Ick. Gag. Yuck. Pwuh.

Seven of the ugliest pairs of shoes ever created by man.

Summer Fashion

Every year, magazines like Vogue, Elle and Cosmopolitan come out with an issue devoted entirely to ideal summer clothing. The selections usually look good. They just don't work out so well in real-time as they do in theory.

At least, that's how it goes when you live in the Southwest. It's hot here. And dry. And in July and August, it's hot, dry and muggy all at once. Temperatures range from 80 to 120 degrees, and yet we're supposed to run around in espadrilles and long, flowing dresses looking cool and crisp.

Yes, flowing dresses in light materials ARE ideal for being outside in the hot Southwest. But what about when you go inside, and the temperature is 12 degrees Fahrenheit?

Unfortunately, Arizona is a place where it must be 75 degrees cooler inside than it is outside at all times from March through October. This does not compute well when added into the equation of summer fashions produced by women's magazines.After all, the long, flowing dress and matching espadrilles are going to look dowdy once you go inside and put on a hoodie and wrap a blanket around yourself so you don't freeze to death (yes, people in my office DO take jackets and blankets with them to work).

Perhaps fashion trends would be better set if magazines were produced in the hottest climates, rather than in cooler places like the Pacific Northwest or Northeastern U.S. True, it's humid there, but they don't use air conditioning like we do. Oh, no siree.

Emergency Response Mechanism

So I just turned 21 this May. That's a number signifying adulthood and maturity in the U.S. if ever there was one.

We tend to believe that and buy into how adult being 21 is, especially since you can get drunk legally in the U.S. at that point (which isn't that big a deal if you're say, German, or go abroad often).

But sometimes believing you're mature isn't enough to make you feel like an adult. Here's a case study that best exemplifies what I'm saying:

It's the first day of Summer Session II classes. I just got my car back from the shop after two weeks of having no window on one side and having to live at my boyfriend's house because I live too far from the university to walk. I'm in a fairly good mood, making my lunch and dinner to take to work/school the next day.

Then there's that damn piece of bread. A beautiful, delicious, golden, mini-sourdough loaf I'm trying to split open to stuff with butter and divine brie. And it's gotten hard over the weekend. So I get out the BIG bread knife. The new one. The sharp one.

It won't cut the bread. I try every angle. The knife will not go in. So, in a flurry of brilliance, I slam the knife point onto the rounded edge of the bread, thinking "WHY WON'T YOU GO IN???"

Slice.

No, not the bread. I got the top of my finger.


"Eh," I think. "I get myself with knives all the time and never bleed. No big deal."

Blood starts coming out.

"Eh," I think. "Merely a flesh wound."

I rinse it out. More blood...let's make that LOTS more blood.

The little red light in my brain clicks on and I suddenly tear across the apartment to my bathroom, grab a Kleenex and wrap it around the gushing finger. Thoughts of "what do I do next?" swirl inside my skull as the wound begins to pulsate with pain.

So what do I do? I run to my desk, and, still holding the kleenex tightly onto my finger, I wrestle my cell phone open and call my parents. Who live in Willcox. That's 70 miles away at a good 80 mph.

My mom answers the phone, and the floodgates let loose. "I CUT MY FINGER! WHAT DO I DO?"

Pause. "Um, did you wash it out?" "YES!" "Did you wrap a towel around it?" "I'M USING A KLEENEX!" "Why aren't you using a towel?" "I'LL GET BLOOD ALL OVER IT!!!" "Okay..."

The conversation progresses as such until my mother wakes my father, who gets his own dose of tearful wailing about the bloody finger and how I've gone through three Kleenexes and it hurts so bad. So my dad calls my boyfriend, who lives a mere five minutes away. What happens when he arrives? Calm, cool logic wrestles with emotional blubbering for two minutes and then wants to know why on earth I called my parents. That's a really good question.

And if that scene isn't bad enough, I struggled when Ian tried to clean out the cut (I abhor medical cleansing pads and Peroxide), and again a week later when my dad was changing the dressings Campus Health had put on my finger--I wouldn't let him get close enough with nail scissors to snip off the back of the medical tape.

There are plenty of situations where I embody that cool, logical 21-year-old I like to think I am. But apparently, that logic has a melting point, and mine just happens to be blood. The moral of the story? I'll let you know when I find out. In the meantime I'm too busy oohing and ahhing over my finger's healing progress to figure out what it means to be this old and still go crying to mommy and daddy when something goes wrong.

I mean, wouldn't the adult thing to do have been to dress the wound myself? Or call Ian before calling my mother?

Maybe 21 years just isn't long enough to be that kind of mature.

A new beginning

It's been a long time since the last fashion post on this blog. Since then, I've done some thinking...and I decided to take a new direction here. Rather than having a blog about fashion, a blog about food, and a blog about random things that catch my attention, why not just have one blog for all three?

So, into the future then, in hopes of many more blog posts in one place than previously.