Let’s say you’ve picked out a swell movie to watch, and everyone’s ready and snuggled up on the couch, except that one kid is still washing the dishes. Still. So what do you do? You watch a few episodes of Originalos. Here’s a representative sample:
Look, I’m not proud of it. In my defense, if you saw Irene laughing that long and hard at a farting caveman, you’d probably let her watch more, too. These 3-minute episodes are streaming on Amazon Prime.
We also watched Valhalla Rising (2009, directed by Nicolas Winding Refn, who directed Drive, which we loved) last night, and we’ll have a lot to say about it on this week’s podcast! (To join my super secret, super fun podcast club, see my Patreon page.) Here’s the trailer for Valhalla Rising:
Behind the curve as ever, I’m just now getting into Terry Pratchett, who played with words, and with ideas of futility, heroism, absurdity and hope, throughout 41 novels about Discworld. He died in 2015.
I did read Going Postal a few years ago, and was charmed and moved by the characters and dialogue but very confused by the plot. Guards! Guards! was much easier to follow, and very winsome and entertaining, as well as touching in parts. Looking forward to hanging around with Captain Vimes more, as well as that very, very interesting Patrician.
Guards! Guards! summary: In the human-all-too-human city of Ankh-Morpork, the canny leader of a secret society realizes that he’ll have the citizens in the palm of his hand if only he can find a champion to conquer the terrible dragon. Only there is no dragon, except for small, mostly-harmless pets. So he summons a big one. Things do not go as planned! The focus of the story is on The Watch, the ones you call when things go wrong, but you don’t really expect them to do anything. In fact, you count on them having no intention of doing something. Well, this time, they do something.
As far as I can see, this is a typical Pratchett theme: Everything has gone to hell, and there’s not much anyone can do about it. Still, for whatever reason, the one guy who knows better decides to give it a shot anyway, and make a stand for what he decides to believe is the right thing to do. (Pratchett fans, do I have that right?)
Listening to . . .
The Black Keys
Also not a new find, but I’ve rediscovered the Black Keys as excellent running music. Yarr, my husband and I are doing Couch to 5K. We’re on week three, when you have to run for three minutes at a time. This is only possible if I hide the fact that I’m running from as many of my senses as possible (especially since we’re celebrating spring with hail and slippery freezing rain; and, not wanting to die, we are running inside).
Here are a few Black Keys songs with a good beat for a slow, steady run:
“Gold On the Ceiling”:
“Tighten Up”:
“Fever” is a little brisker:
“Howlin’ For You” (which comes along with a satirical sexploitation revenge fantasy movie trailer that made me laugh so hard, I almost fell off the treadmill) (warning: stupid, but R-rated):
I welcome other suggestions for running music! I’m putting together a list, because I hear there is more running coming up in this fershlugginer program.
***
Now your turn! What are you watching, reading, and listening to?
That dermatologist should have won a prize for heroic patience. He was snipping off a slew of skin tags that had overtaken my eyelids during pregnancy. It’s finicky job in normal circumstances; but I made it dicier by asking him to snip as I held my squalling newborn in my arms. It was not my favorite way to spend an afternoon, trying to hush her, trying to stay perfectly still while my eyelids were trimmed.
I was in that ridiculous situation because I had to get the thing done ASAP, while I still had postpartum Medicaid coverage. My husband couldn’t afford to take time off work, and someone was babysitting my other kids, but wouldn’t take the newborn. At the time, my state only covered health care for adults who were elderly, disabled, or pregnant. Once you were done being pregnant, you got booted back off the rolls, and good luck scheduling all the appointments you needed in the thirty days after giving birth.
Lucky for me, I was young and healthy at the time, and excessive skin tags were my most pressing medical issue; so I was able to choose to homeschool and to stay home with my newborn daughter and take my chances with having no health insurance. Lucky for me, it wasn’t until after my state chose to expand Medicaid that I developed nodules on my thyroid and lymph nodes, plus debilitating anxiety.
Lucky for me, I’ve had those conditions treated under state subsidized Medicaid, and now I can go back to living my life, caring for my children, doing my job.
We are, by conservative standards, a model family. We aren’t lazy. We aren’t unemployed. We aren’t promiscuous or godless or druggies or perverts. We love our country. We volunteer. We give to charity. We vote. I’m a dedicated mother, married to a dedicated father who works full time. I work from home so I can care for my kids. We are a heterosexual, married, monogamous couple raising our children to work hard and follow the ten commandments. Our kids study hard and have jobs after school. They volunteer. They go to pro-life marches. They’re all college-bound.
We are a Republican’s dream come true. But we can’t afford to buy health insurance. But we are insured, for now.
THIS IS HOW IT SHOULD BE. People should be able to go to the doctor when they are sick, even if they are poor. Women should be able to spend some time recovering from childbirth without immediately propelling themselves out of the home and back to work. Women should be able to consider the possibility of staying home with their newborn babies. People ought to be able to live a modest life — such as the kind you find yourself living if you work hard but just can’t inch above the poverty line despite decades of effort — and still be able to go to the doctor when they are sick.
A work requirement for Medicaid says: Don’t you dare be poor and homeschool. Don’t you dare be poor and consider caring for your preschoolers at home. Don’t you dare be poor and give birth to a disabled child who needs round-the-clock care. Don’t you dare be poor and find yourself caring for a disabled family member.
It’s not always laziness that makes people poor. It’s not always laziness that keeps people from earning a paycheck. Life is complicated. Caring for each other is complicated. People can’t just wake up in the morning and decide to have enough money. But Congress could wake up in the morning and decide to give states enough money to pay for healthcare for everyone. God knows they find enough money for the things they do want: endless wars, beautiful walls, you name it. The money is there when they want it to be.
Today is Chico Marx’s birthday. Born in 1887(!), top height 5’6″, greatest phony Italian accent ever mysteriously assumed by a nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn.
By most accounts, he was as breezy and confident in real life as he was in the films. Christened Leonard, the oldest of the five Marx brothers, he picked up the 1920’s slang nickname “Chicko” (pronounced “chick-o”) because of his penchant for “chicken chasing,” meaning pretty much what you see in the movies: He liked to chase-a da wimmin.
If you’d rather preserve your impression of Chico as a loveable scamp, please do not Google “Chico Marx Tallulah Bankhead.” Someone once asked his first wife why she put up with all his outrageous philandering for so many years, and she answered that she shouldn’t; but when he would walk in the room and turn those brown eyes on her, she went weak in the knees every time.
Here is one of the greatest monologues of all time in any medium in all of history. I won’t set it up, because the only context is: This is Chico Marx.
He would have been 130 years old today! God rest his soul.
On Saturday, we went to confession. Mine was a pretty standard operation: “Bless me, father, for I have sinned. It has been two months since my last confession. I did that thing I always do, and that other thing I always do. I also did that other thing I always do, except more so than usual. And I stopped doing that thing I usually do, but then I started again. And I was mean on the internet. For these and all my sins, I am truly sorry.”
And the priest said what this particular priest always says: “Thank you for that beautiful confession.” He says this when I have a long and sordid list, or a short and sordid list, or when he can barely understand me because my nose is running from the sordidness of it all. The point is, I am not aware of ever having made a confession that any normal human being would consider “beautiful.”
But the confessional is not a normal place. It’s the one place that no one would ever go for normal, worldly reasons. No penitent goes to confession to get ahead in life, or to make money, or to get a full belly, or to impress anyone; and no priest goes to confession to be amused or entertained. It’s where we go to unload our miseries, to show our wounds and our infections, to take off the disguises that make us appear palatable to each other.
So, not beautiful. No, not especially.
Or is it? If the ugliness, the squalor, the sordidness, and the running nose were all that happened inside a confessional, then it really would be an ugly place — just a latrine, a ditch, a sewer. But of course, the part where we lay out our sins is only the first part.
What happens afterward is more obviously beautiful. The priest reaches out and picks up the ugly little load you’ve laid in front of him. And right then and there, he pours the living water over it until the parts that are worth saving are healthy and whole again, and the parts that cannot be salvaged have been washed away entirely. What is useless is gone; what was dead is alive again.
This is beautiful!
And the beauty of absolution does one of those neat Catholic tricks where eternal things reach back in time and impart beauty wherever they want, regardless of chronology. The beauty of absolution makes the confession itself beautiful. Even though my sins are ugly, the very fact that I’m bringing them into the confessional has something beautiful in it: the beauty of trust that I will be forgiven; the beauty of believing that something real and life-changing will happen; the beauty of being willing to accept forgiveness even though I know that I don’t deserve it; and the beauty of knowing that, whoever’s turn it is to sit behind the screen, it is really Christ who is waiting to meet me.
analyzes your face and scans through 123 facial comparison points, such as the bridge of your nose and the shape of your mouth, before matching you with one of 60 Greco-Roman and Egyptian sculptures dating back some 2,000 years.
When Julia Harrell’s new book, How To Be a Hero: Train With the Saints(Pauline Kids, 2017)arrived in the mail, my shoulders slumped for a minute. I just didn’t expect much from it, based on the cover.
Happily, my first impressions were way off!
It’s a manual on the virtues for kids age 9-11 (although I think older kids would benefit from it, as well). In each chapter, Harrell defines a cardinal, theological, or little virtue, gives a short biography of a saint who exemplified that virtue, and ends with a short prayer and a list of questions to elicit further thought about how to apply the virtue to our own lives.
The language is plain and frank, and the ideas are much more challenging than you normally see in a religion book for kids. The saints included are:
Pope Saint John Paul II (prudence)
Bl. Pier Giorgio Frassati (justice)
Saints Peter Yu Tae-chol and Agatha Yi (fortitude)
Ven. Matt Talbot (fortitude)
The Children of Fatima (faith)
St. Josephine Bakhita (hope)
B. Chiara Badano (love)
St. Joan of Arc (humility)
Bl. Dina Belanger (obedience)
St. Monica (patience)
St. Charbel Makhlouf (gentleness)
Nice list, right? And not the most obvious match-ups, either (maybe you’d expect to see St. Joan with fortitude, for instance.)
I think the book could have done just as well without the premise that virtues are superpowers that we must master to become heroes, or saints; and the drawn illustrations are lackluster. It does include plenty of black-and-white photographs of the saints, though, and overall, the presentation is brisk and accessible. Here, you can leaf through the book page by page and get an idea of how the content is presented.
We’re taking a break from The How-To Book of the Mass, which we’ve been working our way through verrrrry slowly, and reading a section of How To Be a Hero in the evening now. (I firmly believe it’s better to do even five minutes of reading very often, than to work harder and burn out faster.) I’m dragging in all the kids, including the five teenagers, because the subject matter is presented simply, but it’s not childish.
Very pleased with this book so far. It would make a good Easter gift.
One time, my mother opened the front door to let in a guest. My father darted through the house, opened a window in the back, and jumped out. This qualified as a brilliantly successful social situation, because he did not have to talk to the person he didn’t want to talk to.
One time, they brought a fruit salad to a potluck dinner, but they decided to try some new recipe that included a sort of eggy custard. They said it tasted good, but it looked a lot like someone had just thrown up in a bowl and then added a ladle. No one ate it. Rather than own up to being the ones who brought a basin of puke to the potluck, they just abandoned it and slunk away. It was a nice ladle, too.
So that was how I was raised. When in doubt, run, slink, hide, just get away! And then you can go sit in the bathroom for a while by yourself until you feel better, and then maybe have lunch.
One time, my husband and I went to a wake, and I was eight months pregnant. The widow greeted us at the door and, clasped us warmly by the hands and, in hushed tones, thanked us so much for being there with her on this difficult day. So I responded in un-hushed tones, “I just need to find a bathroom!”
Why did I say this? I do not know. For some reason, my brain reads any kind of social interaction as ULTRA EMERGENCY PANIC TIME, and responds by shooing intense spurts of electrons toward the Inappropriate Response Center, and my mouth opens, and the wrong damn thing comes out, but loud.
It’s not always a catastrophe. Sometimes, I find myself in a social situation and I manage to escape unscathed, and only have to eat a few sandwiches before I’m ready to breathe normally again. Here are a few of my recent social triumphs:
While shopping, spotted another mom from school browsing through produce section; shoved past an old lady who looked like she was planning to pay in nickels, scored that red-headed bagger who does not mess around with eye contact, and was able to scoot away and rocket out of there before other mom even noticed me.
Came face-to-face with that guy who is named either Rick or Rich, and I definitely can’t ask which it is, because I already did that a few months ago, and I can’t remember what he said. So I got right out in front of it and shouted, “HEY, how’s Wendy?” Which was a not-inappropriate thing to say. Wendy is his wife. They just got divorced, actually, come to think of it. Or possibly I just feel like they ought to get divorced. Or possibly Wendy is his dog. But she does still exist, and is absolutely affiliated with Rih in some way, so it was totally normal to ask how she was. High five, Rih.
Ordered food at restaurant and was unexpectedly asked to make choice about salad dressing. Answered in appropriate fashion without stammering, freezing up, or laughing inappropriately. Ended up with very unpleasant salad dressing, but still, the waitress didn’t back away looking nervous and come back with a burly manager for back-up.
Went to party; didn’t cry until was in car.
Went to other restaurant. Waitress said, “Enjoy your food!” Was able to prevent self from responding, “You too!” Did say, “Meh heh heh heh!” like a goat for some reason, but oh well.
Got pulled out of line and received next-level pat down from TSA agent because I was very suspiciously sweating and trembling and my eyes were darting around like someone with explosives strapped to him or herself. Was able to persuade a very skeptical Janiqua that this is just how I am when I have to stand next to people, and if anything was going to explode, it was going to be my bladder because I was too shy to ask anyone where the bathroom was. But, I did not fall down.
According to a Scarymommy article, “It’s so perfect that this dress code exists. Because it proves in great detail why dress codes are so unbelievably sexist and ridiculous.”
Hey, this dress code is all about girls, and not much is said about boys! That’s sexist!
Possibly, but probably it’s just practical. Boys’ clothing is generally designed for style and comfort. Girls’ clothing is generally designed to be provocative. (See this essay in the Huffington Post, which rightly calls Target to task for the ways girls’ shorts are designed and sized.) When prom clothing is concerned, this discrepancy is magnified times a thousand. Boys are still wearing more or less what they’ve worn for the last hundred years: Long pants, a dress shirt, and a jacket. Sometimes the pants are super tight, and that’s no good. Beyond that? A suit is a suit.
What if they decided against sleeves? Can they were[sic] those 90’s style cropped tuxedo jackets with a tail? What if they wear flip flops? Will that work? Oh, you don’t care?
Nope. Those clothes would look silly, but they wouldn’t be immodest. And that’s the purpose of the dress code: Not to crack down on girls, but to crack down on anyone dressed immodestly. It is almost always girls who are turning up dressed immodestly; therefore, the manual is directed mainly toward girls.
Now, I can easily imagine a future where boys start turning up at prom in skin tight, shiny pants that cling to their testicles, or filmy skirts that barely cover their butt cheeks, or strapless bodices made up of transparent netting, or pants with cut-outs designed to draw attention to their penises or asscracks. These styles could become popular, and when they do, I suppose there will have to be guidelines addressing that kind of thing.
But, folks. Boys don’t have as many sexy parts as girls do. Even if a boy did turn up wearing a stripper costume, he just wouldn’t have that much to show off. A man’s exposed or semi-exposed chest may be sexy, but it’s not sexy in the same way as a girl’s exposed or semi-exposed breasts. File under: How Does One Explain Things That Any Cat Would Understand?
Second objection: They want girls to dress modestly, and that is stupid because modesty is stupid!
The writer assumes all right-thinking people agree that immodesty itself is an arbitrary standard people apply to girls just because they like jerking girls around, and not because modesty is an actual (if subjective) standard we ought to expect from our kids and ourselves.
Here’s a screen shot that Scarymommy shares as evidence of . . . something or other.
Scarymommy is incredulous that girls are not supposed to show cleavage, because, it snarks, “God doesn’t like cleavage.” I don’t see the school bringing God into it, actually. (I suspect the military also disallows cleavage, and it’s not because it will upset God.) And anyway, if a religious school does design its rules based on what God likes, where is the freaking problem with that? If you think Catholicism is oppressive and God is lame, maybe don’t go to a Catholic school? I promise you, a ban on thigh-high slits is not the hardest thing you’ll encounter in God’s law.
As I read through the guide, I was amazed at how permissive it is. A top shouldn’t be cut below the navel, and we’re supposed to be outraged? They allow spaghetti straps and strapless dresses. They allow slits and mid-thigh skirts. They even allow two-piece dresses that expose midriff skin. I’ve seen far more restrictive dress codes. Scarymommy is just upset there is such a thing as guidelines at all. And that is bonkers.
Objection #3: They are bringing actual inches into it! This objectifies girls and reduces them to bits of meat that can be measured and weighed! More sexism!
Scarymommy shares the next section of the guide
and says
NO NAVEL. And we’re bringing a ruler, so don’t even try to show more than two inches of your midsection. Dresses should not be excessively tight, so good luck if you’re girl with actual curves. And no cover-ups are allowed over dresses that do not meet dress code. You can’t hide your immodesty with a sweater, ladies!
Let’s pick this one apart, thereby giving it much more thought than Scarymommy did.
Using rulers, or even giving specific numbers of inches for this and that, can be a tricky game. There is something intensely dehumanizing about laying even a hypothetical ruler on a girl’s body. But if they don’t get specific, then girls will claim they had no idea their little scrap of sequin-encrusted lycra could possibly be considered inappropriate.
So the school is in a bit of a bind. If they get too specific, they look petty, and appear to be objectifying girls, as if their fittingness as human beings can be reduced to how many inches of flesh they reveal. But if they don’t get specific, some girls will show up dressed like strippers. Or, even worse, if they don’t get too specific, some overzealous monitor will tell a specific girl that, in his or her judgment, her dress has crossed a subjective line — leaving everyone to conclude that (if it’s a man) he has the hots for that girl, and is a pervert, or (if it’s a woman) she is just jealous because she’s old and fat.
So that’s why the school gives these specific guidelines. It can lead to heartache for girls with very long legs or girls with especially big busts, but what is the alternative? Subjective standards? No standards?
That is Scarymommy’s soluation, I guess. Many kids and parents and readers will say that it’s always wrong, always sexist, always objectifying, and always body shaming to apply standards to girls’ clothing.
I can only ask you to ask my cat, which I don’t have, to explain these things to you.
(I don’t understand the part about no cover-ups. Probably they have noticed that girls wear a little jacket to get past the door, and then take it off to dance, and then someone has to worm him way through the crowd and shout over the blaring music, “Marissa! Marissa! Principal Horace J. Patriarchy says you have to put your jacket on! I said put your jacket on, Marissa! Your jacket!” and then next thing you know, the Huffington helicopters of outrage are circling the gym and Marissa is crying because it’s really hot in the gym, which puts a damper on the party. )
Objection #4: The same dress can look very different on different girls! This is body shaming, and just proves how ridiculous it is to even try to impose objective standards!
Scarymommy riffs, “Dresses should not be excessively tight, so good luck if you’re girl with actual curves.” (I’ll just proactively deploy my meta-anti-shaming comment here and say that girls without curves are “actual” girls, too, okay, Scarymommy? Check your reverse body positive privilege, sheesh).
Guys, I am a bona fide fatty, and I have an enormous bust. A lot of the clothes I try on are too tight. What I do then, see, is I get the next size up. 21st-century America is actually a really, really good time and place to “have actual curves.” There are options for proportionately-sized clothing that were unheard of when I was shopping for my own prom dress, where you had to travel (by car! No internet!) to a specialty store to find clothing above a size 14.
All they’re saying is, different dresses look different on different girls.
My potential cat is getting exhausted here, with the explaining.
Next:
Scarymommy splutters:
Translation: if you weigh a little more, there are a lot of dresses you can’t wear. Because, curves. Sorry. They don’t make the rules. God does. Oh, wait. They totally make the rules. Never mind.
Um? The guidelines are pretty clear that it is, indeed, the school making the rules, and they’re trying to do so in cooperation with the kids and parents. And the school didn’t even mention weight. Maybe they’re talking about girls with short legs and long torsos, or girls with huge boobs and tiny hips. My cat thinks the Scarywriter is projecting a little bit, but my cat is, well, kind of catty.
And now we’re getting down to what is actually the best part of this dress code.
So many dress codes behave as if you’ll be fine if you just follow some very specific, numerical guidelines; and so many others behave as if you’ll be fine if you just decide to be less of a slutburger for once, what with having not one but two breasts and all.
Instead, this dress code acknowledges that any modesty guidelines are going to have shortcomings, because of what a subjective thing modesty is, and it does girls and parents the favor of asking them to “not put school administrators in the difficult position of upholding school standards.”
In other words, it asks them to think about and uphold those standards themselves. To behave as adults, and not to throw a temper tantrum over their sacred civil right to have a cut-out heart on their ass. “We’re all in this together,” is the basic message, “So please help us have a nice time at the dance, rather than turning this into one more exhausting battle over stupid stuff.”
No dice, Boylan Catholic. The internet chooses temper tantrum every time.
Now, let’s talk about why the internet is mad about the idea of a dress code. There is actually some reason for it.
In some places, especially in some religious circles, modesty really is something people only care about if they are interested in making girls feel bad, or if they believe that boys are ravening beasts who just can’t stop themselves from rapin’ everything that insists on exposing its – gulp – knees.
There are really are people, including some Catholic institutions, that say “teach modesty” when they really mean “teach girls that their bodies are dangerous and shameful, and any time a boy does something bad to a girl, it’s because the girl wasn’t following the Very Clear Rules.”
There are people who really do believe girls and women are, by their nature, always at fault, because if they didn’t want their pussies grabbed, then why’d they have to go out in public with female bodies? What did they expect?
I get it.
I know that people abuse the idea of modesty. I know that some dress codes are sexist. I know that some people treat girls badly. I know that, every year, nice girls show up to prom and get harassed by weirdos with hang-ups, even though their dresses are perfectly modest and pretty. I know that there are problems with many dress codes.
But it does not follow that any dress code is, by definition, sexist and oppressive and worthy of jeers and outrage.If girls are going to turn up wearing intensely sexual clothing, then the school is going to have to respond in some way.
And boy, is it tough to get it right.
If they make objective rules, they’ll be mocked for reducing girls to inches.
If they make subjective judgments, they’ll be excoriated for shaming individual girls, or for projecting their own personal issues onto girls.
If they tell girls to use their common sense, girls will show up wearing inappropriate things.
If they set down rules and turn away girls who don’t follow the rules, they’ll be raked over the coals for humiliating kids who paid for the right to be there.
If they ask girls to submit photos of their dresses ahead of time, so there’s no embarrassing surprises, they’ll be vilified for holding an inquisition and not trusting girls.
And that’s where the much-maligned “21-page manual” that provides dozens of examples of actual dresses comes in. It’s not some kind of freakazoid Scrapbook of Shaming put together by “two women with way too much time on their hands,” as Scarymommy claims. It’s an acknowledgement that it’s hard to just describe what is and is not acceptable. It’s an attempt to be as clear as possible about how the standards of dress look in real life, so we can avoid unpleasantness and just spend the prom, you know, dancing, or crying in the bathroom, or whatever.
We’re really doing a great job inspiring confidence in our young women, America. As if being a teenage girl isn’t hard enough — now they have to shop with a manual in their hands to make sure that dress that shows their back (the horror!) doesn’t show too much of their back.
It is hard to be a teenage girl. I remember. And I have three teenage daughters. It is hard. But we’re not going to make life easier by telling them anyone who helps them make decisions is just out to get them. That’s not how you train people to be adults; that’s how you treat people to be perpetual victim babies. Girls should be shopping with a manual, in their heads and hearts, if not in their hands.
That is part of growing up: learning that there are boundaries. There are some things you want to do that are not acceptable in certain settings. I refuse to be outraged that there is such a thing as boundaries, even when those boundaries are called “modest dress.”
Another objection: But what if this dress code is just a symptom of a larger problem, and girls really are being treated unfairly?
I know nothing about this particular school. I hope with all my heart they are also teaching boundaries about other sorts of things, especially to boys, who tend to lag behind girls in figuring out where boundaries are.
I hope they are teaching boys there are clear standards of behavior toward girls (and toward other boys). I hope they are teaching boys it’s okay to say certain things but not okay to say certain other things. I hope they are encouraging boys and their parents to do their part in learning how they behave, so they can have a prom (and a locker room, and a science classroom, and lunch) without being perpetually at war with each other.
And I hope they are teaching all these things to girls, too. I hope the kids don’t graduate thinking that anything goes, except when it comes to prom dresses.
For all I know, these modesty guidelines are the tip of the iceberg, and the school is positively riddled with sexism and injustice and oppressive patriarchal garbage. Maybe it is. But this modesty guide is not evidence of something wrong. It’s just evidence of a school trying to teach kids how to act decent, because no one else is telling them.
Final objection: But it’s so hard to find a dress that meets these guidelines.
If it’s really so hard to find dresses that fit these not-excessively-strict guidelines, then why be angry at the school? Be angry at fashion designers, who are hell bent on turning girls into sparkly little buffets.
And be angry at the nitwits at Scarymommy, who are teaching girls to think that sexy is the only kind of pretty, and that rules are inherently oppressive.
Good luck building a happy life after learning those lessons from hell. I’d rather take my chances with a dress code.
