The Big 2 – 5 (Final Part) : Getting Over Myself

As of today it has been a month since I have turned 25. During the past month I have taken the time to  catch up on work I had fallen behind on as well as outline some future posts for the blog, but it also got me thinking about things that I hadn’t for a while.  Like most people I have a list of goals I had to get done with a specific (age) time-frame. I believed that by having a set deadline to meet I would be motivated to complete everything. Originally the deadline was my 21st birthday but since I was a senior in college desperately trying to keep my sanity under the pressure of having all writing intensive courses, I cut myself some slack and decided to push the deadline back to my 25th birthday. Needless to say only one thing came to be from that list and that was graduating from college on time. Continue reading

The Big 2 – 5 (Part 2) : Eshakti Chambray

I took  advantage of the nice spring weather New York has been having this weekend to finally wear my first, and certainly not my last, purchase from eShakti. The current price tag attached to this dress is a tad on the expensive side, but I actually bought mine using the $40 gift coupon while the site was hosting a sale by which time the dress was marked down to $62 so this dress was a steal!  Though I fell in love with the dress as is online, I had the dress customized to knee length which turned out to be perfect.  I am petite (last time I checked I am 5’3”) so the maxi dress trend isn’t one I can really embrace for obvious reasons. Continue reading

The Big 2 – 5 (Part 1)

So this weekend I turn 25 and  I figured it would be fitting to have some fun with my pre-birthday church outfit. For a while now I have been on the hunt for a white top for a “en blanc” event this month and found this body suit from Fashion to Figure. Since its ivory it doesn’t fit the bill for that event but I bought it anyway because I loved the style and fit. This is the first time I have ever worn a body suit and I can say that having tried it, I will definitely be wearing another one very soon. (I can’t begin to explain how comfortable and stylish this piece is!) Continue reading

PCA/ACA National Conference 2015

In addition to this blog, I am actually a design and art history historian as well as a cultural anthropologist. It’s a quite a mouthful I know.  Though much of my academic writing and research has taken a back seat since receiving my masters last spring, I have made some efforts in the final months of last year to expand on some projects I had started in graduate school, including my paper on Target, its designer collaboration collections and plus size blogging– a paper I submitted last October  to be considered as a possible presentation for the Fashion, Style, Appearance, Consumption and Design area of the 2015 Popular Culture Association and American Culture Association’s National Conference.

I was told that once you send in your abstract for consideration it takes approximately  a minimum of two weeks to hear back from the area chair, I heard back in two days. From that day I was in crowd-funding and paper editing mode. It was an intensely stressful time given the the other responsibilities I had to deal with such as work, looking for another job, apartment hunting, eventually moving, and starting this blog. It should come to no surprise then that I did my final edits to the paper and accompanying PowerPoint the week before I was set to present. Yet even with all the anxiety fueled by the craziness that is my life, I was very excited to spend Easter weekend in New Orleans for my first (national) conference.

I think my abstract is the longest in history; there was so much to cover in such a little space.

I arrived the day before I was scheduled to present which gave me a chance to sit in other panels for different academic areas, such as Film Adaption, Fat Studies, Tolkien Studies, Material Culture, as well as Libraries, Archives and Museums, to name a few. Admittedly the experience did shake my confidence as I started to question the significance of my paper as the work by my fellow scholars was not only impressive, but presented in such a way that kept the audience engaged for the entire panel. I was in awe of these scholars who clearly have had much more practice than I. Continue reading