Clothes Encounters

That's the clever name of a laundromat in Madison, and I think it describes this post well.

But before clothing, I should back up to the insurance appointment that Porkchop and I had at 5:00 yesterday evening. What was supposed to take 20 minutes wound up requiring well over an hour because our new insurance agent is Mr. Talky-Talky.

I actually really liked him.

I found his listing in the Pride Pages, but, to my great disappointment, he's not gay. Of course, I don't know....just because someone's married to someone of the opposite sex and has a child....that doesn't necessarily mean anything.

Anyway, he was super nice. Genuinely nice, not that fake, smarmy insurance-agent-nice. And his office is near Lafayette Square in a great old building.

Of course, now I'm all concerned about buying life insurance and starting a Roth IRA. These are such adult things. I feel like I'm pretending.

On to Clothing
Since insurance took so long, we didn't make it to Pho Grand. Instead, we hit the bread company in the Galleria. How very disappointing.

I ended up only purchasing a little cardigan and a jersey shirt from H&M. This was also very disappointing.

With all of my Target and H&M clothing, I feel so cheap and ragamuffiny when I'm at work. The problem is that I sit on the third floor by all the marketing people, who, you know, make at least twice what I do and can afford Kenneth Cole trousers or whatever.

The other problem is that the pants from Target and H&M actually fit me, while pants from, say, The Limited don't. I use The Limited as an example because a pair of dashing pants caught my eye there, and I eventually tried them on after rationalizing it out to myself and Porkchop.

The pants fit my butt, but there was at least a five inch gap of fabric at my waist. And no belt can fix this. Cinch a belt around that much fabric and you might as well be wearing a burlap sack with a rope tied around your waist.

This has also happened to me in the past when trying on pants at Express. The sales person went on an on about their Editor pants and how well they fit, so I tried them on. Same thing.

Okay, The Limited and the Express don't exactly offer tailor-made clothing, but the fabrics are a bit nicer than those offered at Target and H&M. I'm tired of polyester pants and cotton pants that wrinkle right away, but as stated previously, those pants actually fit me.

How do the designers at Target and H&M know the secret of cutting pants to accommodate a certain butt-to-waist ratio, but those at The Limited and Express do not?

I think we all know what's going on here. What's the target demographic of these different stores, and what are the assumptions made about those target demographics when deciding the cut of pants?

This Morning
So, this morning, I put on the little cardigan that I purchased last night from H&M, and to my great disgust, I found a little hole in it! It's at a seam, so you can't really see it....but when you're already feeling like a ragamuffin child (with a finger-painted smile, nod to Simon & Garfunkel), a hole in your cardigan makes you feel even more so.

Since I had already spent so much time getting dressed, I had to go ahead and wear it.

So, here I am, sitting in my cheap-ass cardigan with a hole in it while the marketing people parade around in their non-holey clothing.

Gah.

Tailors?
What I need is a tailor who will make pants and shirts for me in quality fabrics.

That way, I can avoid the whole sweatshop-labor-clothing-that-I-can-afford circuit.

This depresses me to no end.