Let me go back for just a minute to two weeks ago. As I stood in my closet one morning, pondering what to put on for the day, I noticed tons of clothes I hadn't worn in a while. Now, by a while, I mean a long time. Like a long, LONG time...I'm embarrassed to admit how long they'd been hanging there. Some even had a layer of dust along the arm and leg creases that folded over the hangers. It was atrocious. Dust bunnies were growing on the clothes that didn't meet my picky standards! So I decided I needed to clean my closet of un-cool clothes. Two boxes later, I was shopping online looking for stylish, yet affordable clothes.
Enter Forever 21. The Cheap Store, as we fondly call it around my house. I shop there some, when I want trendy pieces but don't want to pay a lot of money. Which is always because I'm the cheapest person on the face of the Earth! The only problem with this fabulously cheap store is that their return policy sucks!! You can't get a refund. SERIOUSLY?? Who even does that anymore?? Forever 21, that's who. You better be certain you're FORVER going to love your purchase, because they won't take back that $3.99 cami, even if it hits just under the boobs and it's marketed to hit at mid-hip length. Just sayin... But I threw caution to the wind, and perused the website because I refuse to go in to the store. It has no organization, items are cram-packed on racks in non-ROY G. BIV-fashion with no care given at all to organize items by sleeve length or texture, and it makes me more than a little panicky. Anyway, the website. After hours of searching and comparing cheap sweaters, I finally decided on one! It was a turtleneck (my fav)! In a nice, dull tan color. It looked trendy enough since it was the retro-chunky-shaker-sweater look (I thought that style went out with my middle school years, but guess who's back, back again? No, not Slim Shady, shaker sweaters). So I ordered it! I counted the days until it's arrival. Finally, it came. And I carefully tucked it away for a cool day.
That day was supposed to be Monday. Joe Pennington told me so the Friday before. YES!! Sweater weather. Or so I thought. My day started off like every other: stagger to the kitchen to suck down coffee, drag my half-awake self to the closet to make a clothing selection, and continue with my morning routine. All was going well, my nifty new sweater cut my closet time in half since I only had to pick out the bottom portion of my outfit! My shower took less time too (I'm afraid to scrutinize this topic too closely for fear of realizing that I might have forgotten to wash something), my Sonic Care was fully charged, and my hair looked like it was going to be cooperative: I was kicking Monday's tail! So with reckless abandon, I yanked the tags off my sweater and got dressed. This is where things went south really quickly.
I put on all pieces rather uneventfully and saved my sweater for last. I realized there might be something odd about the sweater when I put my arms into the sleeves and they jutted out of the opening much sooner than I anticipated. My suspicion was confirmed the moment I tried to push my head out of the turtleneck. It got stuck!! Seriously. My head is big, but it's not THAT big. (Although my mom refers to me and my siblings as Rottweiler Heads...we are so loving with each other. But I guess she would know, she gave birth to me.) Anyway, back to my head...I couldn't get it through the miniscule neck opening! It wouldn't stretch a bit. But I pressed and pushed relentlessly and somehow forced my ginormous head through the opening, with minor scrapes on my nose, where I was met with the longest turtleneck I've ever worn. At this point I made a sad realization: the inside of the sweater felt nothing like the outside...it was scratchy, that was going to be a problem. And the further I forced my head into the turtleneck, the more it scratched. I thought that turtleneck was never going to end...it was as long as a knee sock. It felt like my face was stuck in an exfoliating tube!! But finally my head emerged out the other side. I made it! I turned to look at myself in my snazzy new sweater fully expecting to look like the Cheap Store model. Boy, was I wrong. The sweater was boxy, the turtleneck was excessively huge and needed multiple folds, and those sleeves!! They hit at mid-arm, making the sweater look like it was sewn for a T-Rex or had misshapenly shrunk. Who makes a turtleneck with shorty sleeves, anyway???! For a split second I thought about attempting to rip it off and picking out something new, but I quickly decided I couldn't handle the ordeal of my head squeezing through the abysmal turtleneck again...I wouldn't have been functional for the rest of the day. So it stayed (Forever 21 wouldn't have returned it anyway).
Then I noticed my hair in the reflection. My hair that seemed cooperative just 20 minutes before was now standing on end like someone had rubbed a balloon all over my head. Static electricity. When your hair is as curly as mine, it doesn't need any extra assistance in the volume department. I was horrified. I added extra mousse, I patted it down, I coaxed it with water. It had to look good! The Voice was coming to school to record a shot at our pep rally today. What if I was on TV in a T-Rex sweater and with bushy hair?? Oh my gosh. I'm not sure how I even mustered the courage to leave the house Monday morning, but I put on my favorite shoes and went to work.
I knew as soon I stepped out of my car in the parking lot at school that my outfit was not appropriate for the weather. It was humid, it was warmer than I remembered Joe Pennington telling me it was going to be the last time I watched the weather. I was sweating by the time I climbed 4 flights of stairs to reach my building. The humidity was causing the sweater to feel extra scratchy around my neck and my hair to pouf up again.
So I did what any normal person would do. I went straight to the bathroom, attempted to wrangle my hair into a ponytail, blotted off the sweat, and cuffed up my sleeves to look as normal as possible. I went to the pep rally with a smile, a pony tail that was a little catty wampus (all right, it was a LOT catty wampus...it rivaled Cindy Lauper's side pony from the 80's), and a body that felt like it was stuck in a sauna (thank goodness the scratchiness of the inside of the sweater sopped up the sweat and prevented armpit sweat rings). At least my shoe game was spot on.
I should have known better than to rip the tags off of something without trying it on first (but, hey! It looked good on the Cheap Store model) or choose an outfit without having my regular morning conversation with Joe Pennington (see prior blog about my meteorologist chats if you're wondering what the heck I'm talking about). But I did both. And I paid for it. All day. Lesson learned.
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