Work Clothes

It’s a sad truth that a lot of my decision to become a lawyer was motivated by Legally Blonde.*  Wearing pink, practicing law, and teaching everyone about gender discrimination: that was the dream.

For awhile I was pretty pleased to be at least 1 for 3 on that - practicing law.  And the truth is, I don't have the fashion stamina of our fictional friend Elle.  I didn't go to class in law school in designer dresses; I went in yoga clothes regardless of whether I was going to pretend to do yoga that day.

In sum, I like style but I’m horribly inattentive to it. I generally treat it about the same as my high school boyfriend treated me - sometimes I spend time on it but other times I completely forget about it because I’m off playing laser tag with my friends.  (This is the most accurate metaphor I’ve ever created, and I was a poetry major.)

So I go through these swings, particularly at work. I’ll have times when the only thing I wear to work is the work pants I bought because while being cut like work pants, they are actually pretty much made out of black sweatpants fabric. I have a similar skirt that I bought at Costco for $12 which is, again, made of sweatpants fabric.  Maybe literally, though I'm not sure.  Okay, okay, I actually have two sweatpants-skirts: one in gray and one in black. I wear them a lot. I have five plain white blouses. I have some long-sleeved t-shirts with just enough detail on them for me to I call them "work shirts" and wear them to work, silently daring anyone to call me on it.

At some point in the last year (and after having spent my first year out of school wearing a boring suit every day) I decided to switch it up. So now there are select times when I decide to wear very impractical things that I stubbornly decided are what a lawyer should look like, mixed in with the fact that I actually hate how boring lawyers look.

N.B. Most of my coworkers are dudes and you can’t tell them apart other than by hair color/quantity because they are all wearing the same grey pants and blue or white work shirt. They actually get kind of mad when I point out when two or more of them are wearing the exact same outfit on any given day. "Hey, you guys match!" It’s a fun game for me.  

Question:  If you line up three in a row of them wearing the same outfit, will they explode into points of light, vanish, and award points like in the jewel game on my phone?

Whether I’m dressing stylishly or not is, I think, inversely proportionate to the number of billable hours I worked three days before.

And when I do decide to hang out with style, I go in unique directions. For instance, my new work pants are awesome wide-legged white pants with pockets (a la Veronica Corningstone)...

which I recently wore with a baby-pink ruffled shirt and a beige lace cardigan and a belt with a bow on it. I looked a little like Louis Quatorze via 1973:

 Yesterday I dressed like I was going to a Republican summer picnic campaign fundraiser - ie red sleeveless dress under a white linen blouse with tan sandals. I have a pink, blue, and green flowered blouse with a black sequined collar; several enormous statement necklaces I wear like ties (and occasionally I will just jack Husband’s actual ties and wear those, since they’re very cute and he never wears them); varying dresses in teal, hot pink, and patterns.

This whole situation is aided and abetted by my grandma, who is a very stylish former model who likes to buy clothes that are too big for her and then give them to me. It’s from her I got my leopard-print silk blouse and the red sleeveless dress and the bright yellow blazer.

I think it’s my one rebellion against the severe gray-panted, white-walled, blond-wood office aesthetic I live in where we get e-mails from the office manager instructing us to put plastic lids on our ceramic coffee mugs to keep from spilling coffee on the coffee-colored carpet. If I’m going to wear heels to work, they are going to be my hot-pink patent leather ones.**

...or my beige 4-inch-heeled Mary Janes. Or the gray Cuban heels. I have black pumps (also with four inch heels - heh) but those are only for court, and no one ever takes me to court. So there.

The net result of my swings in style is that I alternate between excessively boring and functional and borderline caricature of a lady lawyer. So I dress, on average, like a usual attorney - the standard deviation’s just higher than you’d expect.

* It came out when I was in 8th grade.  Like that's an excuse.

** Sassy came to visit last week and when she drove up she looked at my outfit (black blouse, black mesh eyelet overskirt over a hot pink underskirt, hot pink heels), she marveled, “Did you wear that to work today? Wearing pink and lawyering? You are living the dream!” Sassy always makes me feel better about my life decisions.

House Hunters Dysfunctional: Why HGTV Didn't Answer My Casting E-mails

Looking for a house isn't like the other kinds of shopping one does in normal life. If I want paper towels, I go to Safeway. If I want a million paper towels for the low price normally associated with buying a thousand paper towels, I go to Costco. If I want a million paper towels for that said low price but want them delivered to an address I haven't lived at for six months - but on the very same day I ordered them! - I use Google Shopping Express.

This is stuff you know. But if you want to buy a house, there's no house store to go to. You have to run around all over the place and look at them, and you don't even get to know where they are. That's the province of the realtor, who is the keeper of all of the secrets of where the good houses are and the not-so-secret secret that you can't afford them.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. First, you probably want to know why I, who wouldn’t know General Responsibility if she saw him in a parade on TV, would think it was a good idea to own a piece of land.

For one thing, I wanted to be able to vote at last.* But mostly it was the mold. Most people, upon discovering their rental home has mold, would confront their landlord, or move out, or something. But the thing is…. our rent was really, really cheap. Like really cheap. Cheap like our three-bedroom rental house with a two-car garage was cheaper than a one-bedroom apartment in the dorms that the other law students lived in. And between my money-expensive habit (law school) and Husband’s space-expensive habit (systematically disassembling a 50s car with a retro space station’s worth of chrome on it), it made sense to stay. I may regret this when I die of a pulmonary disease in my 50s, but hopefully my estate’s lawyer finds this post and sues my landlord.

In any case, since at least one of us had finally quit our respective expensive habit, it seemed like it was time to move.

So begin to look for a house we did. I tried to go into the house hunting experience with the low expectations suitable to buying real estate. I've seen Property Brothers - I wouldn't be fooled into thinking I could afford my Dream Home (tm Mattel). We got ourselves a realtor - an excellent one who I think was helping me largely as a favor to my boss’s boss (who has a fondness for buying and selling houses that I imagine she appreciates).

Yet somehow I still managed to be shocked by the houses we ended up looking at. One was painted entirely pea green and, when you walked in the front door, practically dropped you right into the master bedroom. Another had an outdoor shower in the backyard right off the master bedroom, despite having a total absence of a pool, beach, Tough Mudder course, built-in slip-n-slide, or anything else that would justify a porch shower. One had a newly renovated kitchen but a bathroom so small that the sink was no wider than my index finger is long. Yet another had a frillion closets but only one bathroom.

So by the time we got to a house that was pretty good, it looked amazing. It was nice and clean on the inside; the kitchen was decent; it had two bathrooms. Sure, the backyard was a little small. Sure, there were no sidewalks on the streets. And sure, for being in such a dope school district, the house next door did look a lot like a crack house.

But we decided to put in an offer nonetheless.

Unfortunately, in the Very Special Real Estate Market we live in, you can't just offer the asking price. And apparently you really can't do what I wanted to do, which is a negotiation tactic I learned from watching Pawn Stars: whatever price they want, offer them a quarter of it. No, in this VSREM, you apparently** have to offer ABOVE the listed price to even have a chance of getting the property. And heaven help you guess just how much over you should go.

After a bunch of agonizing over the phone with Husband, because I was away for work and thus managing to leave all the annoying paperwork to the better half of our collective partnership, we decided on 25% over the asking price, which was already an ENTIRELY ridiculous amount of money.

Husband: There are a ton of forms I need you to sign tomorrow, though.
Liz: I will be trapped in a room I cannot leave all day.
Husband: Great.

As it turns out, our offer was but one of eight other offers on the property, which sold for around 150% of the listed price. I was grossed out. But we were both over it a few days later when we were hunting around on Zillow some more. And I pointed my laptop screen at Husband after I saw this house:

Liz: “We can afford this one!”
Husband: “It looks like a barn!”

We knew we were going to that open house.



* Come for the typical Millennial immaturity, stay for the American-politics-circa-1791 jokes!

**I'm sorry, but I just can't quit using sarcastic "apparently"s when discussing real estate; my disdain was palpable and has yet to wear off fully.

A Functional Adult Too Easily Forgets

It's probably healthy to forget about things in life from time to time.  As my dear friend Sherlock observed, brain space is finite: 

“I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. . . . Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.”
- A Study in Scarlet

This erudite point particularly applies, I imagine, to negative experiences: often unhelpful and likely to drive one insane, we ought to forget them.

But forgetting comes with dangers.  As those who ignore history are bound to repeat it, so are those of us who ignore our mistakes bound to repeat them.

In my case, the mistake was swimsuit shopping.

I went swimsuit shopping the other day because I hadn’t bought one in awhile and I was going on vacation.  I was, on the whole, excited about going - I like shopping and it was the end of the summer, so I knew all the swimsuits would be on sale and I’d get a good deal.  Plus, buying a new swimsuit is the technical beginning of vacation and the excuse to check out mentally up until actual departure.

What I realized as soon as I got to the store was that nearly a half-decade of relying on old swimsuits meant I had forgotten how degrading swimsuit shopping is.  I can’t buy one pieces because the ratio of my person is somehow different than whoever they make swimsuits for and they never. ever. fit.  

So a two-piece it was, which meant that, while everything was half off, everything was also half off the racks: as in lying everywhere on the floor due to some mad rush I had missed or an extremely localized tornado.  If I found a cute top, there were simply no matching bottoms.  If I found some bottoms, they only had the top in a different color.  But I braved through every single rack in a quest to find a good one.

I remembered enough to know that I needed to try on a LOT of swimsuits because most probably wouldn’t work.  So I grabbed approximately 40 or so halves of swimsuits and, in defiance of the six-items-per-dressing-room fiat broadcast by a lethargic sign, threw them all on the floor of the dressing room.  (That’s a generous word for it; it’s a stall at best.)

I had barely started at this point.

And then I remembered the wonder of trying on swimsuits.  First, there is the inherent bunchiness of trying on a garment that is pretty much underwear over your existing underwear for sanity reasons.  But the real joy of trying on a two-piece swimsuit is the stark reminder of how much I am not the right sizes.  Because you can get two different sizes per piece, the suit is just mocking you: “Hey!  Society says you should be large on top and small on the bottom, not the other way around.  Man, you should stay away from fluorescent lighting!”  

It wasn’t helped by the fact that the picked-over remaining swimsuits available in any size approaching mine were... strange.  It made me desperate: I willing tried on a suit with rainbow-sherbet colored fringe hanging off the top, telling myself, “Maybe it’s cute on?” 

Yep.  This happened.

I generously reinterpreted what size I was.  I tried to tell myself that maybe I didn’t hate ruffles after all.  Maybe Jessica Simpson can design a good swimsuit, despite the otherwise serious gaps in her understanding of aquatic life.  Maybe I didn’t mind wearing a yellow top with pink bottoms, or one with Minnie Mouse polkadots.  Maybe a swimsuit should have glitter.

I should have known when I saw all of these
left from the previous occupant.

After flinging them almost all of them on the ground in disgust, I came out of there with two swimsuits: one, indeed, at least nominally designed by our dear Ms. Simpson, and the other one with some baffling straps that are very confusing to tie but look okay once you get there.  I hope they work out, because I don't think I'll be able to move this memory out of my brain attic for awhile. And here's hoping they are more durable than my ability to recall how much I hate swimsuit shopping, or else I'm in trouble.

A Functional Adult Gets Some Style

I love clothes more than I ought. I love reading Vogue and online shopping and staring at people walking on the street who have cool clothes. I got especially excited last night because I hung out with my friend Rev, who I hadn’t seen in awhile and who is Le Stylish all the time. She has a great sense of style because while her outfits always nod towards whatever is trendy at the time, she never looks exactly like anyone else, just herself. So cool. I may have spent too much of our time at a cool bar freaking out about how much I liked her purse. But seriously, you guys, her purse was amazing.

LOOK AT THIS PURSE OKAY

I’m a little jealous, because she has a job that allows her some flexibility in looking cool at work. I wear boring suits every day. There’s only so much you can do to jazz up a charcoal gray pantsuit without looking stupid, and in my job it’s better to err boring than look stupid.

So my attempts at stylishness are usually limited to occasional frantic bursts of online shopping, and drooling over my friends’ clothes.

This weekend was particularly opportune because in addition to getting to drool, when I got home, I remembered that I had engaged in some of said frantic online shopping approximately 10 days earlier and I HAD THREE BOXES IN THE KITCHEN ALL FULL OF SHOPPING JOY.

Huzzah! So after my efficient Saturday morning routine of sprawling all over the bed, drinking orange juice pensively for 30 minutes, a botched workout* attempt, and eating some jelly beans, I opened the boxes and started trying on the clothes. Yay! Style leveling up imminent! I was no longer a boring gray-suited android!

I had ordered the following things, all of which seemed like good ideas at the time:

• Hot pink jeans

• A hot pink blouse with gray trim

• A wetsuit-influenced “scuba” dress, cobalt blue with neon chartreuse side… ovals

• Black flats to wear to work

The jeans didn’t come because they ran out or something, and CANCELLED MY ORDER. WHAT. As a child of the 80s, I was so excited to branch out into the realm of colored denim! Boo.

I tried on the blouse with a khaki skirt that I had recently forgotten I own (whoops, sorry skirt, I didn’t mean to hurt you, baby, but you can’t tie me down to one skirt). And it looked AWESOME. So awesome I got excited, went out to the garage to show husband, where he somewhat less enthusiastically agreed it was great.

Husband: Yeah, it looks really nice!
*pause*
Husband: You didn’t have that blouse before?
Liz: No! No, it’s new!
Husband: Okay. But you did… have the skirt before?
Liz: Yes, duh.

He’s one for two. Excited with my blousey success, I spent several minutes happily imagining all the places I was going to wear it before trying on the Scuba Dress.

Here’s a picture of it. It’s not as ridiculous as it sounds:

Please be clear: I am not this lady.
This is a different lady.
Wearing this dress is her job.

It’s cute, right? And side panels like those, I have read, theoretically make one look thinner. And looking thinner is the ultimate goal of Western society; once we all look sufficiently thin we will blast off into space like the arcologies in Sim City 2000 and conquer all galaxies through how nice we look. Or such is the impression my subscription to Vogue magazine has given me.

I tried it on and really liked it. It was au courant and funky and a good color on me. So I walked around the house, trying it on with different shoes, before I went to show Husband.

Husband: Oh, would you wear that at the lake?
Liz: No, it’s a fancy dress. It’s very chic?
Husband: Is it made of swimsuit material?
Liz: No, it’s just supposed to LOOK like swimsuit material.
Husband: Okay. And you wouldn’t wear it when we are hanging out around the lake.
Liz: No.
Husband: So where do you wear it?
Liz: At a fancy bar!
Husband: A nautical themed bar?
Liz: A BAR-THEMED BAR.

This conversation with Husband was giving me the uncomfortable realization that… I don’t go to fancy bars, or really even bars, all that often. My trip to a cool bar last night with Rev was an aberration; despite working in a fancy city, I hightail it out after work like the municipal authorities are after me and I need to get outside their jurisdiction ASAP.
 

In this more critical mood, I noticed the bunching. This “Scuba” dress was tight in some places and loose in others, which meant I kept having to yank it down. This is a problem whether you are scuba diving or drinking at a bar.

So, tragically, the “Scuba” dress is going back. Though the quote marks are staying.

Aaaand the boring black flats for work are maybe fine, but not that comfortable. I am leaving them in possible-return limbo.

So my attempt at increasing style is 1 for 4. But the weekend’s not over yet: tomorrow I’m shopping the old fashioned way. No internet, no waiting in the mail, no having to pick things out myself: I’m just going to the mall and buying everything Rev was wearing last night.

---

* My latest attempt to trick myself into exercising is by incentivizing myself using cute workout clothes. I usually find myself “saving” my exercise clothes – for example, never talking my running shoes outside, ever, lest they get dirty. This leads to weird results where my Nikes stay pristine for YEARS and my gladiator stiletto sandals start looking tired after half a season. But today, I figured if I have to run, I might as well like how I look doing it (assuming I like how I look doubled over and wheezing). Though that was distinctly un-fun and ended 7 minutes later, so I don’t want to talk about my workout any more.