Saturday, February 28, 2009

we all knew he was a smarty pants

So boy-friend-o was on this show called Faut pas croire, which means "Do Not Believe," a Swiss news show, speaking about Darwin and his birthday.

CLICK HERE FOR THE LINK

So it starts off and it's just an intro: blah blah blah Darwin blah blah blah that derned creationism museum in Kentucky blah blah blah, we kind of have it in Switzerland too.

Then we get to Phil at circa 2:44 (I'll tell you about the lady later)

He's introduced as Asst. Prof. at University of Lausanne, and Phil says hi.

Then he's asked about the types of Creationism/maybe origin stories out there, and he says that you can't just say there's not really such a thing as a strict Creationist and non-Creationist, that it kinda varies and that some people aren't into it much at all. Then the interviewer pops in saying something like "like the theory that humans and dinosaurs existed at the same time?" To which boy friend-o responds "well, that's hard-creationism" He then goes on to outline his idea of something that is creationist: that there is a specific (particular) place, earth, or country for us, that there is a method as to how "we" got there and that something separates us, rationality or so.

Then he asks a question of the older lady, who stumbles a bit and takes a long time to answer (more on her later).

minute 5:30 Phil is asked about other religions, and he responds that of course everyone has their own cosmoginy (origin story) that explains the place of humans in the world. The host then asks for an example, and Phil mentions in the context of the Vedas in India the great cosmic sacrifice, which enabled the world, but they certainly aren't as hardcore about it as Christians, it's just kind of THEIR specific creation text.

Then the moderator asks "so it's just a Christian thing?"

To which Phil responds at 6:24, that it has a lot to do with the importance of the Bible, and its place in Christianity, that it gives a history and has been absorbed into the tradition (I know that the first part of this is right, the second is rather speculative on my part).


Then she's asked about teaching about the bible and explaining things to bebehs.


At 8:50 Phil is asked whether you can have a scientific and religious explanation of our origins, and he said absolutely. Then he kind of starts to mumble/talk fast, and my french isn't THAT great, but I believe he's saying that there's no reason why in Switzerland you can't have a scientific explanation of our origins and still have a religious explanation.

Then he's asked about the interaction of scientific and religious theories, to which he says something about her answers and then says that there are limits to scientific explanations and religious ones (very Swiss to split the baby like that), and that the biggest problem is confusing a religious explanation for a scientific one.

Then the host says something about the kids to the lady (it's ALWAYS about the kids)

Then there's time for one more question, but even though I understand a lot of the words, they aren't words that make sense to me, so I don't get the question or the answer really. I think it has something to do with what Darwin means in relation to something else, and phil answers by saying something about questions of "why" and "how" and two things coexisting (I suspect Darwin and religion)

LONG AND SHORT OF THIS
Phil is super smart and handled himself well. The lady was there not as someone debating him but a woman making a different point, that is, about teaching kids about their origins and how you can do that scientifically and religiously and not have your head explode. It's clear to see though that she gets flustered more easily, and her points aren't as academic as Phil's, so if it were a debate, he would totally have won!

Go Philippe!

Thursday, February 26, 2009

Oh my Ninja!



Hey you guys. I just wanted to give a quick yodel to the TBTL Tens who are seeing me because of the blog roll!

To my regular readers: I'm kind of addicted to a great show that Ira Glass of This American Life says is "revolutionizing talk radio" called Too Beautiful to Live, with Luke Burbank, the guy from the late Briant Park Project and who substitutes from time to time on Wait Wait Don't Tell Me. It's a radio show that combines Kanye West and the New Yorker as they describe, and I find it quite apt. Anyway, on TBTL, they refer to their "tens of listeners" (as opposed to "hundreds of listeners"), and so listeners are called The tens.
As a way of making us Tens aware of each other, one of the Tens in New York (the show itself is out of Seattle) started a blog roll, which is just a list of blogs done by TBTL listeners, all very snarky, smart, and charming, and I hope that my bloggo fits decently into that group!

Thanks fellow Tens, and let me say, I'm giving the blog roll a big "RAWR!"

A Mardi Gras Where People Lose Their Minds and Not Their Tops

Germans seem like Karnival...quite a lot.
It's not like Brazil where people drink and run about nekked as a jay bird, because it's too cold for that.


Imagine this in 45 degree weather...yikes

It's also not like New Orleans, where people...drink a lot and run around nekked as a jay bird. Haha.


See, it's not just a lady thing! The Zulu Dancers of NoLa do it too

They stage it over the period of a week or so (with the season seemingly beginning with the 11.11 parties in Cologne that kick the season off in November!), with each day having a different theme. In Tuebingen there was a Thursday where girls could cut off any neck tie they saw (and I did...thanks for being such a good sport, Lars), a day where people dressed like sooty chimney sweeps (which teetered on the brink of being too offensive for words), a day to wear rags (which was REALLY impressive and cool to see) and then just some other general days of rather off-beat, kitschy Indian costumes and witch hats. It was actually a lot of fun when I was living in the south.

A little weird looking, not gonna lie, but I think I like it more than Halloween over here

There they call it FaschINg, and in the tiny Catholic dorfs around Tuebingen (and in Rotweil too) people went nuts. It was, granted, a little creepy in a "this is unexpected...why are Germans weird?" way, but I preferred this more organized Mardi Gras kaos, because, among other reasons, you weren't as likely to get tetanus as in NOLA.

Flash forward and I'm in Berlin now, a very protestant state in Germany if ever there was one, but I'm protestant and I do Lent, so they should do fasching too, right?

Wrong.

I was asking around amongst the younger, more party-prone of our staff, and the response was an almost unanimous:
I am Prussian.

Sometimes, if they were feeling especially loquacious, I got

"I'm Prussian...like I want to get drunk and sl--p with my best friend's wife and be completely hungover the next day! That's ridiculous."

Ok, so this whole North-South divide thing, where the former detests the latter and the latter parties harder and with more dedication and cooler accents than the former, is not strange to Germany at all. Anyway, I hope you all had a great mardi gras, and I'm now throwing myself head first into Lent! I don't know why I put an exclamation point on there.

Sunday, February 22, 2009

The reason the Advent Lutheran kids take down the jankey laminated "Allelujah" posters today


With Lent upon us (sadly), I have decided to try a slightly less severe discipline than usual. One year, see, I went vegan, which was nearly impossible and rather awful, another year I went kosher, which was easier (thank you Allison dining hall!!!), and I've tried to do the rules of ramadan (that's hard when your dining hall at NU closes before the sun goes down...REALLY HARD).

Allison: The Cause of and Solution To all of South Campus' Problems
PARC Dining Area REPRESENT!


These have all been a bit of a trial, but it has always been my impression that our disciplines for Lent are supposed to

-teach self control
-mimic Christs' sufferings
-be some kind of contrition for our sins


So with that in mind I'm not going to give up facebook for Lent (I would go crazy), but I'll give up something else awesome:

CHOCOLATE

Yup--the very same

You heard me right, ladies and gents. I am giving up chocolate for Lent, which means that the next 48 hours will be all about the cocoa, chocolate milk, chocolate cookies, etc, because for 40 days I am having none of it. I am not saying that I'm that into chocolate as it is right now, but twice a week I have been known to sit at home with a dark cup of coffee, my letters home, and a bar of chocolate. I think it's a suitable discipline because
I enjoy it,
it is all over the place here (some people I know won't drink coffee at a cafe without a little chocolate to go with it),
and it's done right in this corner of the planet, so it's giving up something good.

In addition every Wednesday I am going to try to find a new Bible verse, not the cliche ones but like really meaty, good ones, and do some thinking on it. It's not exactly the "taking something on" that Pastor Tietjen was into, but I'm in another country, and I have a zillion things to do as it is.
So here are the ground rules for my discipline(s):
NO cocoa-based products, meaning no dark, milk, or white chocolate
No chocolate-based pastries or frosted thingies
No molee (not that that's a worry here, because they can't make a molee to save their lives)
No hot chocolate (I'll have to settle for tea when I'm freezing my hiney off)
Wednesday bible verses will be picked on Tuesday nights and pondered throughout the day on Wednesday (because I have a nice couple of hours free in the middle of the day)
I'll have to be rather insistent that my cappuccinos don't have cocoa on top (I hate that anyway...who does that?!? Who tells people that's ok?!!?)


...Not even if the chocolate looks like or intentionally sculpted to look like Jesus

Thursday, February 19, 2009

...and moving from the pretty to the awesome...

I saw this on the inter-webs this morning, and it made me smile and think, as a person who walks in a very German, get-there-ASAP way, "Gee, that's right on!"

You can click this to make it bigger

Courtesy of PhDcomics.com

You guys ROCK in a very, depressingly accurate way.

Kate has a Camera...Why?

Here's a compilation of things I've found today, pretty or interesting stuff mostly, on a break from toiling away in a library. The flowers, btw, are all from boy-friend-o (Get it? Like in No Country for Old Men...friend-o...nevermind) and are super-pretty and awesome. Thanks bebeh!

I like this snow-gnome's hat and one arm...he looks kind of crazy-cool



I think this might be an homage to Heidi Klum

The way my street looked yesterday morning


PRETTY





Saturday, February 14, 2009

I choo choo choose you!

For the past week the halls of MBO have been abuzz with talk of the Valentines Ball. Having seen the name of a buddy, Katje, on the chaperone list, I thought "why not? could be interesting" and decided to join in the "fun"...from 6-8 PM. The dance went till 11, so I got the best of the whole situation: I got to put in an appearance, help the school, and make it home in time to do something fun. I spent Thursday looking for a decent cocktaily dress, and managed to find a nice, black/grey wrap dress at H&M (if you know my blue one, it's that with longer sleeves and less poof), which I wore a tank top under to make it more...family friendly/less va-va-voom.

It was good that I chose that and not a skirt, because this sucker turned out to be FORMAL! No one gave me that memo (this happens from time to time), but I blended in with the less well dressed of the bunch (Katje was in Dolce and Gabana...a decent picture of which [and of me] was taken by someone from the school paper and I'll get that out when I get it).

Milling in the lobby, something I did plenty in my time

I found my fellow teachers after a MORTIFYING bus ride where my students in year 9 found me (awkward) and kept asking me where my date was. The hall was actually really well decorated by the GSW, the student council, and it looked charming. One of my year 13s, a fellow Texans would describe as SWOLL!, was doing security, walking around in a puffy jacked with a walkie talkie making sure people weren't too drunk or disruptive and feeling important, there were hand stamps, all very official.

The older chaperons stayed mostly out in the hall, helping out when they could



but mostly just watching what was going on and commenting on it, looking for their students in particular. I was proud of our kiddos though, mostly black dresses (some VERY short ones, some over-formal, Quinceniera style dresses), tasteful shoes, and no one was nasty dancing. Mostly the music was Euro trash techno type stuff, most of which I'd never heard. There was one exception, though as you'll see, I was rather critical of the crowd, seeing as how THE SONG COMES WITH ITS OWN, VERY CLEAR DANCE!



I spent my time wandering, chatting up Katje and some of the other teachers, and then towards the end of my time I convinced one of my kids at the bar to get me a free drink. These girls are super cool, and I wish I could go back to my high school days, point these chicks out and say "Little Kate, be them!"

Photo edited for identity and...well, the girl in white is not wearing a family-friendly neckline

Then came Lady Gaga's "Just Dance" and then "Yeah," the former which I like quite a bit, and the latter which I have danced to before and know how, so I sort of waded in and started dancing with the year 10s who were the first ones to charge onto the dance floor at 7:00 promptly. I was apparently leaving a good impression, because a big crowd gathered to watch me "shake it as though 'twer a polaroid picture," and I was complimented. I think I scandallized one of the social workers at the school, but Katje commented "and you don't dance every weekend?" Ner...

At one point we got reports of a girl with a bad nosebleed in one of the bathrooms, so I was sent in to check it out. I opened the door marked "D" and was hit by a WAVE of hairspray, perfume, body spray, and more hair spray. The room was THICK with girls and a smell I can only describe as "industrial fruit and estrogen." They were all yelling and giggling and generally making a scene. I sort of waded in, found the girl in question, and established that she was actually fine, and the nosebleed had stopped (I think the hairspray in the air kind of cauterized it), after which I made a hasty exit, the most drama I experienced the whole night thankfully.

There were some oddities about this dance, things that made it special:
it was a super-formal but in the school assembly hall
no one nasty danced
personal space was respected (GERMAN!)
a student was the DJ
and then there was this...

This is EXACTLY what y'all think it is...a big ole' table of sausages and pretzels.
Can't have a decent dance without it(apparently)!!
So it was a good night, I think some of those kids got instilled with those traumatic high school memories so important to building character, though I never had to witness or mediate them, because I was gone! I got to see my kiddos, and congradulate the ones who did the work to make such a dance happen. So all around a good time.

Valentines Day Update

yes, I realize fully that I have not written in a while, and I have resolved rather that today is going to be a day for the people I love, and I love my tens of readers (any number greater than ten is considered a ten of something, get it?).

So I'll tell you all about my vacation post-Butler. I promise it will be significantly less pretentious. I flew from Schoenefeld to Geneva, where Philippe picked me up

The next day we kind of messed around in the morning, so we were a bit stressed and rushed to get skiis, which was a mistake, because--wouldn't you know it--the rental place that we went to didn't have skiis for "debutantes" as we beginners are called, so we had to go to another place, and we didn't get to the slopes at Les Mosses till about 2:30, which is dreadfully late, since the sun really goes down at like 4:30, and it's too dark to see decent distances on the slopes after 4. the idea of the day, however, was not to get in the most time on the slopes but rather to get a feeling for skiing again, and I have to say, I fell right into the right mode. Remember that one slope that was really long that I fell on last time? Totally kicked its butt! And I was so casual about it too, just chill, almost easy! We did another slope after that too, one where I could glide really fast; I even went faster than Phil (it was because of the skis, which were amazing and pretty new), which he yelled was "NOT POSSIBLE!" as I flew past. I'm pleased to say the end was quite hard, and I did well, until Phil went back for the car, and I got ambitious on my skiis and...well...kind of fell and had to pick myself up, which was hard.
That night we saw one of Phil's buddies playing in a moderately Latin band at this charming pub called Chorus. The band reminded me vaguely of something James would have been in a while ago, with the players singing in "Spanish" for the chorus while a really enthused singer played--no joke--cowbell with all her heart. The musicians were quite talented though, but we left early so I could get some sleep.

I needed sleep because the next day was the big day--skiing on a glacier! I liked the opportunity because, to paraphrase Stephen Colbert, my grandchildren will not know what a glacier is. It's also a deal where you can take a train there (it takes a while but is a really pretty ride), and your lift ticket is included in the price of the train, so it was a pretty good deal.
trying to show off my boots, but I just ended up looking hella-cute

Once we got to the base of the glacier, we had to take a seriously scary cable car to the top, and going up at the same time were this Kuwaiti couple on their honeymoon, rather funny since he wasn't able to ski, and she wouldn't be allowed to anyway. I think they went walking around and shopping (wrhuh?) at the top in the ski store. We, however, went down a rather scary beginning slope (it's ALWAYS so and then it gets better) and then on to the other pistes. I never repeated one and I actually didn't do so badly. I spent a lot of time working on not snow-plowing all the way down, which I am getting better about. The pistes were massive and broad, and the snow was powdery and well kept, just great!


Then, however, like in a movie, in just seconds the clouds descended, which was terrifying. They came billowing down and cut our visibility by a LOT. I was pretty scared, but there weren't a lot of people on the slopes, so why not keep going. I had to just be VERY aware of where the edges of the pistes were, and that was a bit difficult. I was following Philippe all the way down, trying to keep him in my sites.


It was actually quite exciting, and we would have our faces, hair, and hats covered in frost by the time we reached the bottoms, so we looked like grizzled mountaineers. The clouds were also not consistent, coming and going till we couldn't tell what was going to happen next. It did get a little scary after a while, so we decided to head back to base, which was also quite fun, but the visibility was getting worse and worse, so we were glad we chose to go back when we did.



We had lunch on the glacier, where some poor souls were still coming up, and then we headed back down the mountain on the cable car

(the alternative would have been a black-level slope, which...no)

and we spent the rest of the afternoon on slightly smaller, friendlier, but less powdery slopes.
The next day we just kind of chilled around town and then went to the resort at Saillons, getting caught in a HELLACIOUS(and totally unexpected) snow storm on the way back, and Sunday we went to brunch and came back to Berlin via train. It was a short vacation, but I think I got quite a bit out of it, wouldn't y'all agree?

Wednesday, February 4, 2009

A Very Dorky Entry from a Big ole Nerd

We're all nerds for some thing. If you have ever dated/hung out with/been forced to coexist with a Fantasy Sports fan, you know this. Even if it is considered "cool" some enthusiasms, like sports, can take a turn to the nerdy quite easily.

Some things, however, are nerdier than others, and treating a post-structuralist feminist author, Judith Butler, like a rock star definitely falls into the category of ueber nerd.


You know you're a nerd when you schedule "showering and relaxing" into your day
(taken from a friend's electronic events planner)

This is, however, exactly what happened at the Free University's Hegel lecture series. I had managed to get a ticket reservation, but it turned out that these reservations were not for seats but rather for the organizers to figure out how many were going, so we were all a bit irked that we would have to stand in line, but that we did by the hundreds to cram into a lecture hall, Delhi style or something. I was actually pretty amused to see the crowd, all fuzzily dressed college types (if your college is/was in Maine, they were demographically basically the same), some of whom were in need of bras, shoving to get through one tiny door and fill the auditorium. No one was trampled, which was a relief to me, since having to have "was trampled at a Judith Butler lecture" in your obituary would be...outlandishly pathetic. I sat with Stephan, Michael, and Mathew, all polisci majors, in the sixth row from the front


Our view

They were good seats. After an hour of waiting around, watching the place fill to capacity and hearing people sent off to a satellite viewing room



The Crowd

the intros started. First came the university's vice president, and apparently she's not a very loved figure. She and the administration are doing something that American universities by and large got out of their systems by the 80s, fighting to turn a hippy-filled institution into a serious research university, and ticking off quite a few in the process. Usually this would garner grumblings, but at FU Berlin it called for outright hostility, to the point that when she pointed out FU's new rank in the 9 elite universities in Germany, loud booing ensued. "She's an evil neoliberal agent" explained Stephan. I was moderately scandalized.

The worst was yet to come when the coordinating professor got up to give the academic intro. They were running behind, and he was rather pedantic, and this was met 5 minutes in by a VERY LOUD heckler yelling "AUFHOEREN!" meaning "STOP!" and then "free academic discourse [after reunification]" being outright laughed at. These nerds were OUT OF CONTROL! Michael and Mat were embarrassed for their school, and I would have been too to be honest. I mean, what must Judy have thought!?

We found out moments later when she took the podium. It was actually a bit of a Judith Butler's Greatest Hits, in which she was supposed to be talking about "Frames of War" but in which she actually reiterated her work on narratives, replacing "I" with a deployed "life" and "precariousness" instead of "narrative" with a splash of Foucault's theories on discipline and punishment (performativity in other words) and anthropocentric theory thrown in to keep things spicey. I actually devised a drinking game for it:

Judy's Drinking Game
"narrative" - 1 shot
stealing Lacan/Derrida - 2 shots
anti-Zionist rhetoric (she's FAMOUS for that) - 2 shots
quotes out of Excitable Speech more than 3 lines long - 1 shot
fuzzy and abstract "alternative" analyses - 1 shot
antiquated second wave feminist rhetoric - 2 shots
taking a word like "frame" or "life" and counterintuitively redefining it to mean something else- 1 shot

It actually was more involved than that since we came up with the rules in the over-crowded subway on our way back from the lecture (last time I saw a crowd this big on a train was New Years Eve...no joke...and they were all coming from the lecture), but you get the point.

REVIEW OF THE SPEECH
Skip ahead if you don't care to hear nerdly gushing

Now please don't judge me too harshly in my reactions to her. It's all from a place of love. I was really into her sophmore year in high school, in which we had to quote excerpts from both Excitable Speech and Gender Trouble for debate, so I became VERY familiar with the use of her arguments then. I'd actually sort of grown out of her (and poststructuralism in general) by last year, but when I heard she was speaking here, I couldn't resist checking it out. This woman has been very influential in how I view gender in general, and she's largely to blame for a good deal of my weekends that year being sucked away at debate tournaments. I am a nerd for her work even if I'm more critical of it now (I have before been known to say "deconstruct my a$$" in certain company). This was a great lecture, it didn't run too long, and she did the intro in German (though I doubt she could have sustained it very long, though she did spend a year at Heidelberg studying Hegel, she is an American professor), and she treated the topic well.
It was clear from the short haircuts and odd clothing choices that many of the people there had shown up expecting a lecture about gender and feminism, and she was speaking on a more meta level, applying feminist perspectives to conflict theories and referencing some of her works that those following just her work on gender would not have read. She therefore spent quite a lot of the speech defining and explaining things that were familiar to me and the polisci people, but she knew her audience well, and she communicated to them the information that they needed for understanding her perspective.

very short excerpt, just so you can hear her voice

END OF REVIEW

Ok, so that's all for today, kiddos, but a little programming note: I have a week off from school this week and as a result I'm heading off to Switzerland in a few hours to spend some quality time on the slopes with boyfriend-o (get it? Like in No Country for Old Men...friend-o? UEBER NERD MOMENT) so I won't be on or very responsive for a while. Sorry, but I'm enjoying a vacation. Have a great week!

Sunday, February 1, 2009

It IS that easy!

So another example of dumb Kate Luck coming in handy again. I read on my fave fashion bloggo that it was Berlin fashion week, and there were galleries and shows all over town, so why not check it out? I put it in the category of "things I am doing to cultivate a taste in culture and stuff" and elected to go on Tuesday after school to one of the project galleries.
Berlin Fashion Week Components
1. galleries--
like a big closet where occasionally people would come out wearing some of the clothes while everyone else mills around pawing clothes on hangers on the sides...less a closet I suppose, than an actual store
2. buyer's galleries-- these are places where boutique owners and people who have money coming out of every orifice come to look at the new designers and maybe pick up their new lines...from what I understand these things reek of desperation and man-perfume
3. runway shows--these are what you think of when you think of fashion week, and I'll tell you, they last on average like 15 minutes but you wait in line forever to see them

Well, turns out this particular gallery was not particularly...umm...easy to get into. Apparently fashionable people don't like doors, so I went in the back, where there were a billion people in various states of "I'm wearing a potato sack." An androgynous Aussie-accented creature approached me and asked me in a rather annoyed voice "where are your credentials?!" I began to paw through my bag to find some form of ID, which was NOT FAST IN COMING, and she eventually just got mad and ushered me into the gallery where I stood VERY quietly with my moleskine (angelic noises here) writing with my serious face on. Well, this was an emergent artist gallery, so lot of people I didn't know wearing things that looked confusing (good news: black is still good! bad news: Gem Sweaters don't need gems to be cool anymore) and wandering around. Occasionally we would clap at something (there was this REALLY cool shirt that was woven of this tough material...kind of complicated to explain) and then the people who were supposed to be there would chat about how awful this or that was while I tried to be invisible/look like the member of the press they thought I was. The showing was blissfully short (thank the l-rd) and as I prepared to sneak out, someone handed me an invitation to this other showing. This invite:


Shi-SHAW!

became my press pass; I would stick it in my notebook and wander around, and when asked for a press pass, I was at small enough events that no one bothered to wait for me to pull out a lanyard. This basically went on for three of the fashion week nights (email me if you want my input on the de ruuk or the Finnish designers, but I didn't want to bore people), and once I got a little bit more gutsy and tried for a runway show put on by the Lala group. Getting into this one took more finess, since I had to time my arrival to be late enough that everyone was in a rush, but early enough to still get in, but not too early or I'd stick out. YOU SEE MY DILEMMA. I chose a good time, 5 minutes before the show, and I slunk in through the press entry with a pack of angry "I don't get a seat now!" types, and let me tell you, I didn't see much and it didn't last more than 20 minutes all in (upswing: they were TOTALLY playing MIA!). That having been said, it was really exciting, lots of people, and I felt like things were moving around me

I'll also tell you guys this: the reason crowd control and stuff like that works at fashion week here is not because it's so tight--maybe for the big shows and buyer's galleries--but because no one tries to go in. They follow the rules. If you're not supposed to be somewhere, you don't try. I'm here to tell you guys: TRY! I can't believe I got in to see pieces from the designers that I saw, but I did (one of the galleries had a shockingly awful quasi-batik Kors number which I'll go ahead and blame on one of his interns), and it worked.

Well, it worked until I got caught. See, when you go to buyers' galleries you're supposed to present the business card of the boutique you're buying for. I probably should have a business card (I have plenty of friends who do at my age), but I don't, so I did the whole "paw through your cavernous purse" thing again, but this lady was determined to wait me out to let me in, so that didn't go so well, and I kind of scampered off with a "oops" and after that I didn't show my face at fashion week events again. I guess I lost my nerve--it was also just after my German debate tournament (more on that later), so I was tired. Anyway, it was great, totally worth the nerves, and here are my top 5 most frequent observations during my gallery touring (in no particular order):
1. She shouldn't walk in those
2. I saw that on Project Runway once (Joe's awful little PhD hood on a tee shirt...I sh*t you not--he's laughing his straight butt off somewhere I tells ya)
3. What are those loops of fabric for?
4. That top is too___________
5. Wow, there's lots of orange in these galleries. That must be a hip color!

I know most of you aren't fashion types, so thank you for indulging me in this post. The next one will be its exact opposite I promise!