365 T-shirts - the reasoning

This blog should be sub-titled: a journal of my life in geek.

I get my geek on with things about which I am geeky: comic books, Baseball, Ultimate, science fiction, my favorite bands, books I have read and loved, and Jungian psychology to name some of the most frequently traversed subjects.

I began this project simply as a way to count my T-shirts. I own a lot of T-shirts. But how many do I have? Do I have 365? We shall find out.

When I started this blog, I thought about how each T-shirt means something to me. I bought it for a reason, after all. I set myself the task to post an entry about a new T-shirt every day as a way to simply write something every day, a warm up for writing fiction, which is my passion. Writing is like exercise. Warm ups are good for exercise. But after completing a month of blogging about T-shirts, I have learned that this blog serves as a journal; it documents my life in geek, sort of a tour of my interests in pop culture. The blog serves as a tool for self-inventory, for assessment and analysis of self and the origins of self, for stepping through the process of individuation in catalogues, lists, and ranks.

The blog also made me aware that I have some serious gaps in my T-shirt ownership, and I am in the process of collecting some new T-shirts for several of the great popular culture icons that I truly love. Stay tuned.

I was also a bit surprised that people checked out my blog and continue to check it, read it, and even comment on it. I am very appreciative of this readership. Please feel free to share your thoughts in my comments section. I will respond.

Also, please note that I have moved the original introductory text to the side bar. And now, I present to you the most recent entry of 365 T-shirts: a journal of my life in geek. Thank you for reading.
(Second Update - 1310.24. First Update - 1306.05 Originally Posted - 1304.25.)

Wednesday, December 4, 2013

T-shirt #258 - Kalamazoo College Grey Under Armor

T-shirt #258 - Kalamazoo College Grey Under Armor



Obviously, this is not an Ultimate shirt, but since the photos feature an Ultimate Championship Medal, I decided to show the photos and include this one in the Ultimate category. This may be the first shirt in my Ultimate category that is not in some way an Ultimate shirt.

I featured Team Venom in T-shirt #60 in commemoration of our winning the MUSL league in 2007. Here are the pictures taken later that night with my Championship medal. I had switched into my Kalamazoo College shirt after the tournament and still had it on when I arrived home and wanted my picture taken.

As reported over the last few days, I am still in content light, hiatus mode. I have a smidgen more content to share about Kalamazoo College and then off I go to cobble together future blogs with more substance!

Toodles, Noodles.


Though there are eleven posts in my college category, I have only featured Kalamazoo College and a Kalamazoo College shirt once so far. I have at least four more shirts to feature and may own a couple more before this blog year is over.

I originally featured Kalamazoo College content as well as ruminations on identity in T-shirt #100. I delivered a great deal of Kalamazoo College content in that post. Surely, there is more to come.

This time of year as I counsel my WMU students through the completion of their semester, hammering them with academic rigor, though never as rigorous as what I went through at Kalamazoo College, I think of my own academic experiences, and sometimes I share these stories.

I tell my students that a college semester is like running a marathon. It's all about pacing, but it's a long, long distance, and if they do not pace well, they may have to speed up near the end.


I share about my first college research paper in my Introduction to Religion course, in which I investigated creation myths of different religions and discovered that if I built a paper from the inside out, starting in the middle, a thesis and an illustrative introduction would eventually come to me. I remember long hours in the Trowbridge Lounge with all my research and my electric typewriter.

With great pride, I share my long journey through Moby Dick. In the year of the studies of the great white whale, I stayed at school on Thanksgiving Day. I got up at 5 a.m. to read Moby Dick. Huddled in my single in Crissey, I read all day. I went to the President's Lounge for pizza, which is what the college served to those with nowhere to go for Thanksgiving. Sometime before that day, I read Moby Dick for two hours at the Rolling Stone concert at the Pontiac Silverdome. In the two hour stage reset between Carlos Santana and the Stones, I sat there an read while everyone else hooted and hollered and spilled beer all around me.

Then there was my 72-hour novel writing marathon, in which I slept very little, and wrote a 125-ish page postmodern novel called The Next Best Thing To Being There. I perfected the 45-minute power meditation nap to various Pink Floyd albums. I walked through the Burger King drive through at 1 a.m. because we had no car but were starving. I experimented, as did my girlfriend of the time, with Vivarin.

These are the academic experiences that stick out in my mind, the ones I cherish the most.

More stories to come. Stay Tuned.

COUNTDOWN TO THE END OF THE BLOG YEAR: 107 shirts remaining

- chris tower - 1312.04 - time