#double dates will be in true greek myth fashion

[ronnierosest]

Am I supposed to be calm about Moros, Hypnos and Thanatos siblings? Am I? Truly?

[drugs-and-deadlines]

she & her

You are haunted by the manic female NYC writer trope. Not a trope, really, because that feels like a reduction of her wiles, her slipperiness, her popularity, her perseverance, and her sex. It is a certain kind of ghost, progressive and beguiling, her kink as boundary pushing as the prose lifting up her personal narrative. She sculpts meaning-making out of every lived moment in her life, but most especially the young ones, because those are more thrilling for her audience, wherein she oscillated from a teetering cocktail of stimulants and alcohol, between egotist self-aggrandizing and pure self-flagellation. 

You know exactly who she is, because her definition and her very body is composed of the resistance to definition, most especially the questions and expectations of femininity. She is by turns lithe, waifish, possibly sick; by turns defying categorization with a smirk and a firm muscular body; by turns unafraid of her fatness in brain and body to take up space. When she generally speaks of her body, it is to make a philosophical point about the world at large and the place of female-bodied people in it; she skewers her feelings about her own corporal form with analysis. You know her because you have flirted with her in a literal sense, but also a figurative one -- you have let your body, fashion, and being explore each of the categories but none of them ever stuck. And a big part of you has feared why that is -- perhaps you don’t know yourself, perhaps your indecisiveness outstrips your ambition, a thoroughly un-manic trait. Perhaps, most horrifyingly, you fall too cleanly into a Freudian ball of neuroses to allow yourself to ever be you and thus will always be chasing the best way to present yourself. And meanwhile, while you’re asking yourself all these questions, she is writing.

She is not just writing. She is staying up late, refining the same sentence with rigor, stripping it further down to its essentials while you stare up at the ceiling, wondering at the opportunities you’ve missed. She is a ghost because she is able to slip through all the cracks of the house that is your life. She creates a mythos of every doorway she’s passed through. Even in her floundering, even in her telling of her own failures, there is a sort of certitude that each bumbling embarrassment served the narrative purpose of bringing her right to this moment: a moment of fame, of byline, of acknowledged brimming talent. 

If you had little money or privilege growing up, she had all of it, spending summers on a family boat in Greek waters, inviting friends from your liberal arts college to come along and therefore fall in love with her for years. She deliberately chose not to apply to the Ivies because she wanted a less conventional path; you chose not to apply because you never thought you could get in. She ends up dating the women from your past and you watch the thirst traps and inside jokes filter their way through Instagram and Twitter, a life you might have lived but weren’t brave enough or wealthy enough to attract. You cannot offer anyone a good time consistently because it exhausts you along with the other trappings of the class you were born into. You eventually grow out of resenting that which you never had, but the injustice of how the rich always have extra time still stings. Time seems to be everything a writer needs. 

If you did grow up with privilege or money, the ghost shapeshifts. She worked her way through undergrad as a server, or possibly a dominatrix or a stripper, a woman aware of the power of her own body and the ability to turn society’s preying into a currency she could use. She is always embodied, all her couplings and couplets enviable because of the bravery that surrounds them. When she is tired in her classes the next morning, it is only because she worked a double the night before. Her voice still leads your class’s intellectual thought, she openly confesses that she fell asleep in her work uniform with Plato’s Republic two pages away from the end of the reading assignment sometime around 2am. She does this in your 8am class. You’d hope to catch her for lunch, but she always has work to do, is always begging off invitations, and you hope desperately that it’s true and not because you’re not cool enough. And on the weekends, she always seems to have friends from work and beyond inviting her out. They have nothing to do with your age group or with the school you both attend. She is rapacious in her discipline but still somehow has time to try all the drugs you haven’t tried and are too afraid to. How is she so unafraid? Her fortitude and coolness with hard work is a currency too, making up for all the things she didn’t grow up with. Every privilege you’ve ever had only seems to undercut your sense of whether you earned anything. She is raw, willing to say the first absurd thing that comes in her head. Her poetry takes risks yours cannot. 

And you are pissed. Because regardless of where you come from, you are confronted with all these Instagram realities (that only make larger the actual realities), which is mostly that the rules are still the same. You avoided trying to be a cool girl as a child and a teenager because you knew you could not accomplish it, and so you strove to satisfy yourself with being an intellectual. You decided to give up on being an actor or a singer or a dancer and plunge yourself into letters because you thought it would be a refuge from constant performance. Constant performance required constant realigning to the changing modes of cool, and so you thought writing would suit you better. How wrong you were. 

Writing in itself is a more complete performance: if you are serious about it, you must be an intellectual builder of words in every moment of self-narrative, whether spoken, written, or posted. You listen to tales of “dressing for the muse” and showing up at the writing desk at 6am. You also listen to tales of complete slobbishness, writing on the floor with crayons, unafraid to make mistakes while creating in underwear and a tank top. Sex and danger, especially when both can be intertwined, are palpable in every sentence and interaction the manic girl has. It is part of her attraction. No knows if she’s going to want to fuck or fight, or, best of all, floatingly let you know she thinks you are full of your own light. The latter ideal scenario happens right before she leaves you to stride home, empowered enough to tromp through the late night New York City streetlamps dappling through the trees, deciding to walk with your now ever-aggrandizing thoughts rather than take the MTA. She is most thrilling when she leaves you wanting more, which is always. Your thoughts ping around your head with a velocity borrowed from her own. 

Once home, you look up all the writers she mentioned and see them all connected by several nodes: one MFA program or a particular residency, publishing house, or theater company. You become determined that this node is the epicenter, which will be true for a time until you’ve penetrated it and find another node of hot writers beyond your reach. 

There are always conversations happening without you. There are always people fucking without you. There will always have been a better time to be in New York, some time well before you were here, when it would’ve been easy to meet these intellectuals and be friends with them and the real estate was cheaper therefore making the creation of art and myth more accessible. You will always have missed the boat by five years or more, something you curse your age or attachment to another city before this one for. They took time away from the pulsing magnetism of your true love for this city, and you resent that, because now you are less attractive, less energetic, less manic than you were when you were younger. You cannot stay out for so long without chemical dependence & when you do, you bemoan that you should’ve been writing. But when you stay home to write, you invariably miss the moment when you would’ve met the right person who would’ve fallen in love with you & asked to read you.

You alternate with being obsessed with her, wanting in some way to possess her as a friend or ally or lover, to actually being possessed by her. The need to write what you know are brilliant fucking things infecting every moment -- prose pooling into an appetizing puddle at the bar, waiting for you to mop it up, poetry lingering on the steering wheel, electrifying your hands when you touch it to go go go go go fly to paper, even in those moments when you are fully possessed by her and become her, it is not enough, there is a time when you were more brilliant, more boundary pushing, more consumed by the manic need for a narrative that you simultaneously sculpted in your own life and committed opulently to paper. The poetry monster is always hungry. There is always a better-worded performance of the myth of your own making and you begin practicing by interviewing yourself. The graphomania can always, always, always increase its acceleration. But better that than a pandemic-inspired staring at the ceiling, this moment when you are certain you missed your chance and it will never come again, that there will never be a doing coke in the Village with some rich folks you barely know, the bumps wrapping you in cynicism and excitement for your new friend group all at once. No, in your pandemic reality, and perhaps before, clout is only gained via social media and you seem to be especially bad at that. The manic NYC female writer is better at it. She is genderbending her own performance of herself, twisting her depression and isolation somewhere in Connecticut or New Hampshire or her Manhattan fire escape as something to be envied.

How, you wonder, how how how how how

And then it becomes obvious

Her performance of self is nimble like white supremacy, resilient like the virus itself, always finding a new way to shapeshift her experience into something artful. You should be using this moment, because she certainly is. Because what the manic NYC female writer has is an obsession and possession of talent, a haunting that allows her to keep working at the problem into the late hours, when hers is the only light left on. And then there are moments when she obsesses instead of possesses, moments when the light is off but she is still awake, questioning this ceiling, her choices, and the fact that she’s chosen a stable partner beside her in bed instead of an ever-shifting existence that allows for new narratives to come in. She questions her life with the same rigor she does her stories, every choice that does not suit the performance and pursuit of her potential.

And, to that end, all of her/your characters become you/her or are versions of you/her -- and that is the only constant. The feedback she/you get(s) in workshops is that your/her main characters are too similar and that is precisely the point -- you are her and she is you and you both see one another on every street corner and every passage, only a few centimeters to the left in an alternate universe. The Quantumness of it all exhausts you and haunts the many yearning yous, the whole network of them, so overwhelming that then you must return to the facts of your autobiography to find stable ground before your own architecting of your autobiography shifts it again.

[angryhausfrau-writes]

I Travel Troubled Oceans: Chapter 14 - Meditations

With one fashion show already under his belt, Jack approaches his second with much more equanimity. Ok, he's maybe still a frazzled mess, and both Anne and Charles have both kidnapped him on several occasions just to get him to take a break. But he's really handling this show much better than the last. He is.

He's gotten most of his designs mocked up in muslin, knowing now that his strong suit is doing and not planning, even if it's only in this one thing. Charles and Anne have both made fun of him for getting too wrapped up in his head, for coming up with grand plans and schemes and tricky plots when a boot to the face would be nearly as effective and vastly quicker. But that's the thing. Jack doesn't want nearly good enough. He wants perfection. He wants to be the best – and that requires careful planning.

But there's a saying that perfection is the enemy of good enough. And Jack certainly values the balance Anne as his partner and Charles as his second in command (and isn't that a change of circumstances that Jack is still getting used to) bring to their little team. Because Max too is a planner and if it were just the two of them, they might get bogged down in the minute details and miss valuable windows of opportunity. Or literal windows, like the one Anne climbed through into the posh bedroom of one of the city planning commission bigwigs to gather conclusive proof of his tawdry extramarital affair. And if Anne helped herself to some of his top shelf booze and cigars, well Jack likes a drink and a smoke of an evening as well as the next man. Except for Charles, who'd complained that the whiskey went down too smooth, but Charles would drink paint thinner if left to his own devices, so Jack is firmly NOT taking his opinion into account.

Although he thinks at least half of Charles's stubborn refusal to be domesticated is a front. Because honestly, who would rather live life at the ragged edge of survival when they could be safe and comfortable and happy? Who goes out to beat the shit out of other people nearly every day – and have the shit beaten out of them in turn – when there are a million other much more pleasurable ways to spend one's time? Idiots, that's who.

It all just smacks of the kind of hypermasculine male alpha bullshit that Jack has never had particular interest in. Obviously.

But despite their differences, the three of them – well, five if you count Mary and Max, the latter of which Jack has learnt never to disregard – they all make a pretty great team. Jack might think rather highly of himself – too highly, if Anne's to be believed – but he would never be able to pull off the con they're attempting without Max. Without her connections, yes, but it's more than that. She has a clarity of vision he hasn't known since Flint ran a crew, and it's a vision far less likely to cause them to wind up dead or incarcerated.

And Mary has been invaluable helping out with the social media angle of their little venture. So much of what they are doing rests on public perception – and a positive public perception at that. Both Flint and Vane had run crews on the power that fear gave them. But that has never been Jack's angle. Sure, he's ruthless – violent - when he needs to be, but it isn't his go-to method of garnering respect. But even for him, this is a great deal farther along the path of respectability than he's ever trod before. And Mary has helped guide them all down it with a keen eye to social mores and outside perceptions that Jack can't help but admire. Even if he dislikes his work being interrupted for an hour while Mary stages the perfect “candid” photo for his Instagram.

Speaking of his work, it also helps having Christine as an assistant this go round at creating a fashion show, since Fashion Week is somewhat more important than his debut show. Jack has a lot of eyes on his design studio, and those eyes want to see sketches and drawn out designs – proof that he can hack it in the cutthroat world of high fashion. Which, Jack ran a street gang for two years, he's got this covered. But he is garnering a fair bit of interest from the British critics for this new show, as well as some international interest and it serves their agenda to keep those guardians of haute coture appeased., since Max is banking on further exposure for the next stages of her plan.

Sewing the seeds of an international criminal empire is not the only goal, however. Jack is also supposed to be using this show to help Idelle become even more entrenched with Councilor Featherstone. Max has gotten a fair bit of insider information off the esteemed councilor through Idelle's rather pointed pillow talk. Nothing actionable at this stage, but they're still laying the groundwork, both through her efforts and with Jack's own weekly tennis dates with the man. Not to mention the occasional double dates he and Charles have been dragged on, usually to the poshest and most upscale of restaurants – where Charles still doesn't deign to button his shirt more than half way. And expecting him to wear a suite jacket is a complete lost cause.

Not that Jack particularly minds. And he doesn't think Idelle does either.

Frankly, the councilor's not much to look at. Sort of quiet and mousy. Even after all these months and months of trying to draw him out of his shell, Jack doesn't feel like he's been all that successful. The man's more withdrawn than a turtle faced with whatever the fuck eats turtles.

Some kind of bird maybe? Or a lizard? Jack's not a biologist, all right? Or any kind of scientist.

What he is is a conman masquerading as a rich idiot fashion designer. Who's been tasked with making a prostitute look upper crust enough for the nouveau rich government official they're conning to start thinking marriage, not just fun fling.

Because one of the side effects of Jack “befriending” the councilor is that he starts complaining about his life problems. Which is exactly what Jack wants to happen. He can't very well give Councilor Featherstone his heart's desire – fix all the little botherations currently vexing him – if he doesn't know what those botherations are. But God is it dull. His largest problem is an overbearing mother who constantly wonders why he hasn't settled down yet.

And so Featherstone has been agonizing lately over whether or not Idelle is the capital-O one. The real deal. The love of his life. The one he wants to spend forever with – or as much of forever as middle-aged rich fuckers care to believe in.

And for the sake of the con if nothing else, it's Jack's job to make Idelle into the councilor's one true love. His soulmate. His reason de etre.

And that means taking a corner girl and turning her into an upper-middle class enough woman that she can be a wife and not just a hot trophy girlfriend, to be used and then discarded when a newer, shinier model wanders into the councilor's view.

Jack's getting flashbacks of watching My Fair Lady – terrible musical and with a completely different ending to the book. Although the sugar sweet Hollywood ending, with enough romantic nonsense to start rotting teeth, is exactly what they're after.

And Jack is nothing if not adaptable, as evidenced by his turning the whole Flint debacle into something positive. So this go round, all the clothes are rich brocades and just dripping in jewels, like the whole fucking royal treasury is out on the catwalk. And the clothes are not exactly modest, not with the amount of cleavage Jack's showing. Idelle's got great tits and it would be a shame not to feature them prominently. But there's no skin tight latex or side slits up to the waist or plunging necklines that end at the groin.

No. It's respectable.

He's respectable. Which isn't a word Jack often uses to describe himself, much less Anne or Charles. But here they are.

--

Anne is having a great fucking time. Like sure, she knew being rich had to be better than starving on the street. And the kind of money they've got is enough to let them weather storms of a magnitude she can't even fully comprehend.

But just the day to day stuff, it's ridiculous how much that shit's changed.

Anne's got people to clean her bathrooms. Hell, Anne's got a bathroom – and all to herself, she don't gotta share with anyone if she don't want. She can close and lock the door and lay in the gigantic bathtub, full of some perfumy smelling shit she swiped offa Jack and just exist for hours.

No one can get in and bother her. No one can judge her for using up all the hot water. Or for being unproductive.

Or for being girly.

Cuz Anne's not really one for frills and lace. Ain't never been one for dresses or high heels or makeup. But there's something to be said for having the freedom to do all the kinda girly shit she'd thought was stupid and weak and no way to get respect – and to find out that some of it's kinda fun.

Like the bubble baths. Or the tea parties she and Max and Mary started having, as a way for Anne to see Max at least weekly, but they've sorta turned into their own thing.

None of them are posh, and neither Anne or Mary want to put on the flowery sundresses that the event seems to call for. But Max'll put on a just fucking gorgeous dress with her hair piled up on her head with jewels in it like she's a queen or maybe a goddess like from Greek myths or some shit. And Anne'll put on a poet shirt and highwaisted pants and boots, cuz Byron might have been a syphilitic jackass but he had good fashion sense at least. And Mary'll put on a real sharp suit. And they'll sit out in their fancy garden and drink sparkling fruit juices with booze in them or tea nearly white with cream but still so much better than the dishwater they'd used to drink and eat finger sandwiches and fancy little cakes and just take the piss out of all the fucking rich pricks they've had to put up with all week. And sometimes, Charles will even join them, which is extra funny cuz he never even bothers to change out of his usual wardrobe of ripped jeans and leather and just so much testosterone you could choke. But he'll stick his pinky out when he drinks tea and gossip with the best of them, cuz he knows Anne'd give him endless shit if he didn't.

It's a whole hell of a lot of fun, is what Anne is saying, all that silliness and camaraderie and, and civility. She's glad she gets to live a life where she can do all those things. Where she don't gotta be the fiercest and the toughest and the ballsiest fucker in the room just to prove she belongs there.

Though she's also glad she gets to live a life where she can climb through a rich fuck's window to commit espionage and petty theft. Cuz life'd be pretty fucking boring if it was all just bubble baths and tea parties.

[secretcollectivenacho-blog]

Cool Men's T shirt designs - Men’s and women’s Top, T shirt, Gym Wear, Workout Tops and Tanks

Over the past half-century, the dress shirt has gone from being an undergarment to holding a prominent place in many outfits. This is one reason why it is today available in so many styles, colors, and patterns. Whether one's style is chinos or suit-and-tie, shirts are an essential means of expanding one's wardrobe.

A shirt's style signals quite a bit about the wearer's intentions. A dress shirt with a button-down collar, left breast pocket, plain front, and single-button cuffs signals leisure while a dress shirt with a turned-down point collar, no breast pocket, placket front, and French cuffs signals formality. The beauty of adjusting a shirt's style is that you can design it for not only for the occasion but also to compliment your unique features. Men's T shirts

The men's dress shirt collar is the most important style detail, both in determining the garment's level of formality and in how it flatters the wearer's face. Button-down collars are the least formal and extremely versatile; they look great without a tie but can just as well support a tie and sweater, blazer, or sport coat combination. The wing collar, on the other hand, is reserved for formal wear and should always be worn with its companion parts. It is the least versatile collar, whose sole purpose is to signal the highest level of dress.

Most men's dress shirts sport some sort of pointed collar, but there is huge room for variety here. While the standard point collar looks good on most men, those with narrower faces do better with slightly shorter ones, while round faces carry well above long collar points. As a general rule, the greater the angle between the short sides of the collar points, the more formal the presentation. Spread collars, which leave a wide opening between them, take large tie knots especially well. The edges of the cut-away collar nearly form a straight line above the tie knot; this is the most formal collar arrangement. An exception to the parallelism of spread and formality is the tab collar: here little tabs of fabric extending from each side connect behind the tie knot, holding the collar close together and projecting the knot outward for a precise, no-nonsense look. The white contrast collar, in any style, with or without matching white French cuffs, is a favorite of power-dressers. While it certainly raises a suit-and-tie above the masses, let the wearer be warned against it if he cannot equal its eminence. Women's gym wear

On most decent dress shirts, the collar's points are kept straight by collar stays. These 2- to 3-inch pointed splints are inserted into slots on the underside of the collar after ironing, and later removed for washing. Besides the plastic ones that come with most shirts, you can buy them in brass, silver, and even ivory, but their material has negligible effect on their function. Well, now that I've had a chance to ponder this whole corporate t shirt at the gym phenomenon, I have come up with a couple theories.

First a disclaimer: My friend works for MTV, and I sometimes wear a t shirt I get from the swag supply, so I'm as guilty as the next person. But I suspect people at my gym (NYHRC) have more nefarious motives. They're preening their feathers for the opposite sex by wearing their tax return plastered to their chest. They're basically saying I make X amount at such and such prestigious firm, so get in line to date me! Single file by the water fountain! Graphic T shirts

Incidentally, isn't it the guys who do this more than the women? Women's gym attire is generally more of the fun or functional variety, mainly lots of stuff from American Apparel and Lululemon; no surprise there, as the guys are still stuck in that Or else maybe this whole trend has to do with the recession? Things have been a bit tough around here lately, haven't they. Though I see a lot of people with an indomitable spirit just plugging away. In fact, one of my friends who got laid off went directly to the gym to get into the best shape of her life! Ladies tank tops

Denim is there since a long time and has been a favorite of many. The denim jeans are quite common among men as well as women, but to give that cool hunk look, the men's denim shirt is a must have. The impressive denim men's western shirt keeps on coming in trend and are not only worn by the masses but also the classes. The most important aspect is that these shirts nicely blend with any clothing and they are extremely comfortable and ideal for rough and tough use.

Denim gives a casual and trendy look, so it all depends on the designing of it to make the fabric look better. Designers also claim that denims are nice material and can be experimented in a lot of ways. You can have denim long sleeve shirts, men's denim jacket and so on. A particular shirt can look stunning and formal if it si designed in a particular fashion. If you have a look at leading men's clothing line, then you will surely find a section of these shirts.

These denims are available in myriad of textures and colors but it would be always safer and better if men don't get too inspired with the different colored shirts as most of the times these odd colors look tacky. Always go for lightweight denims. In fact, the lightweights are considered as better quality. Go for the classic black and blue colors as these are the true denim colors which can grab all the attention of others. Sometimes, even the double denims work, but to be on the safer side, wearing a shirt with the trousers won't give an overdosed look. sleeveless T shirts

You can hardly find Men's denim shirt design which cannot be made with this fabric. One can make denim long sleeve or sleeveless, the slim collared or any kind of shirt and all of these can look fantastic on men. The designers keep on displaying new designs and that breaks the myth about the denim usage. Just like men, denim is strong and sturdy and it can also be given a washed look or a faded look or even a torn look to project a casual attitude. Denims are great for picnic lovers, so if you have your weekend getaways, then the denim shirt is ideal attire.Men's slimming garments are an extremely popular as a method that men are taking advantage of to decrease the waistline, improve one's appearance, and improve self-confidence. Men's slimming tank tops can be worn discreetly underneath your clothes and remain virtually undetectable. Many men find these body girdle undergarments perfect for everyday wear or even special events where you want to minimize the appearance of a few extra pounds around the waist or flattening the chest to eliminate the appearance of 'man boobs.' Before you go out and buy, you want to know different brand names and reputation for quality If you're looking for the perfect slimming tank top, the first thing you need to know is which brands to look out for. Within the past several years, several new companies have started producing body shaping undergarments for men. Perhaps the most famous name in the male body shaper market is Spanx for Men. It used to be a big running joke about when the famous women's body shaper company would start making these garments for men, offering the same kind of waist slimming effect for men with a few extra pounds around the stomach. However, as of early 2010, Spanx creator Sara Blakely, debuted the new line dubbed Man Spanx in Nordstrom's department stores across the country. You will find that Spanx for Men offers more than the slimming tank top, but also v-neck and crew neck tops as well. It is too early to tell from customer reviews, but if the same level of painstaking quality is brought to the male shapewear, Spanx for Men is adequately positioned to really take off in sales and dominate the market. Sleeveless tops are fashion staples that date back to ancient times. Earlier civilizations wore sleeveless tops, which is evident by glancing at any history or art book that covers topics like Greek civilization. The tank-top revolution did not stop there. The roots of tank tops also have a history in athletics. In the 1800s, men wore bathing suits that resembled tank tops with a pair of shorts. Graphic T shirts

What does this mean for the modern fashionista, or for those who wear sugar lips for simplicity? It means having options, and a lot of them.

Tanks tops are fashionable and they never go out of style. From your basic ribbed tanks to ones with spaghetti straps, these essential pieces supplement any wardrobe type. If you need to hide some flaws, choose tanks tops with contoured seems to help shape your body. Whether you need tank tops for casual wear, for dressing up, or as pajama tops, stores and online retailers will guide you to find ones that best suit your needs.

After finding the correct fit, coordinate your tanks to fit multiple types of engagements. For a night out, pair a dressier tank top with a pair of dark denim bootcut jeans and a pair of boots. Dressier tanks are available in many fabrics types from cotton and lycra blends, to rayon and silk fabrics. In particular, silk tank tops provide a nice option when going out for a fancy dinner. Because many silk tanks have a flowing feel to them around the waist and hips, they provide a great option for any body type. Shop for Men’s and women’s Top from guttstshirts.com with 1000s of stylish products online. Best Delivery and free returns available. Workout Tanks