Garmentitis

I'm standing on the Great Threshold of a Clothing Crisis.

I know I shouldn't complain. I should be happy. But you know me, I'd complain if they hung me with a new rope.

I have an attachment to certain articles of clothing, like my navy blue comfy cotton pants and my dark khaki flood pants. And I'm going to have to lose them. Soon. The flood pants have become decidedly non-flood lately (they're getting longer as I'm getting littler), and to be honest, I had to catch myself the other day when my navy blue comfy cotton pants started to take a little dip below the equator, so to speak.

So it's good, but it's not so good.

I'm wearing some old clothes. I went back to my mom's, rifled through old stuff, took some home and washed the musty odor out of them, and started to wear them. It's nothing that would mark me as "dated," well, I hope, anyway - I don't have any painter's pants or shirts emblazoned with "Frankie Say Relax" across the front.

But anyway, it's getting harder and harder to come up with combinations of pants, shirts, and skirts to wear to work. I'm starting to feel like everyone knows what I'm going to show up in. "Oh, it's Tuesday, that's blue pants and orange striped shirt day."

Today I got up and started searching around for something to wear in to TheCompanyIWorkFor. Still wrapped in a towel, and probably with a heavy growth of recently-shed hair still lodged between my fingers, I picked something out.

I decided to go with my black and white striped shirt and my black comfy pants. Truth be told, they're actually exercise pants, but they hang nice, and if you don't look too closely they don't look like sweats. They're casual, but nice. I didn't want to wear my black leather Keds, because they're not very cushy, so I chose my black Reeboks.

Not long after arriving at work, I had to go back to the back office to use that little machine of hate, the fax machine (God, how I wish the fax had never been invented). As I was standing there, it slowly started to dawn on me. And I became filled with a mixture of fear, dread, and a helpless case of the giggles.

I walked back up to the boss's office and said, "Do you notice anything?" and while saying it, made the "Here I Am, Head To Toe" arm gesture TV game show models so often make while showing off fur coats. And she, thinking, I guess, that I was looking for either a compliment on my smaller but still nowhere near normal frame or my savvy sartorial sense, smiled and said, "Very nice."

"Nice?" I replied. "I look like an employee of Foot Locker!"

I don't know if it was the exercisey nature of the pants, or the black Reeboks, which I've always thought looked like a cross between a referee's shoe and an orthopedic oxford. But I'm feeling a little displaced and disconcerted. All I know is that I have my doctor's bills here in the office, which I keep in - a shoebox. So after lunch I'm just going to walk around the office carrying my shoebox and act like I actually do work at the Foot Locker.

TheCompanyIPretendIWorkFor.