These Japanese Knee Socks

"These socks! These Japanese knee socks!"
Kapka

I have no idea how the rest of the song goes, but I now know how Kapka felt when she composed her little ditty to her knee socks. You see, on Saturday, Cinderella and I went on a shopping expedition of the most dreadful kind--the kind where you know you want to buy something, but you don't know what.

My idea of shopping involves wandering through Gap. If Gap doesn't have anything I love, I usually give up. But Cinderella takes more of a gather approach to shopping (see Tolkien Boy's blog. And yes, I realize that I just implied that I'm a guy when it comes to shopping). So Cindy suggested a few of her favorite stores and off we went.

I used to love Maurices as much as I love Gap, but I haven't been for a long time. It's changed. I've changed. We approached each other warily at first. But once the first blush of awkwardness left, we embraced and renewed the old friendship.

That was dreadful, but too entertaining to delete.

The whole point of the post (well, almost the whole point), is that I found two items that left me giddy the rest of the day. One was a wool, herringbone print, red/white blazer complete with elbow patches. Red elbow patches. For $7.50. The other was a long, chocolate brown skirt that deserves its own song, something similar to Kapka's knee socks song. It was so perfect Tolkien Boy noticed (or maybe it had to be pointed out to him), and TB doesn't notice anything I wear ever. (Or any girl, but as always, this is about me. And Master Fob. Did I mention that apparently I'm one of the nuns of Fob? So not fair. And so appropriate.)

Today I was teaching my 115 students about writing their personal essay so that their reader can relate to the student's personal experience. I used the skirt story as the example and asked how I would get [male student] to relate to the story. They talked about making an analogy or a generalization. And I gleefully punched holes in their ideas. Then we talked about the magic of question answer question.

Why did I want a skirt like that?
Because my sister (LaLa) has a white long skirt that I love to borrow and I want one of my own.

Why can't you just keep borrowing her skirt?
I can't. She's married now.

What else changed when she got married?

And suddenly my skirt story isn't about a skirt, but about someone leaving and having to find a way to replace them, which is something everyone can relate to.

I told you I was brilliant, but no, you wouldn't listen. ;)