Never a Sweeter Sweater

I’m preparing to end my social hibernation in preparation for the coming test, which usually includes a distinct lack of blogging. However I thought I’d quickly answer some questions raised by my recent spat of pictures.

First concerning where I got my sweater; this is an interesting story. I knew that the sweaters that I currently owned were not quite ugly enough, and that DI would be the perfect location to find an ugly sweater. Unfortunately I lacked the time to drive to Utah to pick one up. So I sought a local thrift store. Luckily OSU has its own thrift store just north of campus. I started there, but found that they had the convenient hours of 10 to 3, Wednesdays during academic terms. Seeing as it was a Thursday night the day after finals, I was out of luck. I next tried a vintage clothing store, where they only had ugly sweaters of the $50 variety. As important as winning stupid contests is to me, I couldn’t justify paying that much for a moderately ugly sweater. This stop was really only noteworthy because I had to walk up and down High Street to get to the place. High is a very interesting street because on one side of it is the nice sunny OSU campus, and on the other side is the dark underbelly of the ghetto. So while I walked up and down the street I met some interesting folk. Two people told me to put on a coat. I was walking down the street coatless, as I’m wont to do. After all, 40 degrees is really long-sleeve weather, 30 degrees is jacket weather and 10 degrees is coat weather. But evidently these individuals disagreed and thought I should know about it. Another guy with an impressive grey afro tried to sell my cigarettes, which just didn’t make any sense. It seems like he’d make more money peddling a more serious drug than tobacco. And the oddest was a gentlemen who wanted to know where X church of the X was (that’s not what he said, as that would have been VERY weird. I just don’t remember the particulars.) I didn’t know, so he proceeded to walk along with me. He let out of constant stream of “Gotta go praise Jesus. Praising the Lord, gotta get to the church to praise the Lord. Gotta praise Him, sing His praise, praising the Lord” and so on. Eventually he stopped to ask someone else where the mystery church was located.

I eventually headed home, and remembered that there was a second hand furniture shop near my apartment. I stopped by and found that they did in fact have a clothing section. I perused the men’s sweaters and they didn’t have anything nearly ugly enough. They certainly had a great many sweaters that I wouldn’t wear, but nothing truly hideous. I explained to the salesgirl that I needed a gaudy Christmas masterpiece of a sweater and she lead me into the women’s section where they had the Holy Grail: the ugly sweater section. It makes no sense to me why women, who stereotypically are more attuned to aesthetics and fashion should have such a variety of ugly sweaters. But evidently they had had several requests of the previous weeks for Christmas sweaters and had clumped them all together. And dismissing some truly awful numbers that were more expensive than I wished to pay for an evening’s shock value, I found an 8 dollar sweater complete with fake ribbon, sequins and a generally grodey aura.

The rules of the party were simple: wear a sweater. The uglier the sweater the better. The focus was sweaters of the Christmas variety, but that wasn’t strictly required. One guy had a John Deere sweater, and my roommate borrowed my BYU sweatshirt (he went the U, thus considers BYU apparel the heighth of ugly.) We had a number of school-teacher sweaters, which have their own variety of ugly. My addition of an ugly moustache, hat and belt buckle was merely an example of my thinking outside the box. There was no official 1st, 2nd and 3rd place, but my prize for International Award was announced 2nd. Lolly (his name is Lawrence, but he made the mistake of telling me that his family calls him Lolly) seemed to have won first place for his skin-tight ensemble. He can be seen in the Family Photo, where he is wearing the white holly-decked turtle neck and appears to be pouting. This is not my HE group, just a group of church folk, posing in a traditional family fashion.

And now that I’ve added another twenty minutes of delay, I must get to work on memorizing glycolysis for the 8th time in my life.