fine whine

I can't resist it any longer. Threadless has been running a $10 sale for almost the entire last month, and it's over Thursday.

I'm considering buying only one this time around: The downside of genetic engineering.

Other notable designs:

• The Communist Party
• Funkalicious
• No Repeats!
• Mechanical Mayhem
• Calling Home
• Memories, Sweet Memories
• The War Against Work
• THIS Is How The World Ends

But enough about shirts*.

December is not the brightest month, generally. If I put any stock in all of the newly discovered 'disorders' (or owned stock in the companies that make drugs to treat them) I self-diagnose myself with a mild case of Seasonal Affective Disorder, whereby as the seasons get colder I'm less of my warm self.

Except that that's pretty much what happens to most people, to some degree. The days are shorter and darkness falls earlier and earlier; people don't leave their warm abodes as often, fostering cabin fever, and then there's always the incessant Christmas music that is inescapable from Halloween on.

Every year I've been posting to this site I've posted less and less during the month of December. This year I've got even more of an excuse: sleep deprivation.

Which brings me to the baby. She's been doing pretty well - we've got her on something of a normal schedule at night, at least, whereby she sleeps from about 11 until 5 in the morning. Unfortunately in order to get her to do this we need to keep her from getting too much sleep during the daytime - and by 'we' I mean Jessica during the day, and me after dark. Some nights she's okay with the plan, but other times she cries and cries, until I can find the one magic fix, which is never the same night to night. Sometimes she just wants to lay on the floor or the table, other nights she wants to be rocked in the rocker, some nights I walk with her on the treadmill for half an hour, and sometimes she calms down in the swing. It's never the same thing one night to the next, but I guess that's just how babies are.

I have set up a photo gallery of sorts, and you can look at it by clicking on the '/photos' link above. At some later date I'll post more information about where the pictures are and how you can get better copies of them, for printing and such, but at the rate I've been writing lately that won't happen until February.

Until then, well, happy holidays and stuff.

* The best way to shop is the stock chart. The usual disclaimers apply: All of the Threadless links, except the one in this sentence, contain affiliate information for me through which I get store credit if you buy a shirt. Or lots of shirts. They make great gifts, you know!

Fatal attraction is not a good movie. It's not 'thrilling' and it's not a 'classic'. It's dated, overrated, and I didn't enjoy watching it other than to heckle it*.

Now I can say that I've seen it, because it seems to show up on many a list of necessary or important films. The latter case may well be true, in that this precedes many of the other hackneyed purveyors of the "don't cheat, it can only end badly" message. 'Immoral' Hollywood seems to recycle this plot over and over again, but perhaps (and I'm not really interested in researching it further) Fatal attraction is hailed as the paragon, or at least the progenitor, of the two-decades long spate of such films.

It is only in light of all the other deadly affair movies that I can watch this; I'm not willing to expend the effort to forget them and their hoary clichés.

I work in the fashion industry, and was regaled earlier this year with something of a fashion show at one of our all-company meetings showing off our line featuring flashback styles from the fabulous eighties, with a modern twist. There's an important distinction between the fashions now and then: now we're claiming it's about looking sexy. Having sat through two hours of prime eighties regalia, I can't imagine the shoppers of the time being sold on looking sexy, with as ridiculous as the clothes look. How were womens' clothes sold back then?

I mean, come on. Linebacker shoulderpads? Kudos to the marketing wonks who ever managed to move the first unit of those, let alone so many of them. Don't get me started on the hairstyles.

* And heckling it wasn't nearly fun enough. I want at least one of those hours back.

Today is so-called casual Friday and as such I donned a t-shirt instead of the polos I wear the rest of the week. This is nothing new, really, as this is how I dress pretty much every week.

Today's t-shirt was my bright green one with the flocked yellow Atari logo. Jessica bought it and another one with the logo, but on a blue tee, and gave them to me as gifts. I like them both, but rarely wear them. The blue one has 3/4 length sleeves, and I have difficulty with that sort of thing. The green one, though, has totally normal sleeves. The only downside of it is that everybody notices it.

I get more compliments (or at least comments) on this shirt than any of my other ones, save perhaps for the Darth Vader/cK shirt. Atari is just cool, you know.

A lot of people have bought this shirt, mostly for significant others. While that is an interesting tidbit, it also means that this is by far not a unique shirt. I like having unique shirts.

Oddly enough, despite buying it at JC Penny so many years ago, I've never seen anyone else wearing another dV shirt. Not a one.

It would seem that t-shirts are my hobboy of sorts as of late. When making my wish list I scoured the web for e-tailers with cool shirts, and I watch threadless for its new shirts and the submissions for the ongoing contest.

I'm working on doodling up some designs of my own to send them, but probably won't have anything I'm completely happy with let alone capable of winning. Still, it's worth a shot.

I've also fed many a slogan to their sister site OMG, which operates on the same principle except that anybody can submit ideas in the form of a slogan, not a finished design. They're much slower to print new shirts, and so far none of my submissions, clever though I may think them, have been made into a shirt.

Of course I'm not new to the t-shirt making business. As a kid I painted many of them with fabric paint (some of which are cool, others are merely neat copyright infringement) and even once recently, and I even once screen printed a tee in high school, which was later lost. I spent a lot of time working on that shirt, too.

I'd like to print some more. If I recall correctly it was messy but rather fun.

So I was at Cedar Point today with Jessica (and supposedly lots of other coworkers across the many brands my company controls) and others, and had something of a good time.

According to the park's site June isn't one of their higher-traffic months, and the park didn't seem altogether that full. Unless everybody was in line for the new MaxAir, there just weren't as many people as I've seen there before. I vaguely recall standing in line for the Mean Streak for at least two hours when that opened, and this time I was able to get into the second seat of the front car in under four minutes, most of which was me walking or running through the long maze of railings which is now much much larger than necessary.

They could, I suppose, build a smaller ride inside the line space, if for no other reason (than using the space) than to get more people to trek all the way to that end of the park. Not that people need an excuse, since the Mean Streak is still an excellent coaster and worth the trip alone.

But that's old news. Since that opened the park has seen at least three new coasters (the order's a bit guzzy, sorry) and each better than the last, except for the painful Mantis.

As I stood in line, on the few occasions it took me more than half an hour to do so, I was people-watching. Since I work in fashion these days I seem to pay a little closer attention to what people wear, and I saw a lot of Abercrombie shirts and an equal number of sarcastic, licensed, and/or ironic tees on everybody from a little girl wearing "Pimptastic" to a middle-aged guy wearing a red shirt solely labeled "Duff".

The ones that stood out, hoever, weren't the Christian parodies of the Orange County Chopper shirts or the countless variations on the "your mom" theme, but the AC/DC shirts.

I saw at least five kids, tweens and teens wearing black AC/DC shirts. I realize the band is still out there and kicking it with the best of them, but still it gives me pause to see the kids wearing the shirts. After all, I saw not one shirt for Britney or the Backstreet Boys or Maroon 5 or whoever they're supposed to be loving these days.

And then there was my Darth Vader shirt which was appropriately timely, though I bought it many years ago. I didn't see any other Star Wars shirts at all, which I suppose could be a sign of the popularity of the latest film or maybe just the general merchandising burnout the public is experiencing.

After all, once they've bought their Darth Taters and Vader Sprinklers and Sith baseball jerseys, who has the money for a simple t-shirt?

For a couple years now I've been wearing black every Monday at work*. I don't always wear the same shirt, as I seem to now own three short-sleeved black polo shirts, another one with long sleeves, and two button down dress shirts (one is silk even). I can't recall if I was doing this back in the days I was wearing t-shirts, but I have a number of black t-shirts as well.

This is the sort of thing I'm supposed to be documenting here, so that I can go back sometime in the future and know, oh yeah, on November 11th of 2002 I decided that henceforth all Mondays I shall don the black shirt and thusly I have e'er since... but alas, I never did. I have no idea when I began doing this, save for the fact that nearest I can recall I had no such routine back up in Chicago nor could I wear black shirts to work at Arthur Treacher's when I worked there.

Anyway, today is certainly an appropriate day to wear black, and not just to mark the passing of the weekend. Today my cubicle mate (and departmental counterpart) is turning in his notice. As in, he isn't going to be sitting next to me after next Friday.

He's merely the latest person to sit by me to leave the company. I'm up to three now, four if you count neighbors over the wall. I'm not sure what to make of that.

* And when I have Monday off I generally wear black on Tuesday, or whatever day I return to my desk.

Sometime a while ago I stumbled across t-shirt e-tailer Threadless, and at the time I filed it away as a neat idea but the shirts were a bit pricey. I also thought it would be neat to create a design for them, and promptly forgot about ever actually doing that.

Fast forward to today when I discovered that they were having a weekend sale with a decent discount, and as I was in a buying mood at the time, I decided to mull it over for the rest of the day. In the end I bought two shirts, after looking through my closet at my pretty sorry collection of cool t-shirts that I am able to wear more than twice a year.

I'm looking forward to wearing this shirt on casual Fridays. Now that zombies are cool again I should be the epitome of hipness, even without needing to watch reality television.

Speaking of TV, when I browse through photos (on flickr and elsewhere) I find myself drawn to images of broken and destroyed televisions. So this shirt really appealed to me, and I don't have too many brown t-shirts to boot.

So yeah, I splurged, but I can rationalize my purchases because they were on sale for a third off. The sale ended tonight but anybody who wants to buy some (still reasonably-priced) t-shirts would do well to follow this link and I'll get some minor compensation. I'll make it back up to you in karma and goodwill, or perhaps some other small bribe.