FUGLY SWEATERS FOR SOCHI

If you haven't seen the fugly team USA Olympic uniforms yet, the butt-hideous opening ceremonies outfit, then you're in for a real treat.  Just don't eat before you look at these.

I'll admit it -- these uniforms are so awful that they are mesmerizing in an uncomfortable way.  The sweater, at least, is fascinating in the same way as a severed limb lying in the grass at the scene of an accident: Once you've seen it, it's both impossible to look away and difficult to erase from memory.  The sweater's image becomes permanently engraved on to your cornea.

I don't know a whole lot about fashion, but I am a teacher, and I recognize a fugly sweater when I see one.

This Olympic sweater lives up to its fugly moniker because, short of the ill-fated Titanic, there isn't anything as epically horrifying as presenting this horrid bit of woven yarn out in a public forum and watching the American fashion world sink to its lowest depths of humiliation.  If other countries had any doubts about attacking us and actually winning, this sweater should certainly give them hope.  The team USA sweater screams out to be conquered, imprisoned, and destroyed.

It is, in short, a travesty.

Naturally, I want one.  I want one so bad I can practically taste the indigo dye.

I think this whole debacle would be more palatable had some student or some athlete or some mental patient designed the sweater.  But we are talking about Ralph Lauren.  Ralph fucking Lauren.  The man is supposed to be a fashion genius, and yet trained monkeys could have done a better job.  I'm willing to bet even untrained monkeys could've contributed.  To be blunt, it looks like they already did.

The more I look at the sweater, the less shocking it is.  Years ago my son went to school with a young girl who had a glass eye.  She was a happy kid, an active grade-schooler, and she would sometimes forget to put in her glass eye before she left the house for the day.  The first time I saw her like this, eyelid mostly closed and a hint of empty socket visible, I was taken aback.  But then I got used to it.  Of course, we all had to get used to it because her glass eye fell out into a snowbank, and we didn't find it for weeks.

That's how I feel about the USA sweater.  If I have to look at it, I suppose I'll be less queasy with each subsequent glimpse.  Perhaps it will even grow on me.  Right now, though, I want one of these sweaters for the sheer unbridled tackiness of it all.  Hopefully I won't ever become so enamored with it as to forget how damn fugly it really is.

The Olympics start in two weeks.  By then I should be acclimated to these grotesque cardigans.  One thing's for sure -- No one in Sochi, or anywhere else in the world where televisions broadcast, will ever again mistake Ralph Lauren for a fashion designer, so if his luck runs out, he has a great future as an elementary school teacher.  After all, with fashion choices like the butt-frigging-ugly team sweater, Ralph will have no problem winning every ugly Sweater Contest at his school.