I revealed on the C+C Facebook recently that I kind of hate the living s*$t out of this blog’s name. Ha! Sorry, man. But it could not be further from my style. Not the caftan part, just the whole thing: the kind of lame-duck humor to it, the too-easy pairing, the alliteration… the family-friendly obviousness of it. I can’t even say it out loud.
It’s like naming your cat Whiskers at age 7 then being 19 and not wanting to tell anyone its totally stupid name.
I can see where I was coming from when I first came up with it. Similar to a lot of other questionable decisions in my life, it was born from a touch of mimicry. Blogs were new back then (say what?) and I had no idea what I was doing—just trying something out during unemployment. There were the Snags and the Shops and the ‘Breakfasts at’ and the ‘Brunches at,’ the hippie chic sparkle love head champagne wooly amethyst mole hair blogs and I needed to cut to the chase and try and be a little gender neutral, too. A critic once called us Bungs and Burkas; I definitely wish I’d come up with that myself. Anyway, since then, it’s evolved and re-evolved more than a few times, but man, if a URL ain’t a URL.
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Rob and I have a thing we do sometimes, usually on short, meaningless car rides—like, to the car wash, or the grocery store, or to go get gas on a Sunday evening. We’ll happen to purge something really embarrassing, and it’s so funny and painful, letting these things out into the universe, it’s almost delicious.
Since you asked politely, one of my greatest hits: I once asked my mom a question in the kitchen, totally straight-faced:
Mom? Is Tigger my brother or my son?
Uh, neither?
Tigger was our ratty old tabby cat. He lived to be 21, and he was my best pal. I was speaking Latin and fluent French at the time, so I’m certain I knew that neither my mom nor I had spit a tabby cat from our birth canals, but I do know it came from a place of, like, incomprehensible love. Man, I loved that cat. Overcome. I had to put some sort of label on it.
So you see, folks!? It’s just a dumb blog name. And in the spirit of cemented URLs, I had to pay an ode to it by wearing a caftan again. And I remembered—with its split hem billowing behind me—that it was always more about the vibe than the word itself. Again: I just had to put a label on it.
-C.
[Deets for the cheap seats: Free People caftan + old shoes + Linea Pelle belt + Dannijo bag.]
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