Some Top Fives for Facebook

I’m not used to the idea of “favorites.” I definitely have favorites, but I don’t naturally catalogue things that way. As a child, I had to memorize lists of my own favorites for the omnipresent class exercises involving children informing the class of theirs, and only began to find the process natural once I started comparing things in detail, sometimes with written pro and con lists, to suss out the fine gradations of my own enjoyment. Most of the time, I am too aware of things other people put in the same bins as different from one another to try to quantify them with the same measuring stick, but associative games are another talent I have, and I learned to play them with the best.

So, I set myself a challenge, with a joking Facebook meme inviting people to ask for my Top Fives in categories of their choosing. My friends, being my friends, offered up a downright bizarre selection for me, with which I now do what I do best: give needlessly well-thought-out answers.

Continue reading “Some Top Fives for Facebook”

Some Top Fives for Facebook
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Ask Alyssa Anything

This week, I expanded my blogging horizons by giving my readers the option to ask me questions they’ve been curious about. The result was a mix of questions about me and things they hope I write about at greater length in the future, and it’s been fun to read and to contemplate.

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Ask Alyssa Anything

Notes from the Fashion Lab

I find it strange and a little funny when people comment on my fashion sense.  I have no doubt that it’s genuinely praiseworthy, but some of the compliments I’ve received come with a little extra subtext I’d like to put to rest.

This fashion sense is the work of years, not months.

I’ve been paying vastly outsized attention to women’s clothing for my entire life.  I’ve been able to render informed opinions on clothing styles and makeup hues since high school, if not earlier.  I had weirdly specific ideas about what I wanted the women in my life to wear.  I fantasized about and utterly failed to seduce partners who approximated that style in my misguided quest to surround myself with the precise sort of femininity that it turned out I actually wanted, not to be around, but to be.  I did not face my more authentic clothing with the anxious confusion of an empty cistern.  I turned that spigot and enough fashion came out to dress ten svelte Hispanic ladies.  I was not intimidated by no longer being able to dejectedly match any T-shirt with one or another set of jeans and call it a day; I was liberated.

And because I came into this battle well-armed and, after an outpouring of support, well-provisioned, I’m sharing here what wisdom I have about how I look good in women’s clothing.

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Notes from the Fashion Lab