Reason Number %: Dried Cherries

Dried cherries are inappropriately delicious. I could eat them with (and between) every meal. I buy so many dried cherry packets when I go to Whole Foods/Trader Joe's/The Drugstore that I'm kind of embarrassed for myself and my specificity. Many are fond of dried fruit--apricots, apples, cranberries--but my level of adoration for dried cherries, to the exclusion of other dehydrated nutrition sources, is creepy and diarrhea-inducing.

Tart Montmorency, specifically.

I am very snobby about vintage. Don't ever tell me you love vintage clothing when really you love acid wash denim dresses with American Apparel headbands. Not that it's impossible to look flawless in an acid wash denim dress with an American Apparel headband. It's just not the same as loving vintage.

Though my attitude toward vintage has evolved, I think. As a sixteen year old, I was indubitably, wholeheartedly a vintage purist. Only wear one era at a time. I had my early 1950's silk posy day dress, which I wore with early 1950's red bow pumps and a red embroidered cardigan I bought at Express but that seemed to blend well enough into the outfit so as not to disrupt the historic balance (yes, I said Express. I did.).

And, lest I ever think of myself as cool in adulthood, my seventies obsession of 1998: pagoda-rose printed polyester button-downs with enormous Mudd bell-bottoms and worn-out converse with 666 on the toe, written in Sharpie. And white lipstick! (Mudd!)

AND my brief but impassioned Victorian phase: ankle-length turn of the century lawn dresses with appropriate (though, when necessary, anachronistic) t-straps. But even I felt uncomfortable taking that kind of insanity to the streets, or high school classroom.

I never was a sixties person. It's still one of my least-favorite decades, though I do have a blue velvet babydoll dress with a bib collar in my closet at home that I love to pieces and wear about three times per year.

I still love vintage as much as I always have--even the most ridiculous pieces can find a place in my closet--but I don't want to wear only vintage, and especially not only one era at a time. It's hard, though. It's hard to wear lame and destroyed cowboy boots without looking like a total hipster poser idiot. Sometimes I find myself treading that line.

And that's why there's Quoddy to keep me in check, even though I don't own anything they make.* And very basic denim. Some people can look amazing in neon paint splattered jeans, but I am not one of those people. The simplest pair of jeans grounds my Edwardian blouses in a way nothing else can.

*Oh but I wish I did. The inclusion of Quoddy into my wardrobe would suddenly make me a punctual, beer-guzzling, less frivolous person who means business.