"No fourteen-year-old boy should have a ninety five-dollar shirt unless he's on stage with his four brothers."

This is the second part of a series wherein I bitterly whine about how I can't afford stupid shit (because I go out for lunch and buy gin and tonics too often) and then project my self-hatred onto others.

I hate people who shop at J. Crew because I wish I could afford to shop at J. Crew.

I thought long and hard about writing this post since I have a not-so-secret love for J. Crew. When I was in high school I ordered the J. Crew catalogs and got really excited whenever I received one in the mail. The wool! The cashmere! The leather! The seersucker! The argyle!!! I loved it so much and desperately wanted all of my clothes to come from there. Of course, my mother refused to spend so much money on a sweater that she thought I'd outgrow in a year. (The irony of this is that I still can't fit into the sweaters my mother bought me in high school, since she is of the school of thought wherein everyone's clothes should be at least one size too big just in case. I realized recently that I was even conned into wearing size twelve shoes. Imagine my joy when I discovered that I could wear a size TEN, which doesn't make my feet look too big for my body.)

Therefore, I have a love / hate relationship with J. Crew.

The whole J. Crew image certainly doesn't fit in with my own. Perhaps I decided to buy most of my clothes at thrift stores and wear dark, tight jeans to rebel against my own desire to be WASPier than I already am. I dunno. The point is that if you can afford these ties, I hate you.


And here's a full disclosure: I own two items from J. Crew. The first is a leather key chain with a whale on it (obvs.). I spent fourteen dollars on it last winter and it's already falling apart. The other is a sweater I bought at Goodwill for three dollars four years ago. It's never been washed because it's Dry Clean Only.

I definitely hate you if you have both an iPhone and a Blackberry.

This is the first part of a series wherein I bitterly whine about how I can't afford stupid shit (because I go out for lunch and buy gin and tonics too often) and then project my self-hatred onto others.

I was riding the brown line home the other night instead of the red line. The brown line seems to have a different kind of people riding on it; in other words, there are more white people, which is not really a good think because they're all rich, young, sometimes attractive white people who live in Lincoln Park. And I don't like those people very much, because they are more apt to own Blackberries and iPhones.

I was standing across the train from this man in his late twenties who was wearing a leather blazer, which was offense number one. The second offensive thing about him was that he had a chin strap, which is the worst kind of facial hair (even worse than a soul patch). The only good thing about seeing a man with a chin strap is that it makes me realize that the guy is most likely insecure about his undefined jaw line, because men whose faces blend into their necks are more apt to grow skinny little beards to give the illusion of jaws and chins. This makes me feel better about my bone structure.

Anyway, the Dude in the leather blazer was fiddling with his iPhone, which was not particularly surprising. After he finished picking out whatever album he wanted to listen to, which quite possibly may have been this one or this one, he slipped it into the pocket on the inside of his blazer. And then what did he pull out of another pocket? A Blackberry. Chin Strap And Leather Blazer owns and carries both an iPhone and a Blackberry.

I hate him because he's both a walking cliche and a walking redundancy.