I hate buying new clothes.
I am probably the least fashion oriented person on the planet. There are a number of reasons for this. Remember the Police song “King of pain� Well I am the king of stain. Give me a light colored shirt and lunch and I will put the two together faster than you can say egg on your tie.
The long-suffering wife shows me new evidence of this personality trait every day. “What is this?†she will ask, showing me something on my pants. “Probably something I didn’t eat†I will reply and then duck quickly out of the room. So it makes no sense for me to have high quality clothing.
The odds of me putting an uncapped felt tipped pen in my shirt pocket are directly related to the price of the shirt. The more it costs the more likely I am going home with clothing that will end up being used to wash the car.
The other problem is my constantly shrinking and expanding size. I live from diet to diet. I can lose and gain more weight more quickly than anyone I know. So as a result I have to keep buying clothes in bigger and then smaller sizes. I have closets full of the in-between sizes. The conventional wisdom is when you lose weight to throw away your fat clothes. For me this would be a financial catastrophe so I have clothes that fit me now and clothes that will fit me before Thanksgiving and after Christmas. And so on.
Yet every time I lose a significant amount of weight I somehow find myself at the door of the dressing room. And I can’t tell you how much I hate this experience in words I can use in public. I think it stems from childhood where Mom would wait outside the fitting room and approve or disapprove the selections. This is still how it works but instead it’s the long- suffering wife who passes judgment. I just want to be anywhere else, preferably at lunch.
Finding anything that fits my short legs and large waist is always a challenge. The size I need is never the size they have and if by some miracle they have my size the one I find has been magically altered so it doesn’t fit. It makes for an unpleasant experience at best and at worst turns me into a snarling uncooperative jerk with the manners of a five year old. You haven’t seen anything till you see me throw pants around in the K-mart trying to find something that comes close to fitting. The first manufacturer who comes up with clothing that automatically adjusts to your current size gets my vote for king of the world.
