Eight years ago today, Mr. Improbable and I had been living together for a month. I was working four days a week at Harvard as the communications manager for a software-implementation project. I was also finishing my dissertation on the psychology of narrative — why we read what we do, and how we tell the story of our own lives. In the spring of 2002, I would become a “Dr.” and a “Mrs.” within a few months of each other.

Eight years ago today, I still knew that I’d better keep writing something besides academic jargon and instructions to end users on how to access the new system, or my skills would atrophy. Eight years ago, it wasn’t as easy to get a blog started as it is today, so I kept a journal instead.

Eight years ago today, I wrote this:

I have been in a dangerous state of non-motivation lately, not wanting to deal with the dissertation or anything related to it—i.e., this diary. I’ve been alternating between reproaching myself for my faithlessness, swearing to get this on the web soon so that I’ll have no excuse not to do my entry every day, and telling myself that it doesn’t matter, with all I’ve done lately I can afford to slack off for a week, I’ll begin again next Monday.

Then this morning the world changed.

There are psychologists who study “flashbulb memories”—those memories that burn into the consciousness of an entire culture, that give rise to the question “where were you when”—when Kennedy was shot, when the Challenger went down, when the OJ verdict was announced. And what they’ve found is that, though the memories feel profound and authoritative, they are in fact as fragile and changeable as any other memory. Ask a person the day after The Event what happened, and you get one story; ask them six months later, and it has changed. Those who were alone say they were with friends. Those who were numb remember searing pain.

I don’t remember, even now, how I heard. I was at work, catching up on e-mails and checking the web for news as I do in the morning, and Marc called, and somehow I heard it from him or from a colleague’s shocked announcement over the cube wall or perhaps I saw it online, but then there was shouting back and forth as we all told each other what we knew, and everyone was on the phone to someone else and yelling their news across the cubes and yelling back to the rest of us in the office.

Another hour or two of this, and pacing while the news websites slowly, slowly loaded, and I went home. Not because I felt in danger—despite a few hysteric pronouncements, I certainly didn’t think Harvard would be a target, and anyway if it were I’d not be much safer at home, six blocks away—but to be with Marc, and to see the news. And to see those towers down and think, “No.”

No.

The World Trade Centers are gone. I don’t know why it’s that thought, and that combination of words, more than any other, that brings me to the edge of tears. The human toll is greater, and more meaningful—I’ve have given up the Empire State Building too, and the Golden Gate Bridge, and let them fill in the Grand Canyon with styrofoam peanuts while they were at it, to save those lives. But there is something so egregious about the destruction of the skyline. It’s like those countries where rejected men scar women with acid, destroying their beauty, turning their glory to shame. Human beings die, but we build things, create great gorgeous improbable things, to live after us. Destroying those is a blow to the spirit as well as the heart.

Marc and I sit on the couch, holding hands, watching the news for hours. Occasionally one of us gets up to check e-mail. Sometime in the afternoon Marc decides we should take a walk, and we do, and I feel a little sanity ebb back in: there’s still sun and cats on porches and my new Rockport shoes feel good—until we see the plane overhead and Marc says, “Look, a plane,” because there aren’t supposed to be any, and I realize how many things there are to think about now that there didn’t used to be.

There’s a school near our house and you can hear the children playing. I don’t really know at what age a child can be old enough to realize what happened today, to realize that it’s not a movie, not a “far away” thing. But I do know that whatever they realize, they don’t know that this is not the way it’s supposed to be. They don’t know the unwritten rule that America is never, ever, supposed to be attacked. In a strange way it’s like the election fiasco last fall, the sense of wrongness, of this-can’t-happen-here, the sense that the rules have changed. But for these kids, it can happen here. And even if it never happens again, it will change their assumptions about the world, it will make them a different generation, it will separate them from older brothers and sisters and, maybe, lovers, the way being pre- or post-Watergate separates Marc and me.

Dare I relate this to my research? Oh, yes. Until today America was one kind of story, a triumphal story about wealth and unquestioned belief in our own goodness. For many, we were a romance, in the classic literary sense of the term as used by Northrop Frye: the quest of an extraordinary people going from one glorious adventure to the next. For others, we were a comedy: the struggle of workaday folk to make a living and a life, enjoy simple pleasures and avoid the absurd traps of fate and their own foolishness.

We may come back to believing in one of these stories again. I wonder how, because I think the only myth that can get us through a crisis this huge is the “romance” story, and the tawdriness of politics and dissolution of a shared set of reference points—religious, epistemological, aesthetic—have done permanent damage to our ability to see ourselves as a romantic hero of a nation. Even those who cling to this myth today ascribe it only to the “Greatest Generation,” which of course so inexplicably raised the present lot of self-absorbed, self-loathing Boomers. America may well only work as a comedy now, and something just happened that is not supposed to happen in a comedy, where things can bend but cannot break.

What story will be left to tell?

Eight years later, I’m asking that question even more intently, even more despairingly.

Speaking of awkward compliments, I sort of got one at the reading I did last week at White Birch Books in New Hampshire: “Have you always had such a wonderful sense of humor?” That’s almost too complimentary! How can you answer that in a modest fashion? “Why, yes, and I’ve always been terribly good-looking, too.”

I thanked the woman who asked it, of course, and then said, in essence, yes I have.

I come from funny people.

My parents were funny, and communicated the value of funny to me, in the way some other families are musical, or athletic, or intellectual, or political. I don’t think they did this consciously–I’ll be real interested to hear what the ConductMom has to say about this post, online or off–but they certainly held humor in esteem not just as a random good thing, but as an important good thing.

I remember the day it occurred to me, around age seven, that my mother was funnier than most people. We were living in Oklahoma at the time, and I was taking horseback-riding lessons at a local farm. There were goats at the farm, too, and I vividly recall my New-York-born-and-bred mother’s mingled amusement and horror at being told, “Don’t park under the trees or the goats will climb on your car to eat the leaves.” This wasn’t something she’d ever had to worry about in Queens.

One day, I asked her, “Why do goats have scabby knees?”

“They pray a lot,” she replied. After a perfect beat, she added, “If you were that ugly, you would, too.”

I suddenly realized two things: one, that not everybody’s mother would have said that, and two, that not everybody would joke so irreverently about something that they took, at heart, very seriously. (Prayer, that is. I don’t think anyone from New York City can truly learn to take goats seriously.)

Growing up, my parents and I used humor as a way of bonding, of dealing with our stresses, and perhaps most importantly, as a way of breaking out of the roles of Mom and Dad and Kid, or of Good Midwestern Christians, or whatever. We valued those roles, but somehow also knew it was important to subvert them, to create a place we could just be Nancy and Jack and Robin together. We did humor in a lot of different ways: my father of blessed memory was more the Borscht-Belt kind of old-school joke teller, and also liked to make observations about the oddities of the English language. My mother and I were not above physical slapstick, but were mostly fast and quippy–my mother, in particular, had a remarkable facility for sick jokes, a side of her that I was one of the few people to see. We bonded over “The Carol Burnett Show” and “M*A*S*H” and, especially for my dad and me, “Take the Money and Run,” which we must have watched a dozen times together.

We had a lot of private jokes as a family (“checking the map,” “now I’m a vidow”). Humor was part of our culture. It’s not as though my father ever took me aside and said, “Daughter, humor can bridge social gaps and help overcome psychological defenses, and I want you to think about that,” or that my mother was some kind of godawful Comedy Mom (“Go to your room, young lady, and don’t come out until you’ve written ten witty observations on the difference between dogs and cats!”). But somehow, I knew that being funny was an important part of who they were, and an important part of who we were, as a family.

I can’t even begin to speculate on why my parents were like that. Neither of them were close to their extended families, so I don’t know how far or wide in the family tree the funny blossoms bloom. Through Facebook, I’ve recently become friends with a passel of cousins on my mother’s side, and although I have certain differences with them (I rather decisively did not remain a Good Midwestern Christian) we all share a love of a good laugh. My cousins write some of the funniest updates and comments I get on Facebook, which considering that many of my friends are professional writers and/or performers is going some.

What activities or qualities were particularly important to your family of origin? How were those values communicated? Do you think your parents valued those things consciously, in a way they could explain, or is it simply something deep within them that you picked up on?

“Mad Men” starts this weekend, and I can’t wait. I may have to, of course, at least until it shows up on iTunes, because Mr. Improbable and I don’t have cable. But I think you can get it on iTunes 24 hours after it airs. In the meantime, here‘s a good article in Vanity Fair to whet your appetite–and a “Which Mad Man Are You?” quiz. Look who I got!

… well, I do have ideas. They got that part right. (Actually, unlike a lot of viewers, I don’t hate Peter Campbell. I think there is a possibility of redemption in him–and he is a hard worker, with good ideas. My prediction is that whatever happens to his character this season, his realization that he fell in love with a plain-looking, working-class Catholic girl on the basis of her brains, wit, and ambition will fundamentally change him as a person. Also, my ex-boyfriend is distantly related to Vincent Kartheiser. Is that a weird #lameclaimtofame or what?)

I never did enter the contest to win a walk-on role. I saw some of the entries and mine was nowhere near as well done, and I didn’t have time to do another photo shoot. Kind of a shame, as I have several good vintage or vintage-look dresses, including one Little Black Dress that is cut exactly like the one I chose for my avatar. (It seems that about half my Facebook friends have “Mad Men” avatars as their profile pictures. It is to spring ’09 what Shepard Fairey-izing yourself was to fall ’08.)

For your amusement, here’s the photo I did take:

Not bad, but it’s not great. The book is bigger than my face, and my hands, which are 1) not my best feature and 2) not manicured in a 60s style, are too prominent. (Also, I just noticed, it looks as though my left breast is about six inches higher than my right one, which–peeking down shirt to check–no, it isn’t.) All in all, if that was the best I could do, there didn’t seem to be much point to entering.

But you remember yesterday, how I said Milo had the total early-60′s look? Seriously, check out little Doggie Draper:

Exact same facial expression. Exact. Although that is not the expression Milo would have on his face if his chair were slowly filling with water, I tell you what.

Comments open for all “Mad Men” fans! Don’t worry about spoilers–if I don’t want to see them, I won’t look.

This weekend I went down to New York to see a friend of mine who was in town for a conference, and took the opportunity to visit some Cambridge friends who had moved to Brooklyn last month. I like walking in New York–I find it oddly relaxing, in the same way stimulants can sometimes help people with hyperactivity to calm down. Go figure. So on Saturday, the day I planned to visit my Brooklyn friends, I wandered down from my Midtown hotel to Greenwich Village, and then Soho, and then decided, the heck with it, instead of trying to figure out the subway I’ll just walk across the Brooklyn Bridge and grab a cab on the other side. It’s fun to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge on a nice day.

I asked a traffic cop which way Park Slope was, so that I could get a cab that was going in the right direction, and started off. Great plan, except for one detail: there are no cabs in Brooklyn that are not already in service. So I walked, and kept walking.

And walked all the way from Midtown Manhattan to Park Slope, Brooklyn.

Now, there was a moment at which I decided to commit to walking the entire way, because I knew I was going in the right direction and would get there eventually, and once you’ve been walking for three hours, what’s another hour or two? And it would be worth it to see my friends’ reaction. But there was a good long stretch of Flatbush Avenue in which I was really, really hoping to find a cab.

And here’s what didn’t occur to me until Sunday morning: I could have gone into any store or restaurant, asked someone for the number of a cab company, and called one.

How could I not have realized this?

I interrogated myself about this some (because while Saturday afternoon I’d hit the zone and could have kept walking indefinitely, on Sunday morning my butt and thighs were making their opinion of my non-cab-taking ways felt). And here’s what I think was going on. I think in some deep, unconscious way, I was thinking of taxicabs as though they were a sort of animal with two subspecies: domestic and wild. Domestic cabs are the ones that come to your house, the cabs you call, as you would call a dog. Wild cabs are the cabs you encounter on the street, that cannot be called, but can only be caught. Once you have entered the street, the native habitat of the wild taxicab, you can’t call one, any more than you can go on a safari and call the rhinos (or dangeroos) to come in closer for photographs. You have to catch them. (Thanks to my two anonymous FB friends for those links, which aren’t all that relevant but are hilarious.)

So: domestic = house = calling v. wild = outside = catching.

This leads me to three things:

1. Metaphors are fundamental to the way we think. Yes, I know this was a particularly weird metaphor, but there is a whole field of linguistics and cognitive science that is based around metaphor and thought. I don’t mean highly conscious, literary metaphors and similes that are deliberately created for a combination of novelty and recognizability, but basic ones, so basic that they don’t even seem like metaphors at first, but simply like descriptions of how things are. Look at the way we characterize the development of careers, relationships, and so forth as physical journeys forward or upward: “This relationship isn’t going anywhere.” “My Harvard MBA has put me ahead in my career.” “My workout routine has plateaued.” “Now that I’ve got tenure I don’t know where to go next.”

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, in Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought, list a number of what they call “primary metaphors,” including:

Affection is Warmth

Important is Big

Happy is Up

Knowing is Seeing

These are based on our immediate physical experiences (that of being held closely; realizing one’s relative impotence in the face of bigger people; naturally becoming more posturally erect or even jumping when happy; and taking in information visually). Other metaphors we learn through culture. If I didn’t live in a culture that had both domesticated and wild animals, I wouldn’t have unconsciously come up with the metaphor that I did for taxis.

In American society, for example, a dominant metaphor is that “time is money.” On the surface, this only seems to mean that the more you work, the more you will succeed. But if you dig deeper, it goes beyond that: time is a resource. Time can be used well, or wasted. Time can be spent or saved. Time is something we can invest (“I need to put more time into that project”). Time is something there is a finite amount of. Although some people have more or less time than others, time itself is the same for everyone, just as $10 in Bill Gates’s pocket is the same as $10 in mine. Not all cultures have these beliefs about time.

Metaphors can enrich our thinking, but as you can see through my error with the taxis, they can also constrain it.

2. What does it mean to know something, and what does that imply for the testing and evaluation of knowledge? I have no doubt that had the possibility of calling a cab from a restaurant appeared on a multiple-choice or true-or-false test,* I would have answered correctly. In fact, just the night before, my friend had mentioned calling cabs from restaurants in the context of drinking-and-driving laws, and I certainly didn’t say, “What is this strange custom of which you speak?”

I “knew” you could do this, but I obviously didn’t know you could do this. So what does that say about the validity of multiple-choice and true-or-false tests that are based on the ability to recognize information, but not to recall or to apply it? Nothing good, I fear.

3. Dude, I walked from Midtown to Park freakin’ Slope! According to Google Maps, I walked about seven miles, but I couldn’t make it take the path I’d actually used, which involved a lot of wandering up and down and around in Manhattan before hitting the bridge. My normal pace is a little over three miles an hour, and I walked for a little over four hours, so you do the math. A 12-mile walk may be a lot for you or a little, but it’s a lot for me. Endurance has never been my strong suit and even a couple of years ago, I would not have been able to complete a walk like that going non-stop. So I was rather proud of myself.

Which got me thinking, don’t most of us have stories of things we are simultaneously embarrassed about yet proud of? I’m not hugely embarrassed about my unconscious belief that taxicabs are animals, but I do pride myself on being a good problem-solver, and I failed rather spectacularly to be that.

My current theory is that the basic structure of the shame-with-pride story (and I’d love to hear some of yours!) is that you are embarrassed about/ashamed of the stupidity or ignorance that got you into a given situation, and then proud of the stamina/competence that allowed you to either endure, change, or get out of the situation.

Embarrassed to go into the situation, proud to get out of it.

See? That there’s one of them “life is a journey” metaphors.

*Maybe. From the time I was a little girl until now, I have done badly on true-or-false tests. Even as a child, there were very few statements that seemed unequivocally true or false to me; I needed to know the context in which they were meant to be applied in order to judge, not that I would have put it that way in third grade. So then I’d get all weird and start thinking it was a trick question and put the wrong answer down.

This is probably the most personal blog post I’ve written yet. It didn’t even start out to be a blog post, so much … I just wrote it because I had to. Then I decided to share. This was originally written two weeks ago (damn, tempus fugit!) when I was returning from my trip to Missouri.

What an adventure-filled week! I left last Saturday morning for Springfield, Missouri, home of the ConductMom and a few of the ConductCousins. A bunch more CC’s came in from DC and Texas, and the night of the Fourth was a country idyll of grilled meats, kids running around with sparklers, and homemade country and gospel music, which sounded a lot better after I added a few surreptitious shots of Jack Daniels to my sweet tea. (I stopped doing that when I realized I’d had enough to actually think it might be a good idea for me to join in on “Ring of Fire.”)

The next day, I learned to fire a gun! I have never so much as touched a gun in my life, so I asked my cousins, who grew up shootin’, to larn me, and so they did. I believe it might be an acquired taste. I didn’t care for it much while I was doing it, but more than once subsequently has the thought crossed my mind that firing off a few rounds at a range might not be a bad way to work off the stresses of the day. I still have no sense of how good a markswoman I might be; we just fired into trees, which were all still standing at the end of the day.

I certainly look good holding a gun, just like everyone does. Guns and cigarettes are deadly and horrible inventions; why must they be such terribly appealing props? It’s not the phallic aspect; no one looks terribly sexy wielding a zucchini. I wish I could have used this photo for my book jacket. If anything says “This isn’t your grandmother’s etiquette book”:

(photo credit: Doug Gallo)

Heh.

The ConductMom and I then drove to Kansas City on Monday. KC was the home of my 20s, my theater years, my wild “Shiksa in the City” single days, and I hadn’t been back for 10 years or so, not since my own parents moved south. I reunited with several dear friends whom I hadn’t seen since high school or college, appeared on a couple of the same shows that I used to book actors on when I was a theater publicist, and gave a reading at the bookstore I spent my Saturday afternoons at as a teenager, to an audience that included my high-school librarian, the mother of a toddler I used to babysit (now a fifth-grade teacher going for a master’s, with two children of her own), my boss from my first real job, and Kansas City’s version of J.J. Hunsecker, who knows all my most scandalous secrets.

I got a past, okay? We all do. And mine’s been a little more complicated and contradictory than most people’s, I suspect, and I encountered a whole lot of it all at once this weekend.

I feel as though I should have some profound thoughts about this, but I don’t. Except that, somehow–it was all okay. I don’t mean not awkward, I mean deeply, existentially, transcendentally okay.

“Shalom” means “peace,” as most folks know, but it also means “wholeness.” Because peace can only come when all the parts come together. This was a week of deep shalom for me.

A week of shalom in the summer of Spock! Because that Hadassah lady was more right than she knew. I don’t just look like Spock. Like that pointy-eared halfbreed, I’ve had a long, hard road to shalom, to wholeness. I was born with a passionate heart and an overcharged brain. I was raised with some painfully conflicting values. Some of the chapters of my life don’t read like they’re from the same book as others do.

But somehow, that week, all those disparate elements of my life came together, and damn if it didn’t just work, just like the Golden Rod Rainbow Stripe Shawl Sweater Shrug Cardigan does. You wouldn’t think all those colors would swirl around and play instead of clashing, but they do.

They did.

And I am stopped dead in my tracks with gratitude and wonder and love every time I think of it.

And the reason I’m wrote this–well, I wrote most of it on the plane on the way back to Boston, because it was in me and had to come out. The reason I’m posting it, the reason I want to share it with you, is because I know I have readers in high school, in college, in their early 20s. And if you’re struggling with how to put the different parts of your life together–people from your past and present, family and friends, what you were taught and what you’ve decided for yourself, goals and dreams that don’t seem that they could be part of the same person’s life–I want you to know it can work out. It’s supposed to take a while, I think, so be patient. But it can happen.

So, yesterday, a friend of mine mentioned on Facebook that Hoda Kotb was on vacation and Tori Spelling was guest-hosting with Kathie Lee.

Imagine my shock when I got to the studio today and saw–Tori Spelling. In fact, when I saw her in the dressing room, I vaguely thought, “Wow, that chick kinda looks like Tori Spelling. Pretty funny, considering what my friend said.”

Because this friend–if she’s anything like she used to be in high school, when last, pre-Facebook, I knew her–is entirely the kind of person who would make something like that up just to rattle me. It never even occurred to me that she was telling the truth.

I have another, similar, story about a mischief-making friend who told me something shocking and improbable that turned out to be true, and because I was so sure that he was making it up, I very nearly committed a horrible faux pas.* If you’re my friend, you probably know this story; if not, it involves too many innocent parties for me to write about.

But have you ever done this? Discounted a true statement because a friend was such a joker? Or do I have an unusually high percentage of friends who like to play mild practical jokes of this sort?

Or do I have an unusually suspicious nature?

*Frankly, if I’d said what I almost did, it would have blasted through the atmosphere of “faux pas” and gone faster than light into the deep space of “dick move,” it would have been so bad.

And what is the very first e-mail in my inbox this morning, this morning of my 42nd birthday during which I shall make my second triumphant appearance on the “Today Show”?

A witty e-card from Amazing Genius Science Girl?
A supportive note from the ConductMom?
A sexy love poem from Mr. Improbable?
A “You go, girl!” message from the Fabulous Bureaucrats?

No. It is THIS, from Amazon.com:

“Save 32% at Amazon.com on ‘How Not to Act Old: 185 Ways to Pass for Phat, Sick, Hot, Dope, Awesome, or at Least Not Totally Lame’ by Pamela Redmond Satran.”

THANKS, Ama-freakin’-zon-dot-com. Happy birthday to you, too.

And honey, I do not have to pass for fabulous.

Thanks for your patience, all. I came straight home from Missouri to Readercon, and from there into a week-long work emergency at my HBS job. But I have a bunch of notes for things I’d like to post on–busy times are thought-provoking ones–and I’ve also got some pending good news to share with you. So hang in there. (In the meantime, you might find both the questions this week on the Miss Conduct blog entertaining, if you haven’t seen them yet. And are there any topics you’d like me to weigh in on? I do take requests, you know. Feel free to leave ‘em in comments!)

I told you I was going to learn to shoot!

Cousin Gary, behind me, is wearing the Sox cap I brought him in exchange for shooting lessons.

The Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City is famous for its wide expanse of green lawn. In 1994, giant shuttlecocks were installed on it. From the museum’s website:

The husband and wife team of Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen were commissioned in 1994 to design a sculpture for The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. They responded to the formality of the original neoclassical building and the green expanse of its lawn by imagining the Museum as a badminton net and the lawn as a playing field. The pair designed four birdies or shuttlecocks that were placed as though they had just landed on opposite sides of the net. Each shuttlecock weighs 5,500 pounds, stands nearly 18 feet tall and has a diameter of some 16 feet.

From Robin’s camera:

And a picture of me at the Rainy Day Books reading. This is that black dress, by the way. You can see how comfortable and easily accessorized it is. (Yes, it does look smashing with the Golden Rod Rainbow Stripe Shawl Sweater Shrug Cardigan.)

Happy Fourth, everyone. I’ll be in Springfield, Missouri, for Independence Day, celebrating with my mother and cousins. Monday I’ll drive with the ConductMom to Kansas City where I’ll be getting to see some old friends, and also do a book reading (Rainy Day Books on July 8 at 7pm). So posting may be slow next week, though I hope to have some good pictures to show you when I return.

This will be a trip to remember, I think. I haven’t been back to KC for 10 years or so. Some things I plan to do in on the trip:

1. Learn to shoot! One of my cousins has promised to teach me how to fire a gun, which I’ve been wanting to learn to do for years. I suspect the rest of my red-state cousins are getting no end of amusement out of this request of mine.
2. Give a reading at the same bookstore my mother and I used to go to on Saturday afternoons. Some serious home-town-girl-makes-good action going on there!
3. Be a guest on the same radio talk show I used to book actors on when I was a theater publicist.
4. See my high-school librarian, and probably several other high-school teachers.
5. Reunite with two friends whom I haven’t seen in 15+ years in one case and 20+ in the other (thank you, Facebook!)

So it should be an amazing blast through my present, past, and future!

If you haven’t been keeping up with the Miss Conduct blog, you might want to check out this question, the excellent (and fairly short) comment thread that ensued, and my responses (I & II). We dug into that “rude v. hurtful” distinction in some interesting ways.

Have a happy Fourth!

I shall call it Golden Rod Rainbow Stripe Shawl Sweater Shrug Cardigan, and it shall be mine, and it shall be my Golden Rod Rainbow Stripe Shawl Sweater Shrug Cardigan.

I was really touched by how many of you expressed your confidence that I have a unique ability to manage this garment, much as though it were a frothing Rottweiler and I were Cesar Millan taming it through my calm assertiveness.

And those of you who voted “hideous”–don’t come all over apologetic should you ever encounter me in the flesh and knitwear. I asked. And Miss Conduct follows her own advice, and never asks questions she doesn’t want the answers to.

And yes, I will post some pictures when it arrives, and you shall be free to mock me. (Say what you will, the Golden Rod Rainbow Stripe Shawl Sweater Shrug Cardigan is not as bad as this outfit. My First Lady fashion fangirlishness took a serious blow when I saw that picture.)