Dressing Like a Grown-Up

Does still refering to being an adult as a 'grown-up' automatically disqualify me from being one? It might...



So I found out about this time last week that I would have to go to that fancy luncheon on Tuesday (of the infamous fancy chocolate heaven cake mousse contraption). My first thought of "oo, neat, lunch and networking" was cut into before I even finished the "neat" part with "wtf am I going to wear?"

Pubic access television isn't exactly a business dress industry. Just yesterday, for example, I found myself unexpectedly using a plunger to pry up a floor tile and then crawling under the floor of the building from the room where our servers are to go emerge in the lobby (all the way down the hallway, so a good 9000 yards by crawling in the dark measurements, or about 50 feet aboveground) with a coax cable to run to a new monitor I had just mounted on the wall using power tools. All by myself. And it's even mounted straight.

In brand new sling-back 4inch wedge sandals.

It's moments like that that lead me to wear flats, jeans, and machine washable sweaters most days.

There are spiders under there. Lots of them.

And I may or may not have seen a badger. I remain pretty convinced, but google and wikipedia both disagree, seeing as badgers are not indigenous to the central California coast.


It was at least an unusually large oppossum with an intimidating glare.

Or a reflection.

But I'm going with giant angry badger.

I like to tell myself that a cardigan is one step higher on the 'business appropriateness' scale while simultaneously usually being cheaper than a comfortable hoodie, and therefore justify owning approximately 5,472 cardigan sweaters. And jeans come right after nude and sweatpants on the clothing preference scale.

So when I found out I'd have to dress like an actual, respectable professional in order to effectively network with ACTUAL actual, respectable professionals, I was pretty much SOL. Dress pants are somewhere between shoes that pinch my toes and bras that are a tad too old whos underwire tends to creep out of the seam and poke out of my sweater without me noticing.



I ATTEMPTED to find just one pair of dress pants long enough to wear heels with along with perhaps a cute business type jacket in time. I even drove 45 mintues with a friend to a ginormous mall 2 counties away in my attempts... but I have a budget and a 33inch inseem... in flats... those don't mix well. So that didn't work out...

So then I just tried not to think about it.

And then it was Tuesday morning. I do OWN dress-ish pants. Well the Target version of dress pants anyway. I just don't like how that button that faces the inside of the pants sticks to my spare tire and leaves a weird circle on my skin and the general lack of stretchiness.



So when I pulled a pair off the shelf and slipped them on, I wasn't expecting much. I definitely wasn't expecting for them to slide down my butt every 5 minutes all day. The last time I wore this particular pair of dress pants, on April 21 (I know because it was for that event I organized), they didn't really fit either... but in a totally different way. After breakfast I had to do that crafty maneuver where I slip the little metal tab do-hickey through the button hole instead of through the corresponding metal bit about an inch or so further over on the waistband. They were tight on my thighs and wrinkled unflatteringly whenever I moved from sitting to standing.

On Tuesday they were fastened properly and would slip several inches lower than the waistband of my underpants pretty regularly. I was able to sit up straight in them without a muffin top. They still wrinkled a little unflatteringly in the thighs, but now it was because the shape of my thigh muscles is very different than the shape of the pants.

I've considered myself a size 16 for quite a while now, but it means so much more to put on one of my smaller pair of size 18 pants and have them be that obviously too large. Pants I could BARELY fit into just months ago.

I NEEDED that. In generaly I always feel pretty positive about my progress, but it's HARD to work so hard and progress so slowly, even if it's steady. I'm sure you all know exactly what I'm talking about.

Well I better go, the day is gloomy but it hasn't rained in a while so I have to go climb out on the roof and wipe all the gross stuff off of our sattelite dishes and probably re-point at least one of them for a better signal.... Good thing I'm wearing jeans and flats!