The Baby-sitters Club

Earrings

Academia: Today at work, I had to be a little mean. I don't like being mean to students. I like being happy and smiling at them. But sometimes they don't follow directions, and then I have to start nagging. Fun fact: the word for nag is pronounced almost the same in Arabic as it is in English. Thanks, former students from the Middle East who taught me this when I nagged them! All of our students have to have health insurance and get immunized to take classes. Most of them take care of this right away, but a few don't, and then they ignore my pleasant reminders, and then I have to bar them from class, which I hate doing because it's a giant inconvenience to everyone involved.

So today was the day people got barred from class, and therefore the day they turned up in my office saying, "What? What I do now?" Part of the problem is obviously a communication breakdown, since many of these students are beginners. But another part is that they're basically kids. They're all 19 or 20 years old, away from home for the first time. And so, like all kids, they need a little nagging sometimes...

Sartorial: ... which I was appropriately dressed for today, since I felt like I was channeling a famous fictional babysitter, Claudia from The Baby-sitters Club, a little bit. Did y'all read The Baby-sitters Club? Who am I kidding, if you grew up in mid-80s to mid-90s, of course you did. Of all the girls in the club, Claudia was the arty one. She was always wearing things that didn't seem to belong together, like giant ripped-up neon shirts with striped mini-skirts and polka-dot tights. In other words, she was a fashion blogger before "fashion blogger" was even a thing.

I really wanted to be like Claudia when I was 10, but I was actually Mary Anne, the rule-follower. The Baby-sitters Club was basically the forerunner of Sex and the City, as far as its fans' comparisons of its characters and themselves went. For the record, I'm also Charlotte. But today, I felt a little like Claudia in this outfit. The dress and Victorian-looking earrings are kind of an unexpected juxtaposition with the super-casual jeans and Chucks, which seemed like something Claudia might wear. Just give me some giant bangle bracelets, a dozen chocolate bars under my pillow, and a failing grade in pre-algebra, and I'm all set to be the vice-president of the BSC.