My husband and I have, shall we say…design differences.  We were in Crate and Barrel today and I pointed out this table and said, “I love that table, I like that rustic look”.  To which my husband replied,

“Rustic?  Don’t you mean poor?”.

He’s such a guy.

Neighbor A had a crappy cheap builder sink that was chipped and she hated.  Neighbor B’s husband is a great contractor, can install/fix anything.  Neighbor A had Neighbor B’s husband install new sink, and he offered her a choice of caulking colors.  Not realizing caulking came in colors, Neighbor A selected black for her nice, new sink and was very happy with the results.  Neighbor A saw Neighbor B walking across the street and wanted to let her know what she thought of her husband’s great handiwork, so she opened her front door and yelled out across the street at the top of her lungs,

“I LOVE BLACK CAULK!”

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Said to me at a party:

“Yeah, I left the reservation for a birthday party the other day and I’m never doing it again”

I’ve started looking for Halloween costumes for my 5 year old daughter already, because last year we ended up with a piece of crap I had to sew back together twice (and my husband had to do once).  Every year, I notice how many costumes being sold to little girls are really, well, slutty.  What is the deal with this?  I assume it’s the same phenomena as the loathsome Bratz dolls.  What is with the sexualization of little girls?  It’s revolting.  Now, what really bothers me is this:  it’s a capitaltist system (that itself doesn’t, I’m no commie LOL hang on..) meaning, retailers usually respond to what sells from year to year.  This means to me that a large number of Americans think it’s “cute” or at least acceptable to dress their little girls like prostitutes on the one day of the year they are supposed to imagine themselves as someone else.

I was looking specifically for a cat costume when I came across this one.  The little girl in the photo, who couldn’t be more than 10 (note this costume’s smallest size comes in 4/6) is posing provocativley with hand on hip and slightly tilted sunglasses. Gross. Many little girls’ costumes feature tight corsets or bodices, very short skirts and/or cropped tops for “Diva” outfits.  Oh yeah, and this one–a can can dancer–look how cute, my little girl is dressed for a burlesque show!  Or oh shit, just saw this one–a Geisha!  You can encourage your daughter to go into the sex industry, how adorable.

Looking over a costume catalog, you see little boy costumes: Astronaut, firefighter, superheroes.  Little girls get: slutty divas, princesses, sex workers (the aformentioned geisha etc..), slutty vampires, slutty devils, and slutty fairies.  In all fairness, some of the witch costumes are cute and not sexualized.

Look, I’m not a prude.  I’m all for women getting slutty on Halloween if they so wish.  What I’m NOT for is the sexualization of little girls who are too young to understand the connotations of their costumes.

Dear Lawn,

What the hell do you want from me?  I aerate, fertilize, weed, mow, trim, use $60 of water on you a month and you still look like crap.  You only exist because of my HOA and if I find a way around that, you are dead I’m telling you.  I sweat and worry and you give me a lackluster performance which is embarrassing. I have a master’s in ecology–specifically grass ecology, don’t you know that? And I’m a gardener to boot, you are damaging my street cred in the ‘hood.   You take more work than all my perennials combined and you are only about 1,000 square feet.   I specifically chose a house in a new urbanist neighborhood with small lawns because I don’t need the stress of trying to maintain a species that needs three times the amount of precipitation we get here in the semi-arid grassland of the Front Range.  So you know what?  I give up.  You can look bad if you want, I’ll spend the time I save not working on you on my pretty flowers such as indian blanket that know how to treat a person who loves them. Screw you, lawn.