Butts

It occurred to me today that my pets are like 65% butt, which somehow feels appropriate since my own body feels more like 65% butt lately than not. Oh pants. When shall I ever find a pair of you that fits and flatters (for less than $100)?

Truthfully, on the grad student budget, that figure should be more like < $30. I've found a Nordstrom Rack here, which is kind of like Filene's Basement, in that there you will find drastically reduced black polyester clothing by BCBG and wonder who really, anymore, wears black polyester clothing to work? and then buy it anyway because you read in a magazine once that wrap dresses flatter every figure.

I'm taking a non-fiction workshop this semester, which has been tough. I'd like to do longer, researched, journalistic pieces but my schedule is too packed for that, so I end up writing about myself, which, as long-time readers of this blog know, is boring. It's one thing to write a kicky, 400 word blog entry about one's ass. Just you try and sustain that for 15 pages. I did. Wow. Yeah. Fiction? I miss you.

In a recent attempt to write about something other than myself, I emailed the SLC popo this weekend to see if I could do a ride-along with one of their officers then write about it. In my email to them, I used the word "infrastructure" (as in: "as a new resident of SLC, I'm interested in how the infrastructure of the city works"). Apparently in SLC, examining the "infrastructure" is synonymous with spying. I got back a polite but suspicious email implying that if I were interested in ferreting out then exposing the inner-workings and secrets of the SLC police department, I should take my business elsewhere. I emailed them back and tried to explain what I meant by "infrastructure" without making unflattering comparisons to, say, the sanitation department or mayor's office. They haven't written me back yet, but I'm pretty sure I'm now on some list that, at some point, may involve my black-balling or deportation. I'm not sure, so in the meantime I'm just trying to be an upstanding citizen. Which means taking out my trash on time instead of letting it fester in my apartment for a week. Which means this morning (trash day), dressed in my professorial best, I took the trash out before heading off to teach class. When I got to my car, I smelled something funny. Maybe funny is the wrong word...maybe...horrible? Awful? Wretchingly acrid? Something along those lines.

I was confused--I'd cleaned out my car weeks earlier. I couldn't remember leaving any kind of foodstuff moldering beneath a seat. And yet something in my car reeked like the dead. I puzzled about this all the way to the parking lot at school. Then I got out of the car with ten minutes to class and realized that I still smelled the smell. I looked down at myself--as if a little part of my brain already knew--and realized it wasn't the car that reeked, it was me. One entire be-tighted leg all the way to the skirt was dripping with garbage juice. It was chilly today and my tights were thick--the moisture hadn't seeped to my skin yet and so had gone undetected. Well. It was too late to drive home and change. I made a spectacle of myself in the girl's bathroom and tried my hardest to get rid of the stink, but there was little I could do. I will tell you something about 18 year olds: they notice everything. Faced with the choice of letting my students think I was either completely unhygienic or just plain stupid and probably incompetent to teach a class they were each paying a thousand dollars to take...well, which do you think I chose? I'm just an American, after all.