Apr
12
P.O.U.S’s (Pants of Unusual Sizes)
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April 12, 2006
I haven’t been shopping for clothes in ages, mostly because 1) we don’t have a shitload of extra cash right now, and 2) the ambitious gym routine I had planned to embrace wholeheartedly in an attempt to jettison the post-post-post-POST-partum flab has not panned out very well, in that I have gone exactly zero times, and so I hate the idea of buying outfits for this “temporary” body when ANY MINUTE NOW I’m going to stop eating toffee-flavored Klondike bars after 9 PM and will magically fit into a size 8 again.
You know. Any. Minute. Now.
I don’t aspire to much fashion-wise, really–the best I can hope for is some crossover between “cute” and “comfortable”. The notion of fitted clothing has become completely foreign to me, along with shoes with heels and mascara. If I’m not at home having Gerber Stage 2 banana smeared into my hair, I’m bolting out the door to my uber-casual job; why not live in the same frayed pair of Levi’s day in and day out?
“Because it’s unattractive?” Oh, be quiet.
When I was driven from my home last Friday due to Contractor-Itis (symptoms include an increasing desire to throttle the next person who walks through your living room shouting into a walkie-talkie), I took Riley to daycare and, with several hours to kill and no particular plan for doing so, I went to Target.
Color me tacky, I know, but I love everything about Target, even their craptastic el cheapo plastic shoes that rip your feet apart. I love their junky purses and giant makeup aisles and their baby outfits and their housewares and their diabolically clever advertising. And they sell clothing, too; mass-produced items made from shoddy materials at rock-bottom prices. Hooray! If quantity over quality is your fashion mantra (then embrace me, O Sister), Target even beats Old Navy.
So I spent an entire afternoon tooling around in Target’s women’s section, trying on various things. And if we are to assume that the styles being hawked in America’s discount retail department stores are representative of actual clothing trends some number of months ago, then my heartfelt prayer is that everyone is OVER both the skinny jeans and the gaucho pants. Because oh my GOD.
I left the gaucho pants alone, being pretty much convinced that strapping a large cotton tarp to the tops of my thighs would do nothing to conceal the effects of those ice cream bars (“What would you do for a Klondike bar?” – gain twelve pounds, apparently), but I couldn’t help it, I tried on a pair of the skinny jeans.
Hey, you know who looks good in skinny jeans? Heroin-addicted English punk rockers circa 1979, that’s who. And no one else.
That is the story I’m telling myself, anyway, to help ease the mental anguish caused by seeing myself in the fluorescent-lit Target dressing room mirror, wearing a pair of size 10 skinny jeans. From the knees down, it looked as though I were balanced on two toothpicks, and from the knees up, it appeared that I had morphed into a giant fleshy pear. The only reason the heart palpitations brought on from this arresting vision did not kill me outright was the desperate fear that I would in fact be caught dead in an outfit I wouldn’t be caught dead in.
I did find a cute hoodie along with a shirt filched from the Junior’s section (size XXXXXXXL), but man, I’m still reeling. I can only hope that the next time I buy clothes–say, fall of 2007–someone will once again be manufacturing decent pants with legs that neither end at the knee nor taper to an ankle-crushing point, a waistline that doesn’t sit half a fucking inch above the hipbone, and with undamaged fabric rather than artfully created vertical goddamn RIPS.
Whew. Excuse me, I need to find my moment of zen.
Ahh, much better. Babies are far more fun to shop for, anyway. You can come home with an armful of clothes and it will all fit, it was all cheap, and the recipient is guaranteed to look fabulous.
Apr
10
April 10, 2006
Last week at the office, I watched a bunch of my coworkers stuff themselves into a large cardboard box. It’s kind of a long story–there was this giant box, see, and we wanted to find out how many people could fit inside it at the same time. Hey, I guess it’s not a long story after all.
We had a lot of fun with that box; everyone wanted to wear it on their head, hunker inside it like a prairie dog, scribble “transmogrifier” on the side, or carefully balance one end of it on a flashlight to create a trap using turkey jerky as bait. A big empty cardboard box is second only to the extra poppy kind of bubble wrap in terms of mass appeal.
Imagine my glee when JB and I brought home our newly purchased highchair this weekend, not because we have yet another bleeccch-encrusted baby item cluttering up our decidedly nonspacious kitchen/living room, but because after assembling the chair (a surprisingly easy task, so a tentative thumbs up to the Eddie Bauer highchair for being both semi-attractive and not requiring a degree in particle theory in order to put the damn thing together; minus 25 points though for having a cheesy “EDDIE BAUER” logo festooned on the back of the chair as if anyone gives a moist turd) we had, wait for it, a giant box.
JB had actually started to break down the box for recycling when I grasped his shoulders, shook him briskly, and shouted in his face, “My god, man! Are you blind? Do you not see the rich plethora of possibilities spread before us?”
So we crammed Cat in the box.
That was all well and good, but kind of boring because Cat likes being in boxes. She can be all sneaky in there and dream up various methods of vomiting in our shoes (Hmm, should I just splash it all over the laces so it dries to a crunchy patina of horror, or should I aim up the toe so it isn’t seen until too late?), plus there’s the nerve-wracking effect of looking into the box to find two barf-plotting eyes burning back at you out of the darkness…
(Gah.)
…so Cat was eighty-sixed in favor of torturing Dog.
Now, Dog is not exactly the bravest creature on four legs, so it took some encouraging to get her to approach the box.
Namely, a biscuit tossed inside.
When that didn’t work, we may have picked her up and heaved her in. I said MAY HAVE.
Once she was in the box, and JB and I had taken turns slapping our knees and heaving loud brays of laughter at her expense, we realized we weren’t sure how to get her back out. Tip it over? Lift her from the top using some kind of small crane?
Help meeeeeee.
Uh oh.
Luckily, the Biscuit Method provided enough motivation for her to spring faunlike from the box’s innards, leaving a festive spray of fur in her wake.
We tested her short term memory by attempting to lure her back in, but Dog made her preferences clear.
Now, before you ask, of course I did not put my seven-month-old child in the box, mostly because he started whining when I lowered him in, but also because we have plenty of opportunity to tease him.
“Hey, I’m crazy washcloth head baby! And I want some candy! I don’t have a normal head, I have a damn washcloth growing out of it!”
Yes indeed, a fun weekend was had by all. Well, except for Dog, maybe.
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