You may notice that I still consider all fashion/beauty/aesthetic-related thoughts to be frivol, but that's just the way things are. If I'm on Reddit, it's usually subreddits related to this frivol, and there was a thread on r/femalefashionadvice recently about this very idea. Anyways, here's another post about fashion.
Since my last fashion post, I have purchased 2/3 of the items I planned for, and one other shirt. I bought two knit crop tops from Forever 21, a navy-cream striped one and a rusty henley that would better suit my roommate, and the stone-wash denim shorts from American Apparel, for 20% off. I did it to congratulate myself for getting good grades this past semester. I tell myself these things.
Sometime last year, after getting really into lurking the whole minimalism/French wardrobe/capsule wardrobe/pseudo-Scandi/pseudo-gamine giga-trend (and it is a trend, for fuck's sake), I decided that I'd forever swear off fast fashion like Forever 21, H&M, and...actually, that's where 90% of my wardrobe is from. Oft repeated are the claims that the quality is shitty, sweatshop conditions, overly trendy, etc. Others put this more eloquently than I can.
Earlier this summer, my roommate and I were cleaning out our room. Mostly, this was her digging through the literal piles of clothes that she has and figuring out which things to keep and which things to donate. In this process, we found two of my grey shirts and three of my boyfriend's and multitudes of my black ankle socks. We heaped a ton of things into our donate pile and called it a day. When she left for her summer vacation, I tried to do the same to my clothes and realized that even the clothes I didn't want to keep weren't in condition fit to be donated.
This comes back to Forever 21. About 75% of my wardrobe comes from before college. I have very few items from middle school, but enough where I really do have to broaden that category. I have a difficult time letting go of clothes. This is a relic of the fact that I've been about the same height and weight since I was 14, and that even then, I recognized that I would be doomed to jeans and t-shirts and skater dresses (even before they were called such) for all eternity.
That is to say, I'm pretty happy with the way I dress, and I actually do like how Forever 21 t-shirts fit on me. The problem is that I use this to justify keeping clothes past their expiration date. My jeans from pre-AP classes are napkin thin. My crimson ribbed (sounds gruesome) polo from seventh grade should have been retired three years ago. All my $3 basics from Forever 21 and H&M inevitably lose their shape after the first year. I know this. I bought two tops from Forever 21 just a few weeks ago. I know better.
I also know better than to buy low-waist shorts or jeans, but thankfully I stopped that nonsense in college. Also, you don't have to wash your jeans after ever wear. Repeating pants gave me way too much anxiety in middle/high school.
Anyways, this post was sort of just about how I have an overblown wardrobe problem that stems not from over-consumption but from keeping clothes that are far too old/were low quality to begin with. Every once in awhile, I realize that I'm 20 fucking years old, applying to med school, and consistently wear clothes that I had back in the fucking day.
As a final note, mend and make do and all that, but probably buy things that can hold up to some wear before they start looking like napkins in the first place.
Thursday, June 11, 2015
Friday, June 5, 2015
Ready for review
Post-AMCAS celebratory lunch + recreational reading
I submitted AMCAS yesterday morning with little trouble. My transcripts were received surprisingly quickly, especially since there was a delay with my community college one, and I my application was 'ready for review' when I woke up from my nap. Naptime, of course, is just one of the many leisurely activities I did yesterday. Alarmingly enough, I started and finished a recreational, non-meducational book (The Triple Package, by tiger mom Amy Chua and her husband Jed Rubenfeld) and also spent an absurd time on Reddit. I added one other American history/politics/economics/society book (A Call to Action, by Jimmy Carter, a president I very vaguely know as being the fella whose presidency correlated with the Iran hostage crisis) to my summer reading list. I'm about 80% through The House of God, and surprisingly haven't touched The Once and Future King.
To return to my favorite topic (the MD application cycle, of course), I'm still in the process of finalizing The List, which is not anywhere near finalized. Even so, I'm sort of letting myself kick back and relax this weekend -- and just this weekend -- before I go all in with pre-writing secondaries and burning my eyes out staring at MSAR. Oh, and I have jury duty on Tuesday.
In my leisure, I've been picking back up with my interest in frivolous things like clothes and makeup because I am a vain creature. My latest fixation has been the pursuit of a suit for med school interviews, which I will hopefully get. My suit shopping, however, is hindered by the fact that Reddit has convinced me (r/mfa, those well-dressed bastards) that my suit should be wool, should be lined. Easy enough for MFA! Women's suits, I've learned, are usually synthetic and usually feature flared trousers, which do not look good on me.
In other news, I'm restarting my independent research project. Last summer, I made some good progress on it, but we were hindered by the data collection method. This summer, the machine shop has new toys, and hopefully by the end of summer, I'll be trained to play with them on my own. I'll have to spend some serious time thinking about how to go about with this inquiry, since I don't know how and where this whole thing will be impactful. I need to be more prudent about planning out this project, planning out how much and what kind of code I'll need to write in MATLAB, planning out what models I need to make on SolidWorks, planning out what to do with the vast cloud of data that I get -- quite literally, since it's a point cloud of coordinates. Really, that's the crux of it. At this point, I'm just collecting coordinates without a good plan.
One final thing: I'm getting back into writing, amazingly enough. I'm hoping to regularly post on r/nosleep, and to get a long-term high fantasy project resurrected. This is all, of course, me dreaming about not writing secondaries.
Nothing else to report.
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