Wear this one to the track and maybe Lady Luck will smile. Lovely line drawings on cotton. 1950s print combines yellow, orange and avocado. I like the white brushstrokey slashes, but I’d be tempted to replace the buttons to give it more texture and gravitas.

It’s a size 14, a mere $19.99 and is just longing for you to snatch it up. It’s an offering from Six Cornelia Place, which regularly has some pretty spiffy novelty prints. The auction ends in 6 hours so get to it.

This is my 108th post, goslings. The same number as beads on a mala. I’m not Samsara for nothing. It is said that there are 108 earthly desires. I don’t know what all of them are, but for me they look like novelty prints. I think longingly of a few in particular: the Asparagus dress, the mushroom dress and the seahorse dress.

I copied this from here: Heart Chakra: The chakras are the intersections of energy lines, and there are said to be a total of 108 energy lines converging to form the heart chakra. I guess my heart has 108 dancing fairy versions of novelty prints rotating around it. And my heart is on fire (Oh, yeah, smoke gets in my eyes.)

Blogging about novelty prints has simply fanned the flames of my heart. I think about clothing even more now than before. And often desirously. It hasn’t helped me with my compulsive shopping problem. Instead, denying myself leads to more frantic binges, including a pair of lemon-colored loafers I bought over the weekend. I just feel guiltier about it.

Why should a nice Jewish girl feel guilty about shopping?

Well, goslings, because I live in a country that likes to go abroad and blow people up and mess up their infrastructure and then complain that the situation has degenerated into violence and chaos. I live in a country where most people cannot afford to get sick or pay their medical expenses. I live in a country whose national pastimes are jingoism, war profiteering and corruption. Consumer goods are manufactured in situations of human rights violations. And I can’t do a goddamn thing about it.

Sure, I marched. I protested. I still sign petitions and write letters to politicians and news media expressing my outrage. And it doesn’t make any difference. And so, in my heart, I retreated. I spent the past year taking photos of what I’m wearing, for crying out loud.

There isn’t even a street to take it to anymore. My city is becoming one big mall. It’s like Soylent Green, only instead of the big public secret being the food (er, well, with bovine growth hormones there is that too), it’s the economy. We are just keeping ourselves in a system of debt-peonage.

Or we are caught up in the new religion of self-improvement. (And yes it is Protestant at its core.) We spend all our time improving ourselves instead of advocating for change in our society. Why do we have to be perfect? Why do we have to have uncluttered homes, and fat-free bodies, and fashionable hair? Especially when we don’t, I mean we really don’t.

Isn’t it worse to be ignorant, or unkind? Isn’t it just a waste to spend a day putting things into plastic boxes from the container store?

This post is not well-thought out, alas. Perhaps this is “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore!” Week. (Please rent Network, it does hold up marvelously well. It’s almost chilling how the politics haven’t changed.)

Here is a terrific article in the Times about accepting your slovenliness, goslings. It almost cheered me up. Do you think I could become a Guru of Mess? I have to work on articulating my rage.