in a relationship with someone, he can still surprise you.  It turns out that Husband is actually really good at backing things up.  He navigated that trailer backwards into the driveway perfectly.  It was truly impressive.  Everyone applauded.

We then crammed everyone into the garage as best as possible and tried to figure out how to lift something that was designed to be picked up only by tow trucks and machinery in factories.

"Okay, let's get enough people on each side."

"But we need someone to direct!"

"Okay, Jam can direct and guide, and everyone else lift on one side."

"We need someone on the back!"

"Two people on the back.  The rest lift."

"Do we have any more gloves?"

"No, but use these rags?"

"Do we have any more rags?"

"Well, here's a shirt of Husband's that I don't like anymore, no, it has holes in it, stop looking at me like that."

"Okay, does everyone have gloves, or a rag, or a shirt?"

"Let's lift on three."

"Lift on three, or lift on one-two-three THEN lift?"

"One-two-three lift."

"Should we do a practice lift?"

"No.  It's time to lift.  Jam?"

"Ready everyone?  Here we go - One.  Two.  Three.  LIFT!"

It's now that I should mention that our garage wasn't exactly spacious: there was the frame of the car, the washer and dryer, Husband's workbench, a bunch of boxes, etc.  So the grunting and narrative shouting that ensued as 22 people tried to move in concert while carrying the heaviest thing imaginable was NOTEWORTHY.  

Spectacular, in fact.

By which I mean we caused a spectacle in the neighborhood.  The neighbors - many of whom we still had never met - all came out of the house to stare as we awkwardly waddled this car onto the trailer. 

Then it was merely a simple task of driving the trailer to the new house and unloading it into the new garage.  And that couldn't be any harder than getting out, right?  

One, two, three, lift, carry up the driveway, lift to set on the work tables and...

Husband:  "Uh, okay, everyone set it back down on the driveway."

The work tables that had been the right height for the car body to fit in the old garage were not the right height for the new garage, which we discovered was in fact shorter than the old garage.

When Husband and some other individuals broke out the saw to start cutting the tables down, I gave up and started getting the burgers ready.

We eventually did get the car lifted and into the garage, and we did get the burgers on the grill, and we MAY get our friends to forgive us someday.  But I told Husband that if we move again, either the car drives to the new place or it doesn't go at all.  We don't have enough friends to get an entirely separate batch to lift the car again.

We did find one upside the next day to having a giant auto trailer at our disposal, though:

Better tips for people who would like to talk to women

Dear people thinking of listening to pickup artists: this doesn't work, and as further disincentive to being a jerk to women, keep in mind that this (or worse) might happen to you.  I am an actual woman who has successfully conversed with many human beings, so I am qualified to give you advice.  If you want to talk to women, try any of the following tips instead:

• "Hey!"
• Smile at her and ask her what her name is.
• Try having an interest, and then asking her if she would like to discuss that interest with you
• If not, ask her if she has an interest.  If so, discuss it with her.
• "What are your thoughts on the current political situation?"
• Jokingly complain about something moderately unpleasant about the environment, e.g., "Yikes, this jukebox is pretty loud!"  "It's crowded here tonight!"  "I didn't expect quite so much Miley Cyrus to be playing here, but you take what you get, I guess..."
• Compliment her hair or earrings.
• Ask her how she feels about the current weather pattern and/or level of atmospheric pressure.
• Discuss the most recent victory or loss of a local sports team.
• Literally anything other words or mouth noises than negging.

Not Unmoved: A Tale of Packing

When I was in college, I moved every.  Single.  Year.  It was no mean feat, either - when I first rolled up to college, I did so in a uHaul packed with my possessions.  I overheard whispers of awe as I hauled all of my dorm necessities up the stairs.*  And everything when back down the stairs nine months later and into a storage bin, out of which it came three months later, up a different set of stairs, and so on.  I lived in a different dorm all four years of college.  I thought it was a luxury when I lived in one of those dorms for 12 straight months rather than 9.

Of course, after college, due to a specific confluence of circumstances I ended up moving everything out, back to my childhood home a thousand miles away, and then back to the exact same school again three months later.  If I ever want to plead insanity, I will have plenty of people to testify that I actually did this.  

Twelve months later, I moved again.  

So in five years of my life, I had moved all of my earthly possessions a total of nine times while stubbornly refusing to reduce the quantity of said possessions.  Despite the moving.  Despite unsolicited suggestions as to the appropriate quantity of shoes required for existence as a student.  Despite the trauma to certain groomsmen called upon to move my couch while still recovering from and dressed for our nuptial celebrations.

After that ninth time of moving, I was of the opinion that moving could SHUT UP.

Fortunately, that last time was moving in with Husband after our wedding.  We successfully snookered various members of the bridal party into doing at least the final heavy lifting while we were on our honeymoon in Hawaii.  (Apparently we have a habit of going to Hawaii during housing transitions.)

And then we didn't move again for a long time - five glorious years of no moving.  But we bought our house!  Which was very exciting!  Until the initial elation faded and we realized what it meant.

We had to move.  Again.  And moving makes your place look like this:

As Husband can attest, I don't even like packing for a short trip.  It's one of my least favorite activities.  I did not greet the task of packing our entire life up with tremendous enthusiasm.  SOME person I MAY OR MAY NOT be married to may have described my demeanor as "sulky."  Perhaps it was: starting to move required confronting three very serious things I had henceforth largely been able to ignore:

1.  The exponential increase in stuff-accumulation that happens the longer you don't move

2.  The mold

3.  The entirely disassembled elderly vehicle in our garage.

Point the First:  Stuff Accumulation

I have modeled below the Liz Functional Theorem of Stuff Accumulation:

Current stuff = ((starting amount of stuff + major gift-receiving life events) * number of closets) ^ (years in residence)

In our case, the theorem proved chillingly accurate.  (OK, I can't really quantify it, but close enough.)  Neither Husband nor I are particularly inclined to throw things away.  We have "reference" files full of papers that include his resume as of his senior year of high school, or a job offer I got for a summer internship halfway through college.  We have a full costume box.  We have a selection of sheets for XL-twin beds that haven't fit any bed since we left behind the crappy dorm ones.  I have enough bottles of half-used hair products that, if dumped into the bathtub, could drown small rodents.  

When you move, you at least confront the more egregious items that need to go.  The shirt that is really affirmatively torn.  The box of cards received on your last birthday.  The pens that are out of ink.

I wasn't used to having stayed in the same place for five whole years AND having had the use of all the closets in the house.  So when we started packing, I started finding some next-level crazy stuff:

•  A bunch of broken vases.  
• A plastic box containing:  

1. an empty box sunglasses had some in; 
2. a pink feather boa; 
3. a bunch of save-the-dates for our wedding; 
4. a fanny pack; 
5. a worn-out black leather belt.

• Twelve billion wire hangers

When did I decide that was an important selection of items to store together in the guest room closet?  

The most notable find was my dried-out wedding bouquet:

Which led to this inconclusive** text message exchange with Sassy:

Point the Second:  The Mold

We knew our house had mold.  You can't get a house for cheap rent in a VSREM just on good looks.  We also knew from the fact that for a long time, whenever it rained, the roof would leak and one of the walls would actually swell up with water and be kind of squishy if you poked it.  The landlord eventually repaired the roof, but our battle with mold had been ongoing.  We scrubbed the walls with bleach frequently.  We once painted a couple walls with mold-resistant primer stuff.  None of it seemed to do much good -- the house was damp and poorly insulated and it kept coming back.

We just hadn't realized how much. 

When you take the furniture out of rooms, the room looks pretty sad:

But when you take furniture out of rooms and find a ton of mold, that makes YOU look pretty sad.

Husband sprang into action.  He was DONE with mold and did not want to bring a single spore of it to our new home.  So... amazingly... we actually threw a lot of stuff away.  If we felt it was too mold-contaminated, in the trash it went.  All of the furnitures was thoroughly scrubbed and left outside on bright sunny days to kill the mold.  Items that had been in the room with the worst mold were cleaned and then sealed in airtight ziploc bags for a period of no less than two months.  We were zealous.

Friend:  "Your new house smells a lot ... fresher? than your old one?"

Husband:  nods knowingly

The rest of the move was fairly standard, with only the minor glitch when my mom and decided we absolutely needed to remove gross shelf paper from the shelved in the new house before we could put anything in that closet, so that had to happen immediately for obvious reasons:

There was also the issue that Husband really didn't want to move our old TV because it is ridiculously big and heavy.  It has a giant screen but is NOT a giant flat screen - it's an old projection TV and thus weighs twelve million pounds.  Husband, sensibly, wanted to sell the TV on Craigslist before we moved a buy a new one.  I, stubbornly, did not want to admit I had already bought Husband a new TV for his upcoming birthday.  The TV got moved.  

Astute readers will have noticed I never reached Point the Third:  Enormous Disassembled Elderly Automobile.  That's another story for another day, bien sur.  You will stay tuned, non, mes petits cheres?

* In justification of taking a uHaul to college: I was moving from a state without sales tax to a state with ridiculous sales tax!  I had attempted to buy everything I would ever need for the rest of my life before I left.  

** I currently cannot remember if I threw my spooky, Miss Havisham wedding bouquet out or if I hid it in the new garage.  Hmmm.

Functionally hitched

For someone who talks a big game about not being a functional adult, I do have one impressive qualification of the mature: Husband and I have been married almost half a decade. Though it’s far more a reflection of his infinite patience than anything I do - he still puts up with me even though I’m a screwup - it’s still pretty good. Compared to, say, famous celebrities, we have been through:

• 14 Bradley Cooper / Jennifer Esposito marriages
• 16 Nicholas Cage / Lisa Marie Presley marriages
• 31 Kim Kardashian / Kris Humphries marriages
• 191 Dennis Rodman / Carmen Electra marriages
• 718 Britney Spears / Jason Alexander marriages

(thanks, Time Magazine, for this helpful information!  Way to be a serious news source covering the Issues of the Day!)

You might think comparing your marriage length to celebrities isn’t fair; it’s like laughing at a dachshund for not being able to reach something on a high shelf. But lawyers generally aren’t all that much better at lasting marriages, so I still think some credit is due - I haven’t yet nitpicked Husband to distraction, so that counts for something!

Now lest you begin to think I’m going to have to retitle my blog to Smug Mature Person Brags About Her Marriage, let me state immediately that the very fact of our marriage was seen by many as Highly Irresponsible. Because we got married young, son - not stereotypes-of-the-Deep-South young, but young enough that the minister who hitched us felt the need to comment during the ceremony that he had worried about us because we were so young.

Everyone thought we were CRAZY. Which had its upsides: none of our friends had ever been to a wedding before, so there was no wedding-planning pressure and they were all just really excited to come celebrate. (And, bless its digital heart, Pinterest hadn’t been invented yet, for which I am so thankful.)

We weren’t old enough to be ridiculously set in our ways, and we didn’t each already have a bunch of nice furniture that conflicted. The main thing we had duplicates of was spices, and somehow we have yet to shake this? Like how much dried tarragon does one household need?

Everyone was, of course, correct that we were crazy. But one great thing about getting married young is you get to work on your timing. Because my conclusion about marriage is that it’s like a comedy routine. Actually, it’s not like a comedy routine. It is a comedy routine. And the longer you’re together, the more you get your timing right.

We have a couple of routines we do, really without thinking about it. For example, there are the ones where I’m the straight man and it’s Wacky Husband Doing Wacky Things. So I roll my eyes about [Topic] and set him up for the good punch lines. This one is usually about his unending car restoration or fondness for old trains and rusty buckets or whatever. But then we’ll switch at other times: he’s the patient exasperated one and I’m the wacky linedancer/overemotional suitcase packer/ indignant moviewatcher objecting to legal inaccuracies in the film.

I think a lot of couples do this: you know each other’s stories and so you can either get bored by them or you can take the fun option and inhabit them. You learn where the slow spots are and help your esposo steer through them; you make it funnier by providing a contrast, or a pseudo-conflict, or a commentator. And you get better at it with time - we leave ‘em in stitches, Husband and me. (Sometimes we even make them laugh! Wait, no, too soon for an actual stitches joke?)

Though I wonder sometimes if unmarried people think married people spend their times alone with each other rolling their eyes at each other and exchanging barbs. Like they live in this horrible, real-life version of the parents’ marriage from Home Improvement.

I can’t speak for anyone else, but I’ll tell you this: when it’s just us, we are often just laughing at the squirrels in our yard. You guys, those squirrels are hilarious. The eye rolls are all for your benefit. Just like my inexplicable wedding-planning pins on Pinterest: just because I’m never having a wedding again doesn’t mean I won’t pin for your wedding. You’re welcome.