wardrobe malfunctions

We've had my parents here over the weekend, & now I'm completely exhausted. But it's good that they visited: it meant the bathroom got cleaned. This afternoon we took them down to Werribee to see the annual Helen Lempriere Sculpture Award. It's something I go to every year: if you like parks and gardens and are interested in sculpture, you should go too. I took a lot of pictures and tomorrow I'll post one or two, if you're not totally bored with sculpture already, ha ha. I think the parents enjoyed themselves. And at least the whole family got its collective fill of celebrity / freak spotting when Alannah Hill was spied sitting on the grass outside the cafe. As usual, Mlle Hill was fully kitted out in floaty, lacy, frippery clothes from her own range and had enough makeup on to frighten a cassowary. I wouldn't normally bother to tell you this but for the fact that she had SNEAKERS on her feet, well did you evah?

There was quite a long stretch there in my life when I was completely addicted to Alannah Hill's clothes; I am more than half ashamed to admit it now, but I honestly didn't feel properly dressed if I wasn't wearing at least one or two things of hers. And this just to go to university and shut myself in my office from 9am to 7pm. That was the Oscar Wilde phase: "I may occasionally be slightly overdressed, but I always make up for it by being immensely over-educated." Ah well, at least I still have the credit card debt to remember my former glamourous self by. I've long disposed of nearly all that wardrobe now, except one or two things I won't wear again but just like too much to get rid of. Now that i really think about it, I really am well into that final phase of the PhD, because that thing where once-important "standards" just vanish into thin air has totally kicked in. I can hardly be fagged to brush my hair in the morning, let alone wash and blow-dry it, and today instead of bothering to look for clean clothes I just put on some dirty, cat-hairy ones that i found on the bedroom floor.

I'm thinking about this now partly because of encountering Alannah today, & partly because I still don't have any clean clothes for when I have to leave the house tomorrow (no point putting on a load of washing at 11pm, now is there?) and partly because I've been following with interest the unfolding story of how my Internet Friend Scrivener, a literature professor in Atlanta, recently dyed bits of his hair green and had some fascinating reactions from partner and children, colleagues, friends, and, unexpectedly, from himself as well. You can go read it yourself, if you haven't already, so i won't summarise. Among other things it is a story about a person becoming suddenly and deeply conscious of how his personal appearance affects the way people "see" him, and on that level it resonated strongly with me, as I imagine it did with other women readers.

Having written those last few lines, I realise there is a lot more arising from them that I'd like to explore - things arising also from the years of weekends that I worked at Hell On Earth, but i will have to save it for another time: cos i think now I had better go do some washing after all.
sigh