Gone shopping

This is not necessarily a good thing, but sometimes a necessary thing. While I do seem to have this addiction to shopping, my shopping enjoyment does not come in the way more common to most females. To be more precise, I am just not that interested in clothes, and when I am the most interesting clothing has either something to do with Halloween or maybe Christmas, or else it is something bought with the intention of making it into some sort of costume.

Most of the shopping addiction is tied to clearance sales, mainly post-Halloween and post-Christmas clearance sales, and then clearance sales of yarn and art supplies and such things as are often found at Hobby Lobby and Michaels. The exception to the mostly not so feminine shopping is to be found at the store Bath & Body Works, which became a bit of an obsession for me about two years ago. Most of the shopping there is for future gift-giving, and so is somewhat tied to the whole Christmas sale thing.

But every once in a while, shopping for clothes is necessary. My dad mostly got out of this chore by mainly wearing the same type of thing over and over again, and mostly having my mom go to the store and get it. That way he only ever had to go to the mall for any clothing was once every few years to buy a suit or a jacket, or maybe even a coat. If my mother had died before him, he probably would have found someplace online and bought the rest of his clothing there.

But I do not have my mother to do all of these things for me, and I do not quite have the whole wearing mostly the same sort of thing down to a science. There is always the phrase--do I look fat in these--that comes up, and there is some slight hope that I would do a better job of avoiding some of that if I were to go to the store and selects the clothing myself.

I do mostly dress to be comfortable. At the present time I do not have a job and do not much worry about how I dress. I like wearing jeans most of the time, and with few exceptions I want them to be as comfortable as possible, and that usually translates into jeans that are as old as possible. But even with old jeans that are worn to be comfortable, there eventually comes a time that they might come apart at someplace that is difficult to patch, and they must be replaced.

So yesterday I had the task of buying at least one pair of jeans, just in case that the ones I currently wear might come apart and I should be trapped inside the house without pants. And also I needed at least one pair of slacks, just in case I should want to go on a job interview or some other place that jeans would not be appropriate attire. And since I have gained almost fifteen pounds since this time last year, the slacks that I already have in my closet do not fit me.

So sometimes shopping is very necessary, a chore that one can no longer put off. It is unfortunate that this particular time of doing this particular chore I have to deal with the triple whammy--I have almost no money, I weigh more than I like and don't really look good physically, and I really hate the new pants.

New pants are designed for a totally alien group of people. New pants were designed for skinny little girls who like for everyone to see that they are either wearing thongs or no underwear at all. New pants are designed for girls with flat stomachs and/or small waists.

I have neither a flat stomach nor a small waist. This is not a new thing, as I never had either, even when I was eleven or twelve and weighed only 88 pounds. I'm just not built that way, and without some surgical procedures I will never have a small waist. But this last year the weight has started to become a problem, and the lack of flat stomach and such has become very noticeable. So it is really awful that new pants do nothing but draw attention to the problem.

Really, if I wanted to have my gut hanging over my belt and show off half of my butt crack when I bend over, I would have just become a plumber.

So that's all quite annoying, and to have to part with my money to buy such is even worse. But we got paid yesterday, and I decided that it was time to get it over with. So I went to Target and was on my way to Walmart when I remembered a place that might have more of what I was looking for. There is this place that sells everything for eight dollars, and while all of the clothing is new, I think that some of it was actually made several years ago and has just been sitting in storage for a long time. So while a lot of it was still the awful new pants design, some of it was designed so that the waist band was a lot closer to the waist than the stuff I had seen earlier.

So I bought one pair of black jeans that was almost exactly what I was looking for, and the fact that I do not look perfect in them is my fault entirely and no reflection on the designer. And I also bought another pair of black pants that weren't quite what I was looking for, but they will do in an emergency if I wear a jacket, which I usually do, and eight dollar emergency pants are much preferable than more expensive ones.

And while I was there, I also found five swimsuits. I was not looking for swimsuits, but they turned up while I was looking for bras, and so I had to look at them. There are always these ads for slimming swimsuits, but there are sold next to tomato plants that supposedly produce a hundred pounds of tomatoes or some such nonsense, so I tend to think that the suits are not that great, and I'd rather buy from a store so that I can see the actual suits. Suits sold in stores with similar claims are usually so expensive that I don't even bother trying them on. But here were five of them, and they do not make me look just wonderful, but they do make me look somewhat better than what I wore last year, and I'm somewhat larger than I was last year. And they were only eight dollars, and I doubt that I will ever find such a good deal again, so I had to buy two of them. I realize that I do not need two swimsuits in October, but I should have at least one for emergencies, so that if I win a trip to Hawaii I will be ready to go. And I'm not one of those people who just can't stand to wear last year's style of swimsuit, so this should save me the trouble of buying a new one next year.

So it was not the best day, but it did not turn out to be totally dreadful either.