Dress Ups

I find myself with the need to assemble a costume. There's a horror film trivia night, and while they don't usually do this, they're encouraging people to dress in costume. Specifically they're looking for 80's horror costumes. I'm not consumed with the need to wear costumes. The main thing is that I'm lazy. I can think up costumes it would be neat to wear all day, but I do not relish the effort or the expense. I could say I don't have a psychological need to cover myself in that way, which could be true, but it's really not relevant.

There used to be all these costume parties, but those dried up. Maybe all at once we got weary of doing that, when we could drink and eat snacks without it. Maybe also my lack of commitment was noticed, these parties are still happening and I am merely not invited. There still are several costume-requiring events around Halloween, and auditions also call for some level of costume, but the burden is less. This costume will be more involved.

Clothes For The Job

Most of the time, I don't go to a lot of trouble to prepare a look for an audition. I do what's necessary, but that doesn't entail procuring a lot of new items every time one comes up. Often something subtle and vague creates an adequate effect. They say that what matters is the performance. For what I do, it's my look, which would suggest that the outfit matters a lot, but that's only true to a point. I think that, at least. I haven't conquered this world yet, so I could be wrong.

I have a fair number of costume pieces at home to work with. There is a whole box of props and costume stuff that I am really only a custodian of, but in the absence of constant use for its intended purpose as a supply cache for comedy sketches, light use for auditions seems entirely reasonable to me. I've used things from it to great effect in the past, including part of a nurse uniform that I wore in one of the commercials that I booked.

Shirt Spite

I bought a shirt at Goodwill recently. Really I bought several, all of them pretty great, but one in particular seems remarkable. It especially made me glad I perused the menswear section on that day when I really just meant to buy some records. It was a brand-new shirt, as far as I could tell. Like one of the other shirts, it was new enough that it still had a sticker naming the inspector who approved it (and not by number, but by first and last name).

The shirt references something from the recently-concluded hit show "Breaking Bad". I watched the first few episodes of the first season and concluded that it was not for me. It subsequently became a huge phenomenon that all my friends love dearly. I'm left feeling left out and frustrated, which my friends know. I try not to bring it up, and I try not to say anything about the subject if it comes up anyway. That wouldn't help anything.

Nothing Serious

I'm rather upset with myself as I write this. There are things you ought to know about yourself by the time you get to a certain age, and I don't know about of those things. One of those is what size clothes I need. When I was younger, I was under the impression I was a size large for t-shirts. A few years ago, it became evident to me that I was more of a medium, and I congratulated myself for ascending to that level of maturity.

After a while, I started to think that the medium shirts were rather baggy on me, and that I was really more of a size small. I started seeking those out, and I had one that I liked a lot. It seemed to fit well. It was a black shirt with a white illustration of a cow looking at a duck and thinking about a duck. I liked that shirt, and even relished the inevitability of people seeing that illustration and not getting it. It was a good shirt.

Tops

The other day, I was gifted with a shirt. Some friends had gone to see a theatrical piece. It was, in fact, a sort of parody of the Terminator films, and someone was giving away shirts promoting Arnold Schwarzenegger's latest film. As my friends and I were rather eager for his first major performance in ten years, this was a rather fortuitous occurrence. Several of the shirts were procured with the intention of wearing them to the theater.

We did that, in fact, but the tale of seeing the movie is a separate one from what I mean to discuss now. It's that shirt. It looks nice, basically, but has some peculiarities. The back identifies the star, the film's title and its release day, but the front has a rather detailed illustration which substantially coincides with the theatrical poster. I rather imagine that I will have to be careful with it in order to preserve the shirt through the wash.

Can't Spell Hate Without Hat

While I was in Las Vegas over the weekend to celebrate a friend's birthday, I made some effort to look presentable. It was not as much as I might have liked or as much as I have at my best, but I made a decent effort. I brought a decent shirt and a suit jacket, hoping that I would be able to pair it well with nice jeans and passable shoes. I also had what I would call my nicest coat, as Las Vegas was very cold. Things worked out better than I might have guessed.

Another friend along for the trip made a contribution. While at the shared home of him and the birthday boy, I was witness to him getting ready. At one point, he emerged from his bedroom with a handful of hats. I'm always game to make a bold, temporary fashion choice, and so I didn't think twice about accepting when he declared that he and I would both be wearing berets. I've been derisive of them in the past, but I'm not afraid of them.

Getting Tight

I took a brave step today where fashion is concerned. I don't do any such thing of my own volition, typically, but the season of Christmas often brings gifts of clothes from those who know how much I need them. They don't buy me the things I would buy myself. Rather, they take stock of what I have and ought to have by their estimation, and fill my perceived needs. This leads me to some worried moments.

I am still working my way through the haul yielded by this Christmas, and most recently have worn a pair of what they call "skinny" jeans. I dislike that name, but I wore the pants. I had qualms about wearing such tight pants, as I rarely have pants that are even a good fit. Mostly they are rather baggy on me. I worried over how they would fit me, and waited to remove the tags until I'd given the pants a thorough trial.

While The Cat's Away

I had an incident the other day that upset me for a matter of some minutes. I was doing my laundry, and my system requires that I have all three washers available at the outset, reducing to only two dryers thereafter. There's always a period of some anxiety as I first check the machines and then rush to get my clothes down to the laundry room before anyone can claim one of the machines. It typically works out all right.

I remain a little on edge as I sort out my clothes and direct them into washers. My fear is that someone will come along wanting one of the machines while it is still in my power to be charitable and allow them one. I don't wish to be charitable, you see. My system is fragile, and such compassion is more than it can handle. Typically it doesn't happen that anyone comes along, and then there's generally no issue after that initial phase (so far as I know.)

Wearing On Me

I like cold weather. Where I grew up, it was blisteringly hot more often than it was so much as brisk out, and so perhaps I see cool weather as a nice change of pace. Certainly that's how it felt when I left home for school. The frigid winters were one more way of getting out on my own. I also feel a certain connection to the older cities of the east, which is appealing to me. Another thing I like about cold weather is that it's jacket weather.

I'm a thin guy, so my frame is slight and my physique less than imposing. I'm not a weakling exactly, but I think it's just as well that some impressive clothes be draped over my figure in order to give me some sort of heft. There are a number of garments that I like getting out once they can be justified- and no sooner. I really hate affectations, and that's a bad one. It's nearly as bad as sunglasses indoors, I think.

Dress Right

The other day, I had need of a Christmas sweater. It was, of course, one of those themed parties where everyone is supposed to have one. Like most of those parties, the theme was indifferently received by attendees, but for once I was one of those who actually made the effort. I would like to have come up with a gaudier, more ugly sweater, but technically the terms of the party did not require that it be so- only that it be a classy sweater. I did fairly well.

Of course, I did not try to find anything until the day of the party, and even then I was making minimal effort. I went to one nearby thrift store (chatting along the way with a friend who I bumped into) and found that they had already been stripped of all possible holiday garb. It turns out that such parties have become so fashionable that the sweaters are actually in demand. I didn't leave empty-handed, though. I bought eight VHS tapes, because I have a sort of a compulsion there.

In Cold Blood, In Warm Water

Doing the laundry is something I'm getting better at. I think I went whole semesters in college doing the laundry no more than a couple times, but I seldom let it slide so long that I have to start wearing dirty clothes. There are pitfalls for me, and getting stains out of things is one. The whole system I have  for washing three loads and reducing it to two dryers is tough to manage sometimes, and having enough quarters is a constant problem.

Another issue is in the behavior of other people using the machines. I rush to get my things out the machines and either transferred over or upstairs to fold. I may be the only person who places importance on that timeliness. I hate to inconvenience someone by leaving my stuff in a machine they need, and so I don't do it. I'm downstairs within a minute or two of the cycle ending, because I keep track.

Undercover

I never in my life had possessed undershirts. Now, this is the sort of really mundane thing that I find rather interesting but can easily imagine that I am alone on. Maybe I'm not, but I sure wouldn't bet on it. In any case, I never had one, but suddenly found the other day that I needed one. I was to appear in a friend's short film, and you commonly provide much or all of your wardrobe. I was supposed to supply my own undershirt.

I left it not to the eleventh hour, but at least to the tenth. The day before the shoot, I went off to the nearest dollar store. I knew they carried undershirts, and I figured that there couldn't be much difference between a high-end undershirt and a cut-rate one. Perhaps there is no high-end one. I found them to be priced 6.99 for three, and I snapped up a package of small's. I figured that was a safe pick for my frame.

Sizing Down

Yesterday I wrote of my emaciated wrists and my anxiety over them. Today there is a similar story. I was at a department store looking for pants. Quite naturally, the search began in the mens' department. I've never been on the high end of the sizes, but this day was something else. I found after some looking that there was just nothing there for me. Everything was too wide in the waist, too long or both. It all would have to have been tailored somehow.

The next place to look was in Young Mens'. There were more options there. Now, there was no overabundance of well-fitting clothes there, and there also was a higher rate of clothes that weren't my style, but there was one pair of pants that fit tolerably well after an extensive search. I was happy to get out of there with the location of one pair, or else there might have been more there for me. I'll leave that for the next time.

A Hero Of Whole Cloth

I have to be thankful for my friend Marcus, who bestowed upon me the true, unheralded workhorse of my wardrobe. It's a gray suit that I don't think I ever anticipated getting a lot of use. I suppose that at that time I didn't think so much of my chances for advancing any in society. I was sort of an Eliza Doolittle who stumbled upon a dress that served as an inanimate Henry Higgins. I'll stress though that we're talking about a suit- a grey suit.

The pants are needed on a relatively infrequent basis, but that jacket goes with so much. It's not an obviously neutral color, but it goes with everything just as black or white does. That's my opinion. If I didn't have it, I wouldn't have been able to tie together the bunch of almost-suitable shirts, pairs of pants and accessories. It performs miracles as far as I am concerned, and it had better: outside of that, I have only my funeral/wedding suit.

I'm On Top

After a bunch of my shirts were ruined in a disastrous wash cycle some time ago (the blame for which fell on faulty deodorant), I embarked on a mission to replenish my supply of shirts. At this same time, I had taken out of circulation any shirt which didn't at least come close to fitting me, or which I could not replace and could not bear to lose. It was quite a turbulent chapter in the annals of my wardrobe history, you may be sure.

I had a real undertaking on my hands, and it goes on now in the hopes that I might exceed the quality and variety of what I had before. It principally involves the purchase of secondhand clothes at local thrift stores. I find that they have there an awful lot of things that cannot be purchased elsewhere at any price, to say nothing of the things that can be purchased elsewhere only at a tremendous and prohibitive price.

Notice?

It's a good thing that I don't do things on a day to day basis with the hope of getting a response out of people. I say this because I don't seem to be able to do it consistently. It's something that happens, but not when or because I want it to happen. In life, you have to be happy with what you get on the inside, because external stuff cannot be counted on. That's why I'm glad I like the shirts I bought the other day. I'm probably going not going to get much of a response.

I don't know why I would expect one, but you get really narcissistic. You think that because you look in the mirror all the time and know all the details of how you look, everyone else knows them too. It hurts to think that people aren't really paying attention. Now, it's true enough that if I got a haircut, it would be commented on for the foreseeable future, but then that would a response bought with now several years of time invested. It hardly seems worth it.

Short Some Shirts, But Not Shorts

As you'll recall, I recently lost a number of shirts (some of which may yet be salvaged), with the likely culprit being the deodorant that I was using. As I said initially, one has to see in such things the opportunity that is there. I tried to anticipate the excitement that I would feel about selecting new shirts and then wearing them. The day following the disaster, I did not have to time to act on that, but the day after that I did have some free time.

I decided to seek out one of the neighborhood's thriving thrift stores. There I found some rather promising shirts, selecting six at the rate of two dollars apiece. That is positively a steal for what I got. As I may have noted in the past, there is probably no store where you can find firsthand the things that are available secondhand. I tried to find a balance between decent, understated shirts and ones which made me laugh enough that I wanted them. I think I did that.

A Hell Of A Massacre Of A Butchering

I had a real tragedy the other day, and I say that with the full knowledge that it is utter hyperbole. Really, it's terribly insensitive to characterize what happened as a tragedy in light of true bad things, but I can't help myself. Anyway, I'll just lay it out there and let you judge for yourself whether it was as bad as it feels to me while writing this. I may not even feel that badly about it when I look back over this after it has been published, but we'll see.

It's known that I struggle with laundering clothes. If there's anything but ordinary wear to wash out of something, then it's really beyond me. A stain, as I've noted, is invariably a death sentence. Now, I had bought some new deodorant that promised to make sweat stains a thing of the past, and I jumped at this. I've always been afraid of such a thing happening, and in fact I think it has once or twice. Sadly, I was misled.

Mystery

Our laundry room has been host to many unspoken dramas. I have been party to some myself, quietly seething to know that the delicate arrangement that efficiently gets my clothes into three washers and two dryers was ruined. Others have undoubtedly had their own run-ins there as well, though I couldn't know about them unless I know people involved, or if I actually notice something. As it happens, I did notice something the other day.

I think maybe I was going for a soda from the machine that lives in the laundry room. I noticed a pile of clothes that must have been removed from the dryer by a frustrated person with whom I could certainly identify. I saw what I thought was one of my socks, and so I thought that it must have found its way into someone else's load by an improbable chain of accidents. I took it upstairs meaning to reunite it with its mate only to find that the sock was not mine. I returned it to the lady's clothes.

Pride: Let It Ride

That outfit I wore for the speech I described yesterday was really something. I gave a rough description of it then, but it warrants something in depth. For the speech I was playing a character of sorts. I feel that I rather easily become a kind of sleazy producer or promoter type. It takes the slightest of nudges to make me look that way. The gray suit I wore was the one I almost always do (as the only alternative is the newer one that only comes out for weddings and funerals).

The brown shirt is several sizes too large. It only looks passable under a jacket. It has a collar, but doesn't exactly cry out for a tie. I forced one on, and could resist the whimsical choice of a shiny dark brown tie on a light brown shirt. I wore the nicest shoes that I don't worry about damaging, which were also brown, as I said. I have some dark socks now, but they're too thin, so I had to hope no one would notice my white socks. If I stand most of the time it works.