domestic dilettante, humorless feminist shrew

Today on my lunch break, I went to the mall.

This is not a journey that I undertake lightly. I hate malls. I hate how they smell, and I hate how they’re full of people, I hate how the lights are ugly and too bright, and the salesclerks are either invisible or breathing down your neck, and I’m pretty sure that the air is actually thinner inside a mall because I always leave feeling lightheaded and dizzy and vaguely ill, and…yeah. I hate malls.

So when I say that I went to the mall, understand that what I am saying is that I went to the mall despite all of this, because I was convinced for the seven-minute drive there that it was somehow going to be a good thing.

Okay, in truth, I went because of two things. One is that something needed to be done about my eyebrows. I have a buzz cut, and every few months it occurs to me that the amount of eyebrow I have does not match the amount of hair I have, and then I go and give the nice woman at the mall $10 plus a $2 tip to thread them. It’s a $3 tip if she doesn’t get lotion in my eye.

The other reason that I went to the mall is because I’ve once again hit a point where I realize that all of my clothing is unattractive and inadequate, and that despite the fact that I’m a reasonably mature person who has a six-year-old child and a career and a husband and a house and garden that I haven’t killed, I look like a surly seventeen year old. Everyone I know–literally everyone I know–dresses better than I do.

This is partly because I do not care. I don’t like clothing that clings to me, I don’t like things that touch me too much, I don’t like things that are girly… There is a long, long list of things that I do not like in clothing.

The other reason that I dress like I do was driven home in my attempts at shopping. I am, let’s face it, kinda fat. I’m one of the in-betweenies: too fat to comfortably shop in the regular sections of a clothing store, too thin to really fit anything in the plus-size section. Add to that the fact that I’m apple shaped and have small boobs, and you’ve got limited clothing choices. My general objectives are inexpensive and comfortable, which usually ends up being men’s jeans and a tee-shirt. (Not one of those horrid girly-cut things, either, but a bog-standard rectangle-shaped tee-shirt.)

So my options today were this: continue to look like a teenager, or suck it up and go into JCPenny, where there was a big sale, and see what I could find. Somewhat reluctantly, I went for option number two.

Women’s clothing was right next to the door. I grabbed three pairs of jeans (fourteen, sixteen, eighteen) and two shirts (XL, XXL) and hit the dressing room. All the jeans fit, but…weirdly. Eighteens were huge in the legs and gappy at the back, fourteens fit my legs great but squeezed my stomach, and the crotch on the sixteens was much baggier than what I needed. The shirts also did not work–the XL fit, objectively, but was too tight for my comfort, and the XXL was cut in such a way that either a breast or a shoulder was exposed. Pass.

I texted my boss and offered Starbucks in exchange for letting me take a long lunch and make it up later. Deal struck.

The plus-sizes were in a section next to the regular sizes, so I headed over there. It’s like passing into a different world, a world that primarily caters to grandmothers who live in Miami and would like to wear brightly colored animal prints and large, floating muumuu-inspired tops. Apparently, the hot trend for fat girls this season is bright colors, lots of filmy fabric, and tight satin singlets worn under caftans.

News flash: the last thing that I want on my body is something that’s going to billow.

I grabbed several pairs of jeans, a few pairs of capris (I hate capris, but they’re so damn ubiquitous that I’ve given up), and two sizes of every shirt that I didn’t hate. The dressing-room police were off duty, so I was able to take everything in with me at once, which made it a bit easier.

After a dozen pairs of pants, I had two that fit. The shirts were harder, as I’m small-breasted, and the assumption seems to be that if you’re fat, obviously you will have enormous breasts. Out of the nine or ten styles of shirts (styles–I had two sizes for many of them) that I took in with me, one of them ended up fitting. The others either left my tits hanging out, fell off of my shoulders, cut across my nipples in a painful way, or involved a fitted singlet that was attached to a bunch of shapeless, filmy fabric.

Ninety minutes in the store, and I walked out with two pairs of pants and a shirt for a mere $50. Everything that I purchased was on sale, all of them more than half off–buying at regular prices, it would’ve been over $40 just for the jeans.

I made what was a pretty major effort, and I ended up with two pairs of pants and a shirt. It’s depressing, but I’m not sure what else to do–I’m unwilling to join the caftan club, unable to spend a ton of money on clothes, and ultimately unimpressed with my options.