Liz G

I can't say this for sure, but I think that around 9th grade I stopped wearing one particular fleece shirt of mine due to the fact that a maynard wore it.

I must say I wish I knew how to sew, and not even in an ironic "oh sewing is so not cool-cool" sort of way, it seems like a useful skill.

you must be a seamstress.

It is a useful skill, Jeff. Once I borrowed a friend's needle kit and just stared at it for a while before realizing my jeans wouldnt magically repair themselves like in Fantasia. Then I gave up.

To fleece is also to steal.

i've found you

getting my wisdom teeth out was the worst experience physicially of my life to date

pre-destined holes aside, with the abercromie stuff i own, i really believe you get what you pay for. other than that i've been very happy living in all the stuff ive bought at jeffs store, but that doesnt have to do with sewing

I agree. Fuck fleece. It may seem wierd at first, but the fuzziness is giving and not abrasive. Once you get going, you feel the tickling sensation that can only be found in fleece, and it's like a polish job for your beef wand. don't grip too hard or you get rugburns.

A POLISH JOB FOR YOUR BEEF WAND! Honestly!

Samara, I agree about the damn wisdom teeth. These are so much worse than the appendectomy.

To fleece is to steal.

i looooved getting my wisdom teeth out. sweet opiatic love anyone? i was so clever! i wasn't in pain when i was in "recovery" because they gave me so much morphine, but in my stupor came greedy intelligence, i would grip the sides of my bed till my knuckles turned white and so they'd give me more. eventually though, they had to stop, or else i would stop breathing. but damn that was the best sleep i've had in my entire life.

but to the fleece- i may or may not have made one or more of those blankets. may or may not.

Why do they call them wisdom teeth if they are only going to pull them out when you get old enough?

I fell off my bike about a week ago
and I desperately wished I knew how to sew
'cause my bicycle shorts which were 60 bucks
ripped at the seam and I could only say fuck
Instead of fixing the damage caused by my errant tire
I just stood around with a sewing desire
Now nothing's fixed but my badly bruised hip,
but the hole's still so big you can see my dick
My nuts now get pinched with the repair i shirked
due to the inability to do some needlework.

That's actually a true story sans the detail about the hole being so big as to reveal my "nether regions".

Let's do some math.
1 Abercrombie shirt costs $35
Materials for one shirt equivalent to Abercrombie shirt cost about $5.
Say it takes about 4 hours to handcraft a shirt in the same quality as an Abercrombie shirt. Seeing as the average person who wears Abercrombie probably makes about $52,000 dollars a year which is $1000.00 a week which is 200 dollars a day which is $25 in an hour. In that four hours that that person spent making that shirt, they could have made $100 - $30(for Abercrombie shirt) = $70. But you might ask, "But if that person is on salary (which a person who buys Abercrombie likely is), then they don't get paid by the hour, so they can make their shirt after their 9-5 job and still have time to sleep; so why do they have to buy Abercrombie?" The answer is quite simple, actually. Abercrombie uses a manufacturing plant in Indonesia which uses one exclusive container ship line to get its product back for high mark up sale in the United States. The ship line has a deal worked out with a boat producer. The boat producer requires a certain valve in the engine to it's flagship container ship (which just so happens to transport Abercrombie and Fitch textiles back from Indonesia. The valve is kept lubricated by GX4400 sythetic lubricant that is produced by the company that your dad works for. The GX4400 lubricant is produced only for the valve on this specific engine, as the valve has very specific tolerances and only a lubricant produced specifically for it will work. The company produces a similar lubricant for a very similar valve in a certain type of airplane engine, however the lubricant in the airplane engine can be soluble in water, whereas in marine applications the lube must be insoluble in water. Your dad happens to be the lead engineer in the marine engine valve lubricant department of the chemical engineering company. One day everybody in America that buys Abercrombie decides not to buy Abercrombie any more. In about a week there is no demand for the container ships to make rounds to the Indonesian Islands in which the Abercrombie clothes were produced, so the ship manufacturing company which had a deal worked out with the Abercrombie manufacturing plant stops production of that specific container ship. The engine producer no longer needs to produce the engine, so the valve obviously doesn't need to be produced anymore. With no more valves being produced the lubricant produced by your dad's company becomes obsolete, so some job's are "eliminated" or "redistributed", so your dad is either making half as much or fired completely from his job depending on how good of a marine valve lubricant engineer he was. But that's not the worst of it. An dead Abercrombie manufacturing plant still looms large on the landscape of an Indonesian island stricken by poverty and exploited by corporate greed to find the cheapest labor possible. All of a sudden, with no corporate structure on the island the indigenous people revert to a state of anarchy, and they turn the anger of their plight onto the eyes of a very incompassionate corporate America. With the decision not to buy any more Abercrombie, there are now thousands of Americans out of a job, and the economy is the lowest it's been since the 1930's. A rising nation in southeast Asia witnesses the vulnerability of a struggling America. With growing dissent in Indonesia, the largest muslim population in the world, North Korea has the manpower necessary to conduct an invasion of North America. The only problem that North America faces in invading America is that we still have more nukes than everybody else on the planet combined. North Korea has nukes, but no rocket capable of delivering a payload to any part of the U.S., but they threaten to hit Tokyo, the capital of one of our largest technology trade partners, Japan. The U.S. has a policy of "no negotiation" with terrorists of this kind and we stand our ground. Meanwhile, because North Korea has the support of Indonesia, the Muslim population of the world sees North Korea as a temporary good force in the world. The middle east cuts off all oil trade with America, so we are left to our own devices. Luckily, we have ANWR, but in order to fuel our now failing economy and War machine, the ANWR oil reserve lasts only six months as the environmentalists and oil experts say it would. Alaskan Caribou are now extinct. Now we have a dwindling oil supply coming from small oil fields, and with no oil, we cannot fight a war. Desperate, the United States decides it needs to make a stand, and for the first time since 1945, the United States sets off a nuclear device about a quarter mile above the surface of Seoul, the new capital of the United People's Republic of Korea. China, having signed a non-aggression pact with Korea takes this as a threat and hits DC with it's largest warhead. Naturally, The United States retaliates, as do our allies, and before we know it the world is in nuclear holocaust.
Fifty years later you walk out of your fall out shelter to witness a world that looks as though it had never harbored life. You make your way to what used to be Miami, Florida and see a bustling marketplace of dark-skinned people in familiar attire. You find that you are in a western trading and shipping outpost of the Kingdom of Arabia, and the year is 1500. When told that the year is 1500 you cannot believe it. The calendar now accepted the world over is the Muslim calendar. As you look around, the architecture people appear as though they could exist in 1500 A.D. Suddenly, a town leader spots you as a christian and you are taken into custody. As you sit kneeling on the platform in the town square, waiting to have your head decapitated for the whole town to see, you look down at your now elderly frame and see a tear in the knee of your jeans. Just as the blade is on its downstroke, you crack a smile, as the little tear in your jeans reminds you of a lifetime ago, when a company named Abercrombie & Fitch used to place these strategically on their jeans for what was once considered "style". Then, just before the blade makes contact with your neck, your smile turns to a frown as you realize that the horrible existence of the past 50 years of your life came from a simple decision to start sewing your own clothes and boycott an honest American company.

Whatever Ryan. Prove it.

wow. too long.for me to read. period.

well ryan, that is definitely the craziest thing you have ever written. Everybody loves throwing ANWR in there when they are talking about world crisis. For more writings from shaffer, see his thoughts about 'Intellectual Bushs'

joel, i will post that once I get a break from the countless hours of homework a night. So on the weekend or something.