Tagged: clothes
Clothes are just clothes, except maybe a little more
Clothes are just clothes, you know?
But at the same time, they are more than just garments that you drape all over your body. They are more than warmth, or sustenance. They make a statement.
Yet, if it’s a Tuesday, and if you have a paper due, and if you don’t want your body to feel constricted, it’s also a sweats day. Or it’s a t-shirt and leggings day. Or it’s a no clothes day, because clothes are ultimately…for the weak.
What do clothes mean to me? Well, it depends on the day. In my opinion, I don’t really have a unique style, because I don’t have one very stable personality to be tied to. I am not inherently girly, preppy, “soft grunge”, emo, laidback, or polished. It all depends on the day.
If you step into my closet, you’ll find all sorts of clothes. Dresses, for school dress up days, debate tournaments, and when I’m feeling extra girly. T-shirts of every color and size, as plain as white and as exuberant as bright blue with a family of orange cats (as is the case with today).
It’s high school, and clothes matter very much to most people. I value clothes and shopping is absolutely one of my favorite past-times, but I believe that at this point in time, the importance of fashion choice to me is characterized mainly by novelty. New clothes, whenever possible. I’m still following the trends and wanting to update my wardrobe with every season. I look to celebrities and flip through magazines (though not as avidly as some people might) and at least notice what they are wearing.
I think that the novelty effect will wear off, when I get older. As my body stops growing and I have one less excuse to buy new clothes, I’ll start buying higher quality clothing, timeless so that it lasts for longer than a season.
Right now, they represent a statement that I can make of myself. The statement doesn’t really say much; it doesn’t tell people who I am, it doesn’t scream “girly” or “tomboy”. The statement is simply…there. It’s a statement just for the sake of being a statement, indicating that if I were to someday settle down and assume an allover personality or style for myself, then I would have the liberty of doing so.
My Top 7 Most Viewed Blog Posts, and My Hypotheses for Why
Preview for an upcoming post? Here it is!
This one is popular because it’s short and funny! There’s a picture of a cute duck, and most of the viewers found this through a writing challenge that I did online, in which I left a link back to my blog. Not much more to say about this post, there’s not really an underlying meaning, except I suppose to question the legitimacy of eggs, but I don’t mind eating eggs and I’m not really disgusted about where it comes from, but hey, that’s just me.
This guest post finally addresses one of the biggest themes that blogs rant about, that I have yet to acknowledge: love. Specifically, teenage love. I haven’t been able to bring myself to write about it because I know I’ll get lots of questions and pesterings from the people that know me personally, so I suppose for now the only time you’ll hear about love on this blog is when anonymous people submit their writing to me. Perhaps later, I’ll feel confident enough to state my opinion on teenage love, but for now, I think I’ll refrain from it.
This post is popular because I advertise it a lot. I slip it into a lot of other posts whenever writing is relevant, and that’s one of the best methods to get more hits on your blog. I think my teachers probably appreciate this one the most because it shows that I’ve learned something from my eleven years of English class. I made this one general and applicable to anyone on purpose; I knew people would be able to relate to it, and I guess that shows, through the amount of times it has been read.
I know why this one is so popular. For starters, it is the first “This Kid I Know” post I wrote, so no one was expecting me to be so straight up about the people that I know and respect. Secondly, I posted this on his Facebook wall on his birthday, so that definitely generated a lot of views. Perhaps Holmes liked the post so much that he shared it with a lot of friends? I haven’t asked, so I guess I’ll never know for sure. The post was short, sweet, and to the point. I know that high school kids definitely appreciate this kind of post. And they’re eager to find out who exactly this Holmes kid is. (He’s world-famous, by the way.)
Perhaps this one was pretty popular because I wrote it in a different style than I normally do. It was unconventional for me; it was more of a shot at creative writing. I wanted to test and exercise the way I could depict details, so that the reader could imagine themselves in my closet through my words. This post was a work in progress for MONTHS but one night I finally finished it after sitting in my closet for an hour or two, rifling through my special box.
I’m genuinely surprised that this wasn’t #1! Whenever I find new blogs, I always look at their About page to find out whether or not we have anything in common, and whether or not I think I’d be interested in reading their blog. An About page is basically a mini autobiography in which the writer can write anything they want, in whatever form they want to. This is their moment to hook in potential loyal followers by preaching to them what exactly it is that they write about, and why exactly the follower should make like a follower, and…follow. I edit this page a lot because I always want to get the best message across to people who stumble upon my blog.
I suppose this one has been the most popular because I posted the links on my Gchat account, and on my Facebook page, and a great portion of my friends on both social networking sites ARE debaters, so when they saw a post about something that was relevant to them, they just had to read it. This post was one of the first I had planned to write, but I didn’t get around to actually writing it until a few weeks later. At that point, we were a little ways into the debate season, and so I would be able to pull examples and concepts from the tournaments that I’d gone to for inspiration to write about in my post, as well as the seven weeks of debate camp I also attended over the summer. I think this post was popular because it’s policy debate is something that I genuinely care about, but also because debaters have a tendency to link things to each other in a flash, so perhaps it traveled quickly?
Post inspired by the Weekly Writing Challenge at Daily Post, here.
Catherine Zhang 