The scarves of scholars & Arabs

It snowed today, and my lips are getting chapped — time to get a scarf!

Any money I have for clothes is going towards a coat first, so I’ll probably just find something at my mother’s house over Thanksgiving. But allow me to share my two winter neckwear aspirations.

1. Getting a college scarf. I passed up the opportunity when I was at Oxford a few years ago, mostly because I felt ambivalent about the prestige factor: showing off is for twits. But I’m less concerned about that now, plus I have a new source of motivation — irony. The new head of Wycliffe Hall, where I was, is apparently changing the school from a mostly harmless little religious school into a British analogue to Bob Jones U. And now instead of being a little embarrassed that I technically was a student there, I find it pretty amusing. (The price of irony? $60.)
2. Getting the squarish kind of scarf, for lack of a better term. (A little help, anyone? I’m not used to the word being used for square things.) Something more keffiyeh-like. Keffiyehs on hipsters are a fashion cliché I’d like to avoid, and wading through the political implications would be tiresome anyway. But I must confess, I do really like the look, which is as much about the general shape as the pattern. Maybe there will be some wicked hot stitch-n-bitched scarves at the Boston Bazaar Bizarre next month?