Go Irish!

Notre Dame might accept students and offer classes, but beyond the trappings of dorms and dining halls, ND is football.  I've seen Rudy, peeked through the fence to glimpse the football team practicing, and watched almost every home game on tv.  I was SO excited that we were finally able to afford tickets this year (for a student and a spouse, tickets to the home games cost $500).  Yesterday was the first game of the season.  Mike and I got to campus early and wandered through the huge crowds of people, who were all dressed from head-to-toe in Notre Dame gear and were taking pictures of everything in sight.  Grown men were acting like children on Christmas morning; it was hard to watch them and not get absurdly excited for the game.

Our seats were right next to the stairwell the players came through, which was really cool.  Our team stayed ahead the entire game, and we ended up beating the Boilermakers by a comfortable margin.  Despite some missed tackles, it was a very promising start to the season. And yet...

It was a mostly-miserable experience.  Perhaps this was partly the product of overly-inflated expectations, but  I couldn't wait for the game to be over, and kept thinking I'd be enjoying it more if I were watching it on TV.  Tailgating, it turns out, is pointless if you're not ingesting large quantities of beer. The ridiculously overpriced hamburger I got before the game was almost entirely raw, and the two bites I had before looking down left my stomach queasy for hours.  The stadium was so packed that we didn't have room to stand facing forward, but were forced to stand twisted sideways (and my shoulders are NOT that wide).  My shoes got drenched in Coca-Cola, and everything smelled like vomit and alcohol.  We had to remain standing on the benches the entire game, and even then a guy in front of me was so tall I could only see half the field.  

Our section, which was supposed to be reserved for law students, was inundated by sophomores who were too drunk to find their real seats (which certainly didn't help the crowding problem).  One of them, who decided to sit on Mike's other side, was constantly throwing his elbows out during cheers and knocking Mike and I down from the bench.  This same fellow yelled a constant stream of filth, not only at the referees and the other team, but at our own players.  His friends found it hilarious.  

Notre Dame students have the tradition, whenever our team scores, of hoisting small-sized females into the air  and throwing them up and down in celebration.  The large, obnoxious sophomore was not paying attention, and thought that we had scored off an incomplete pass.  He grabbed a drunk girl sitting in front of him and threw her up in the air.  The other boys nearby didn't notice, and were busy trying to listen to the referee announce a penalty.  Obnoxious boy couldn't catch the girl on his own, and she crashed down onto the ground, hitting her head on the bleachers.  Blood started pouring down her face.  A few of the boys seemed mildly concerned (i.e. put a worried expression on their faces and quickly asked if she was ok, but continued intently watching the game), but obnoxious boy thought her injuries were even more entertaining than his profanities.  The girl's friends were, perhaps, even worse.  One of them yelled to obnoxious boy "Make her stand up so I can get a good picture."  And so obnoxious boy forced bleeding girl to her feet and held her up while her "friends" pulled out their cameras.

All this stood in sharp contrast to the games I watched last year, sitting on the comfy futon, eating homemade salsa and cookies and getting homework done during the commercial breaks.  I'm all for cheering the Irish on, I'd just rather not do it from the stadium.  As we have season tickets, hopefully yesterday was an anomalous experience, but ... I feel like such a terrible Notre Dame student right now.

The Skinny

A few years ago, whenever I saw someone wearing skinny jeans, I shuddered.  The 1980s and early 1990s are not a fashion era I find very aesthetically appealing, and I didn't really want graffiti denim and parachute pants to make a comeback. I still feel that way, but I've become acclimatized to skinny jeans - and seen a lot of people pull them off adorably.  But my closet remains resolutely full of flared pants and bootcut bottoms that are quickly becoming "mom jeans"

Part of it is due to my overall ignorance when it comes to fashion - I love clothes, but I like shopping on the cheap and definitely don't keep up on my Chanel and St. Yves Laurent (if that's even a thing) or what ridiculous get-ups are draped over models on the catwalk (they can pull off anything... I can't).

Another reason I've avoided skinny jeans is because many of them simply don't fit.  A while ago, I found a great chart that evaluated your measurements - and it kindly informed me that my ankles would only be proportionate on a woman who stood over six feet tall.  Many skinny jeans in my size, even some of the stretchy ones, literally will not fit over my monstrous heels because the bottom hems don't have much give.

Both of these obstacles could be overcome... there definitely are skinny jeans out there that would fit, and they've become so pervasive that you can pick them up at K-Mart and wear them with any shirt on the shelf.  The real reason I persist in my mom-jeans is psychological.

There was a period of time, when my family lived in a ridiculously big house we couldn't sell and my family was trying to pay two college tuitions (both mine and my mom's) when we didn't have much money.  As a result, I was dressed mainly in hand-me-downs from relatives and the bounty from an occasional trip to DI.  When I was 14, I owned three pairs of jeans, and all of them were skinny jeans.  Today, this would probably be fairly normal.  In 2002, back when Britney was still all that and most teenagers didn't even text, wearing a pair of skinny jeans was something only women over 35 attempted.  Any passer by could have seen that I must be wearing clothes someone more sensible had rejected, and I was painfully aware of it.  Shy 14 year old girls don't tend to excel at "working it" in "vintage". 

When our/my money situation changed, I loaded up on flares and gave those skinny jeans back to DI.  Unless you count weak moments in dressing rooms when I've temporarily thought about giving in to the trend, I have't been in a pair of skinny jeans since.  My past experiences being unfashionable have scarred me to the point where I now insist on being unfashionable.  My main consolation, besides how awesome it is to wear skirts and not have to worry about pants at all, is that at some point bootcuts will be back and I'll be the hippest 30 year old mom around.

Three Reasons to be Ridiculously Happy

1.  It's still Spring Break, for another 48 hours and 4 minutes

2.  Thanks to the motivation provided by this delicious-looking photograph taken by my cousin, I have a giant container of homemade oreos sitting on my counter!

3.  At the outlet mall, I picked up this amazing hat for a mere $2.  I feel like a plaid Charlie Chaplain (despite the fact that this is most definitely a trilby, not a bowler - yay Wikipedia for clearing that up).

\

Granted, I can think of other reasons to be happy too, like having good health and a place to live and whatnot, but they're currently being cancelled out by the fact that it is literally raining on my parade.  Or at least on the parade that we would be downtown watching right now, were it not raining.

The Case of the Missing Casebooks

As anyone who knows me well enough to read this blog probably knows, I love bookstores. In my perfect imaginary world, I would spend two or three nights a week curled up on an easy chair at Borders with cocoa and a new book (and somehow magically not feel guilty about exploiting a commercial establishment with my loitering, merchandise-using, freeloading ways). There is, however, one trip to the bookstore that I generally dread - the one that heralds in the beginning of each new semester. Spending seven hundred dollars on books is my idea of heaven, except when that seven hundred dollars only buys four dense casebooks and their statutory supplements on such enthralling matters as Partnerships, Corporations, and Other Business Associations.

This semester I was able to buy my Federal Tax Law casebook online (saving $70), because the professor kindly informed us of the ISBN for the required text over a week ago. I hadn't heard anything about the other books, though, and deciding that there weren't enough days left to order the books online and have them shipped in time to safely be able to complete my reading assignments before Monday's classes, I headed to the bookstore, warily armed with my credit card and expecting the worst.

I quickly located the section with the law school textbooks (the wall is very easy to spot - laden with hundreds of hard cover casebooks [all around 1500 pages and uniformly bound in impressive shades of blue, red, and black with gold lettering] a quiet shopper can hear those unlucky shelves moaning and lamenting their fate like the damned souls in the Divine Comedy). I began looking through the tags on the shelves, indicating the various classes: Not-For-Profit Organizations, Administrative Law, Federal Courts... After a few minutes, I came across paper-bound books with pictures on the cover and realized I was no longer in the right section. Concerned, I began retracing my steps, peering more carefully at each tag. As before, I did see the Federal Tax casebook on the shelf, but not a hint of any of my other five classes.

Finally defeated (with irrational fears going through my head that every class I had registered for this semester had mysteriously been cancelled) I approached a bookstore employee for help. Somewhat annoyed that I didn't have my course numbers with me, she led me over to a computer and began inputting my professors' names.

"Medieval Legal History?" she asked. "The professor informed us there were no books needed for the course." One by one she looked up all of my classes, and each time informed me the same thing "The system says there are no required texts."

A few hours later, I began to get emails with course syllabi, each one including a message from the instructor that there were no required texts and he (the pronoun evidences my university's gender issues, not mine...all my professors this semester are men) would be emailing us attachments containing our reading assignments each week. So even though it means less impressive-looking tomes to use in torturing my own bookshelf, I think I can live with buying some $2 binders and using my free printouts rather than having to spend money on casebooks. Now I just need to convince my husband that the $700 I had set aside for textbooks should still be spent at a bookstore, on a shopping trip with a more enjoyable purpose :)