She Knew There Were Two

Do you remember that point in the 2008 Democratic primaries when it became mathematically impossible for Hillary Clinton to receive the nomination, but she just kept running anyway as if she had become a parody of her very self? My friend Brendan and I fully supported her decision to ignore reality, so we went to see her at a rally in DC.

And I'm going to go ahead and convert this picture to puppet-us: 

We each had our own campaign poster that we wanted Hillary to sign. When the rally was over, we rushed the stage with everyone else. I mean, she wasn't exactly getting those 2008 Obama crowds, but it was still pretty cray. We couldn't get close enough to touch her, which was disappointing as most of my fantasies revolve around her stroking my hair and telling me I'm special.

She started signing posters, so Brendan took both of ours and passed them up to Hillary from within the depths of the crowd.

As soon as we saw her up there with the posters, we realized that we had created a disaster for ourselves. Our posters were double-sided and identical, so they looked like only one poster when they were stacked on top of one another. We had a shared vision of her signing just one poster and how our subsequent battle over it would destroy our friendship and possibly the world. We started freaking out and yelling to her that there were two posters but there was no way she could hear us over the screaming crowd of old, white Democrats (Obama really did have everyone else at that point).

But we had no reason to worry, because Hillary knew that there were two posters.

Aside: Here is a dramatization of what I look like when I'm handling a new dollar bill at work, and I suspect that there might be more than one. I'll convince myself that one dollar bill is two, or perhaps that two are three, and I waste a lot of time doing it. I also look really uncool and crazy. Everyone does.

End of aside.

Hillary Clinton signed one of our posters, KNEW THAT THERE WERE TWO, flipped them over and signed the other side without missing a beat. She then she handed them back to the crowd in one fluid motion. 

I cannot stress this enough. She didn't even see that Brendan and I were together. She didn't even really see Brendan. She could just tell that there were no more and no less than two posters. SHE KNEW THERE WERE TWO. AND SHE LOOKED REALLY COOL DOING IT UNLIKE EVERYONE ELSE. MAYBE HILLARY CLINTON LIKE WASN'T REALLY GOOD AT BASKETBALL OR WHATEVER BUT THAT DOESN'T MEAN SHE WASN'T COOL, OKAY?

Brendan and I started shouting about how she knew there were two, and it has not stopped to this day. 

Also, blood came out of our eyes.

And Brendan got a speeding ticket on the way home.

In conclusion, Brendan lives in Virginia and I live in Utah, so it's really good that we each have our own poster and don't have to share custody.

Hillary 2016.

Fashion Past Part 1: High School

I have a difficult time with subtlety. I can only appreciate incredibly literal art, so it really is too bad that Jon McNaughton is straight crazy. I love themed bedrooms well past the point of tackiness. I encourage all of my baby-having friends to choose names for their children that come in matching sets (animals, colors, mythology, Kardashian-style letter situations, each of the five Cosby kids, etc.). And, full disclosure: I've kind of started getting into Magic: The Gathering and have made my deck entirely out of cats (it is, unsurprisingly, not very good). I latch on to an idea and run with it. My trouble with subtlety is no more apparent than in the way I choose to style myself. I've found that I periodically try to re-imagine my persona and essentially end up wearing costumes. I always convince myself that my current choice is the THE ONE and all others pale by comparison. Looking back, a lot of my ideas have been pretty weird. The following is an exhaustive list of the stupid ways I dressed myself in high school.

Freshmen Year

This was the first time I tried to use fashion to control the way I was perceived. The only previous notions I had had about the way I should dress had just been vague ideas about how I should probably stop wearing so many purple peace sign shirts (never did). Freshmen year, I thought I was a lot smarter than I actually was, and I wanted everyone to know it. I decided to start wearing blazers (hoodies for high IQs) over t-shirts about Harry Potter, politics, or preferably both. 

I'm having a hard time coming up with a Harry Potter/Republican politics pun about this random Googled guy's nip. Order of the Pheonips? Win one for 'The Nipper'? House Majority Nip?

I was super "into" politics in High School and never really have been since. I mean, I vote and stuff. Like, I try to stay informed. Okay, not really. That was a lie just now. When I said "I vote and stuff", I meant just for the president and when I said "I try to stay informed", I meant that I read the Michelle Obama issue of Vogue. I'm what's wrong with America. That is, if there's something wrong with America. It's not like I would know.

Sophomore Year

I was a desperate wannabe and a cyber bully. I wore clothes for children and bows in my hair and sideways studded belts and I bleached my hair into oblivion and took pictures for Myspace where I clutched the cord of the blinds as I pretended to stare longingly out of the window and it was all really, really stupid. 

Pic for reference

However, I did go through an interesting phase when I had do-it-yourself fusion extensions. First off, they were hilariously terrible.

Another pic for reference

They were impossible to style and couldn't be pulled back into a ponytail without exposing the bonds (which was important because I was totally fooling everyone). I had a job at a movie theater and therefore needed to find a way to put it up to avoid getting an anonymous Indian woman's hair in people's popcorn. I found that the best solution was to just swirl up my hair like Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman. The style was so tall and ridiculous that I decided to just embrace it. I figured I could channel Marie Antoinette and people would think I was making a statement instead of just having really, really bad hair. I went to a craft store and bought some clip-in birds and a nest complete with plastic eggs. This was what everyone was doing at 16, right?

Years later, I am still having a hard time coming to terms with how bizarre I must have looked. One time, this lady donated a dollar to the children's miracle network, so I asked if she wanted to write her name on one of those paper balloons. She choked back giggles as she told me that I should put my bird's name on the balloon. She and all of her friends then doubled over in laughter as they walked away.

She did donate to the Children's Miracle Network, so I guess she wasn't an altogether terrible person.

Kitty Kane will go through another Marie Antoinette phase in Fashion Past Part 2: Adulthood.

Junior Year 

This was the year I finally became aware of my desire to periodically change my persona. It was also the year I started naming my phases in order to make it easier to reference them. I had a lot of ideas, but I won't even bother covering all of them since I had little to no follow-through. 

The summer before school started, I found a dirt-encrusted bag for gardening tools in our garage. I decided to theme my new persona around it. This phase was called Secret Garden.

The secret was that I didn't really have a garden.

This new phase of my life would involve me wearing floral dresses every day and carrying that stupid bag around (whatever, fine), but it would also involve me smearing a little bit of dirt on myself before I went to school (crazy). I decided that if anyone asked about the mud on my face, I would tell them that it must have happened while I was working in my imaginary garden.

I actually only ended up doing this for a day or two, and no one even asked because I didn't have friends. 

The most important persona for me that year was called Cranberry Dreams. Cranberry Dreams was the natural evolution of an elaborate fantasy I had crafted for my future self in which I was married to a cranberry farmer in Wisconsin. In my fantasy, our farm had been in his family for generations, and we would even have a fun little boat to use on the bog called The Queen Berry. Anyway, the price of cranberries plummets, and I have to work three jobs to keep us afloat while all of our friends and neighbors in our independent cranberry farming community are, one by one, forced to sell their farms to the evil soul-sucking merchant of death, Ocean Spray. We're one of the few farms left when Ocean Spray goes under in a tragic health scandal that claims the lives of 143 people. Our farm then becomes massively successful and single-handedly saves Thanksgiving that year. My beautiful family is then featured in commercials, and I become super famous and an icon.

Despite dressing my son in cat costumes, he becomes a really successful hockey player.

At 17, I decided to start dressing like the first lady of cranberries, like you do. It was essentially dressing like Jackie Kennedy except with necklaces and headbands made out of dried cranberries. I didn't really stick to this one either. It wasn't because I had a problem making and/or wearing craisin accessories, but more because I was bad at dressing classy.

The final phase I am going to discuss from this year didn't make it far enough to get a name back then. For our purposes, we'll just called the Victorian Nightgown Phase. It did not get very far because it was a really, really dumb idea.

Don't wear a Victorian nightgown to high school.

Senior Year

Everything was really stressing me out senior year, so I decided to "streamline my life". Streamlining my life meant sleeping in the clothes I was going to wear the next day, and it apparently also meant that I had to stop wearing bras. I cant even remember the reason, really. I mean, I guess it isn't comfortable to sleep in bras. I think it was also because I didn't want to go bra shopping. I had spent all of high school wearing these really weird sexy '80s bras that I had found in the garage in 8th grade. I made an executive decision that, support wise, it probably wasn't any worse to wear nothing than to wear them. So, yeah. I didn't wear bras during my senior year of high school.

Personal, but excellent question, readers. Three words:

Bulky | Corduroy | Jumpers 

To further #streamlinemylife, I went to Goodwill and bought bulky corduroy jumpers which I assigned to different days of the week. Monday's jumper was probably the best looking and certainly the most classic, but Tuesday's jumper was my favorite because it was the most comfortable. I didn't have a jumper assignment on Friday because 1.) There were only four jumpers in anything close to my size at Goodwill, and 2.) YOLO? On Fridays, I would either have to repeat Monday or Tuesday's OOTD, or find something equally as bulky as a corduroy jumper.

Or just skip school.

Groundhog Day

On the last school day prior to every major and minor holiday, my second grade class would usher in said holiday to all of the residents unlucky enough to be in the rec room of the nearby nursing home.

It was always a parade, and I always wanted to be the star.

The Halloween, Thanksgiving, and epic Christmas/Hanukkah/Kwanzaa/New Year's parades came and went, and I remained relegated to the sidelines. Below is an artist's rendition of my suffering. I should note that I usually exaggerate and sometimes straight up lie on this blog. In my MS Paint version of events, all of the parade leaders are men. It is a cheap trick designed to make you just as outraged as I was, but it wasn't really the case. While I'm at it, I should also note that none of my classmates donned a diaper to portray Baby New Year, and I did not actually wear a dashiki.

I got you, Babe.

That epic Christmas/Hanukkah/Kwanzaa/New Year's parade was the final straw. What would you do if you were stuck in one place and every holiday was exactly the same, and nothing that you did mattered? I vowed that next time, I would be the star. I didn't care if I had to lie, cheat, steal, or kill; those nursing home residents would experience my talent. My opportunity would come on Groundhog Day.

My teacher started presenting her vision for the Groundhog Day parade in mid-January. She wanted it to be led by the noble groundhog itself.

I'm lying.

I'm still lying.

Okay, here's where it all starts to fall apart. I knew I needed to somehow come up with a bear costume without anyone knowing that I'd lied, but I didn't actually have a plan going forward. Basically, I just hoped that a bear costume would randomly appear in my house. I honestly think that towards the end I had convinced myself that I was already the proud owner of a bear costume.

My mom picked me up from school a few days before February 2nd, and my teacher started talking to her about the wonderful contribution I was making to the rec room parade.

Reaction shot.

But whatever, because my mom took me home and made me a bear costume in like, 48 hours. Thanks, Mom.

High-fiving a million angels.