Sunday, December 31, 2006

My Christmas present: clothing

My mother has complained about my wardrobe for years; it consists mostly of free t-shirts, worn jeans, scuffed shoes, and the few scruffy jackets she's been able to get me to wear. Now that I've stopped growing, she wants to give me one of these as a Christmas present (belated). I think she's trying to tell me something.

Clothes are things I lump in the same category as grades and money; I wish they didn't matter, grudgingly acknowledge they do matter to many people, and set things up so that I can ignore them as soon as possible. For instance, I get only shirts and pants that match nearly all my other shirts and pants so that when I perform my complicated selection procedure of "pick the shirt at the top of the pile when you get up in the morning," chances are that I won't look too bad. All jeans go with all t-shirts, so this is easy.

Mom's making the compelling argument that if I go suit-shopping with her now, it saves me money (the suit and associated wardrobe will be a graduation-birthday-Christmas present, although I'd much rather have a new laptop, a dremel, or another two years of webhosting)
and time (because I won't have to buy a new suit for many years, on account of I'm no longer growing... and because she'll stop nagging me about it). Since a professional wardrobe is one of those things that I'm going to have to do eventually and might as well get over with now, and since it will make my mother happy (and probably my dad's parents, too), I said okay.

So I get to go clothes shopping for a whole new wardrobe this winter break. Yay. I'd much rather be working on math instead...

2 comments:

Beth said...

Here's another silver lining in the cloud: if you go shopping with your mother and she pays, chances are your clothing will be a bit more expensive than if you were buying it. While there are exceptions to the rule, generally the more clothes cost, the longer they last. Therefore, not only are you getting an unpleasant task out of the way, you're also lengthening the amount of time till you have to go through an ordeal like that again.

See? There's a bright side to everything. ;-)

Anonymous said...

I'd probably benefit from some sort of fashion consultation myself. I've only recently come to care at all about my appearance, so I don't have much experience with picking clothing.

Of course, one reason for me to avoid spending *too* much on clothing now is because I'm still shrinking... but I don't think that's much of a problem for you.