Entry for January 06, 2008

"Moto ni modochatta!"

It's back to the way it was.

In junior high school, I was Ugly Betty. I had heavy bangs and thick glasses and bushy eyebrows. Then again, since it was the mid 80s, pretty much everyone had bushy eyebrows. But I wore saddle shoes. It was bad.

When it was time for high school to start, I decided that I was going to CHANGE. I was going to be fashionable and pretty and peppy and POPULAR. My mom took me to a cheap hairdresser and I got my hair cut in very short layers. I enlisted the help of my friend Jacie (pronounced jay-see, she got a lot of JC Penny jokes during elementary school), who had a much better eye for fashion (and more generous parents who would buy her more clothes in a season than mine bought me in a year) to see if my closet had anything to offer. She put together a few really nice combinations from what we found (I remember our favorite being a calf-length olive green pleated skirt and an earth tone striped shirt) and I wore her creation to school.

So the first few days I worked out of the combos she had suggested, but it took less than a week before I ran out of things to wear. In the ideal world, I would have enlisted Jacie's help for a shopping trip, but I knew that my parents were not well off and there had to be enough money for groceries and piano lessons. I reverted back to my old ways of my mother's home sewn plaid pants and old blouses and sweater vests. I started letting my hair grow out and cutting my own bangs.

In retrospect, all bets were off for my aspirations of POPULARITY the moment I decided I wanted to be on the math team, so I probably could have saved Jacie the trouble. Jacie, if you're out there, you were a good friend. Thank you. You were (and probably still are) beautiful and well dressed in a way I could never dream of being.

Every so often, I still go on a kick where I decide I am going to dress fashionably. I buy fashion magazines that tell me I should spend 10 months worth of groceries on a single outfit, check Gap and Uniqlo for similar items, and sometimes go so far as to actually (gasp!) buy them. But I always end up going back to my old ways. At work, I wear Birkenstock clogs. I don't like wearing skirts to work because we sometimes use sharp instruments and I have a fear of one of them stabbing me in the bare leg. I won't wear trousers that need ironing. In fact, I try to avoid anything that needs ironing or professional dry cleaning. I realize that this is a problem since, unlike the Pumpkin Daddy, I am not one of those people who can pick random things out of the LL Bean catalogue and look smoking hot, but, well, have you tried getting what a 2 year-old sneezed at you out of washed silk?