Dress Coded Book Quotes

THE FIRST TEN LIES THEY TELL YOU IN HIGH SCHOOL 1. We are here to help you. 2. You will have time to get to your class before the bell rings. 3. The dress code will be enforced. 4. No smoking is allowed on school grounds. 5. Our football team will win the championship this year. 6. We expect more of you here. 7. Guidance counselors are always available to listen. 8. Your schedule was created with you in mind. 9. Your locker combination is private. 10. These will be the years you look back on fondly. TEN MORE LIES THEY TELL YOU IN HIGH SCHOOL 1. You will use algebra in your adult lives. 2. Driving to school is a privilege that can be taken away. 3. Students must stay on campus during lunch. 4. The new text books will arrive any day now. 5. Colleges care more about you than your SAT scores. 6. We are enforcing the dress code. 7. We will figure out how to turn off the heat soon. 8. Our bus drivers are highly trained professionals. 9. There is nothing wrong with summer school. 10. We want to hear what you have to say.

Changing yourself is supposed to mean hope, at least according to the self-help books and magazine paradigms, but for me - and I suspect many others - it simply means finding new ways to feel inadequate.

The SpecOps dress code stated that our apparel should be 'dignified' but in Cordelia's case they had obviously stretched a point.

TEN MORE LIES THEY TELL YOU IN HIGH SCHOOL 1. You will use algebra in your adult lives. 2. Driving to school is a privilege that can be taken away. 3. Students must stay on campus during lunch. 4. The new text books will arrive any day now. 5. Colleges care more about you than your SAT scores. 6. We are enforcing the dress code. 7. We will figure out how to turn off the heat soon. 8. Our bus drivers are highly trained professionals. 9. There is nothing wrong with summer school. 10. We want to hear what you have to say.

BEFORE THE TREE HOUSE WAS A RECORDING STUDIO FOR PODCASTS, IT WAS:* A grotto for mermaids and mermen. Piles of seashells. Buckets of sand from our old sand table. Fabric in shades of blue hanging everywhere. A fairy house. Shimmer fabric in shades of pink, yellow, and green. Tissue-paper flowers. Cutout butterflies with huge googly eyes. The boxcar from the Boxcar Children books. Spoons, tin plates, a knapsack, crackers, and plain cookies. Red-and-white-checked fabric for the windows. A keep. Cardboard swords wrapped in foil. Many, many of them. The Gryffindor common room. Red and gold, with wands made out of repurposed foil swords.

Be an epic goofball. Seriously. Praise be to Pokemon Go for getting people out and doing stuff again. For about five minutes, Pokemon Go was beating out porn in internet usage. That’s crazy awesome. Who knows what the fuck the new hot thing will be by the time you are reading this book, but I am all in for anything that gives us permission to be epic goofballs. I will talk in a crazy accent, wear weird t-shirts (I love buying t-shirts from the boys’ section of the store) to work (the benefit of being self-employed… I set the dress code), dance with my waiter in the middle of the restaurant (thanks, Paul!), and have my husband (a deeply patient man) push me through the grocery store parking lot while I stand on the shopping cart.

No stories were viral. No celebrity was trending. The world was still big. The country was still vast. You could just be a little person, with your own little life and your own little thoughts. You didn’t have to have an opinion, and nobody cared if you did or did not. You could be alone on purpose, even in a crowd. The New York Times was chucked on doorsteps the following morning. There were disparate stories on page A1—the supply of stem cells, a controversy over school dress codes, the competitive morning TV market, and five others. The physical newspapers arrived to subscribers around the same time nineteen men with box cutters passed through low-security checkpoints in four different airports and boarded four cross-country domestic flights. The flights were hijacked, the planes crashed into buildings, 2,977 people died, and the nineties collapsed with the skyscrapers.

I’m going to say this once here, and then—because it is obvious—I will not repeat it in the course of this book: not all boys engage in such behavior, not by a long shot, and many young men are girls’ staunchest allies. However, every girl I spoke with, every single girl—regardless of her class, ethnicity, or sexual orientation; regardless of what she wore, regardless of her appearance—had been harassed in middle school, high school, college, or, often, all three. Who, then, is truly at risk of being “distracted” at school? At best, blaming girls’ clothing for the thoughts and actions of boys is counterproductive. At worst, it’s a short step from there to “she was asking for it.” Yet, I also can’t help but feel that girls such as Camila, who favors what she called “more so-called provocative” clothing, are missing something. Taking up the right to bare arms (and legs and cleavage and midriffs) as a feminist rallying cry strikes me as suspiciously Orwellian. I recall the simple litmus test for sexism proposed by British feminist Caitlin Moran, one that Camila unconsciously referenced: Are the guys doing it, too? “If they aren’t,” Moran wrote, “chances are you’re dealing with what we strident feminists refer to as ‘some total fucking bullshit.’” So while only girls get catcalled, it’s also true that only girls’ fashions urge body consciousness at the very youngest ages. Target offers bikinis for infants. The Gap hawks “skinny jeans” for toddlers. Preschoolers worship Disney princesses, characters whose eyes are larger than their waists. No one is trying to convince eleven-year-old boys to wear itty-bitty booty shorts or bare their bellies in the middle of winter. As concerned as I am about the policing of girls’ sexuality through clothing, I also worry about the incessant drumbeat of self-objectification: the pressure on young women to reduce their worth to their bodies and to see those bodies as a collection of parts that exist for others’ pleasure; to continuously monitor their appearance; to perform rather than to feel sensuality. I recall a conversation I had with Deborah Tolman, a professor at Hunter College and perhaps the foremost expert on teenage girls’ sexual desire. In her work, she said, girls had begun responding “to questions about how their bodies feel—questions about sexuality or arousal—by describing how they think they look. I have to remind them that looking good is not a feeling.

School Code of Conduct. Everything you need to know about how to behave at school—and how not to behave—is right here in this book.” A bunch of teachers came around and started handing out a copy to each student in the gym. “When you receive yours, open up to page one and follow along with me,” Stricker said. Then she started reading… really… slowly. “‘Section One: Hills Village Middle School Dress Code…’” When I got my copy, I flipped all the way to the back of the book. There were sixteen sections and twenty-six pages total. In other words, we were going to be lucky to get out of this assembly by Christmas. “‘… All students are expected to dress appropriately for an academic environment. No student shall wear clothing of a size more than two beyond his or her normal size….’” HELP! That’s what I was thinking about then. Middle school had just started, and they were already trying to bore us to death. Please, somebody stop Mrs. Stricker before she kills again! Leo took out a pen and started drawing something on the inside of the back cover. Stricker turned to the next page and kept reading. “‘Section Two: Prohibited Items. No student shall bring to school any electronic equipment not intended for class purposes. This includes cell phones, iPods, cameras, laptop computers….’” The whole thing went on and on. And on. And on. By the time we got to Section 6 (“Grounds for Expulsion”), my brain was turning into guacamole, and I’m pretty sure my ears were bleeding too. People always talk about how great it is to get older. All I saw were more rules and more adults telling me what I could and couldn’t do, in the name of what’s “good for me.” Yeah, well, asparagus is good for me, but it still makes me want to throw up. As far as I could tell, this little green book in my hands was just one long list of all the ways I could—and probably would—get into trouble between now and the end of the school year. Meanwhile, Leo was drawing away like the maniac he is. Every time Stricker mentioned another rule, he scribbled something else on the page in front of him. Finally, he turned it around and showed me what he was working on.

[7] The Shadows Code In the 1930’s a mysterious crime-fighter called the Shadow was the hero of a popular pulp magazine and an even more popular radio show. Dressed all in black, the Shadow could glide unseen through the darkness to battle the forces of evil. Stories about the Shadow, written by Maxwell Grant (pseudonym for the Shadow’s creator, Walter B. Gibson), often contained curious codes. This cipher, from a novelette called The Chain of Death, is one of the best.

If that sounds cultish, I’m unapologetic. When organizations talk about creating an innovative business culture, a lot of people focus on the external symbols. The ping-pong and foosball tables in the office, the team-building Thursday beers after work, the company ski weekends, and the anything-goes dress code. At TMHQ we have all those things. But they are marginal to what we are really about. A culture is built up over months and years of good practice, questioning, and improvement. Of doing things the right way and having anyone who comes into the group or participates in an event recognize what that means. Culture is all the things that happen in an organization when the boss isn’t looking. Tony Hsieh describes, in his book Delivering Happiness, how he built his online shoe business Zappos by concentrating on service and integrity above all else. “Your personal core values define who you are,” he argued, “and a company’s core values ultimately define the company’s character and brand. For individuals, character is destiny. For organizations, culture is destiny.” I think that’s true, and doubly so when you are “delivering happiness” as an experience that asks people to take on and display some of the virtues of that culture themselves. In this sense, we believed, in our initial phase of recruiting, that a candidate’s previous career path and qualifications were less important than his or her willingness to embrace our credo. Though we had no experience in event management, the plan was never to go out and hire people from the event industry. We had obstacles where participants jump through flames and we feared the first thing an outside event person might instinctively do was pull out a fire extinguisher.

Under the cover of darkness, that’s when duels were arranged, to conceal the proceedings that were frowned upon by law; and there was enough time for sobering-up if the challenge was prompted by intemperance brought on by too much drink. This duel though, was preplanned. “. . . that was how a dress sword came to be a part of a gentleman’s formal attire,” Francisco thus concluded his disquisition on duels that had proceeded at sinuous length when the three friends: Rodrigo, Miguel and himself, had gathered in his study to strategize just last Monday. Both parties had agreed to use pistols, not swords which was the weapon of choice up until the end of the last century. “If you can afford one, you can have a bespoke pistol made, Rodrigo,” said Francisco who, as was his wont, had been on a fact-finding mission about duels. These pistols came in cases complete with The Twenty-six Commandments, the code book that laid down the methodus pugnandi, the same book that Miguel had now folded and shoved into his pocket, its pages soft like cloth from much handling – and the damp from the river-mist. He and Francisco shuffled around in the shadows cast by the incipient pre-dawn sun, still unsure of their roles in this debauchery.

There is also what author and academic Elizabeth Currid-Halkett recently identified, in her book The Sum of Small Things, as “inconspicuous consumption”: things like private education, health care, and childcare, which bolster the upper classes but are less “visible” than a Birkin. Wealthy people in the Gilded Age, when Veblen was writing about status anxiety, had squadrons of servants; now they have French-speaking nannies, concierge doctors, and prep schools.

Throughout most of the conversion ulpan, Moran consistently wore a skirt or a dress, her arms always covered by long shirt sleeves extending below her elbows. As an anthropologist, I also took care to dress according to the modesty code that the three male Orthodox teachers had introduced to the class of mostly young women. But now, six months later, only a short walking distance from the ulpan, we both allowed ourselves to show up in jeans.

Specialists in information technology are the new lawyers. Long ago, lawyers realized that they could make themselves culturally essential if they made the vernacular of contracts too complex for anyone to understand except themselves. They made the language of contracts unreadable on purpose. (Easy example: I can write a book, and my editor can edit a book . . . but neither one of us can read and understand the contract that allows those things to happen.) IT workers became similarly unstoppable the moment they realized virtually every machine powering the modern world is too complicated for the average person to fix or calibrate. And they know this. This is what makes an IT guy different from you. He might make less money, he might have less social prestige, and people might look at him in the cafeteria like he’s a nitpick—but he can act however he wants. He can be nice, but only if he feels like it. He can ignore the company dress code. He can lie for no reason whatsoever (because how would anyone understand what he’s lying about). He can smoke weed at lunch, because he’ll still understand your iMac better than you. It doesn’t matter how he behaves: The IT department dominates technology, and technology dominates the rest of us. And this state of being creates a new kind of personality. It creates someone like Kim Dotcom, a man who’s essentially an IT guy for the entire planet.

If the purpose of reversal dress is to be radical, why sycophantically surrender to the dress code of men?41 Why does ‘gender-neutral’ clothing always look like men’s clothing when shirts, ties, smart shoes and suit jackets are hated work uniforms for many men and symbols of exclusion and oppression for most working-class men and women? Why does the ‘gender-neutral’ body have to resemble that of an emaciated young boy?