The Absurdity of My Clothing Styles Changing

 The absurdity of having to get things done as an adult can be shocking and when I see people on TV shows somehow have things together, I do wonder. Joey made a good point in the episode of Friends where he tells them they are all hanging around a coffee shop at 11:30 on a Wednesday morning.

The simple things, like just keeping your wardrobe functioning can make you feel like you are going completely insane. Take for example the latest issue I am having, as someone who spends about 99% of his time at home, I cook, clean, read, and pretend to work all in the same clothing.

Now, in the grand scheme of things this means that I only need to do the washing once every two weeks, because I don’t stress about what I am wearing and when. However, things have gotten strained between me and my wardrobe as I notice little things going wrong.

Recently I have switched my all black, and drab, t-shirts to more bright and printed designs. Just the simple addition of an interesting thing appearing on my shirt can make it feel like I am having a much better wardrobe sense than before. However, this has caused a unique and new issue that I never really thought about.

Especially since black and brown shirts rarely seem to show any of this issue, even when you throw them in a puddle of grease. You see, bright clothes, with prints on them, always show stains. I have a plain blue shirt that fits comfortable, that now has two yellow stains on it that have become more permanent than the blue itself.

For the life of me I cannot figure out where this stain comes from, or even how it got to be so permanent. I type this after having changed out of it and now wearing a nice white shirt from Levi’s. Which I treat like gold, having an oxygen bar to clean it whenever I wash it, to keep it going as white.

But somehow, I wonder how people that seem to have it all together manage to keep their clothing continually clean. As I can try as much as I want and still fail to get my clothes to stay clean, and on some level, I understand it is because I am currently cooking with the same clothes I always do.

Suddenly, wearing an apron while cooking becomes tantalisingly pleasing. The shirts seem to absorb random splatters and stains faster than they can be made. I once made coffee, with a packet of cappuccino that required only water, and still found a few spattering’s of telltale brown spots on my shirt afterwards.

Now, yes, moving slower and more carefully will help to fix this specific issue, but it isn’t that easy when you are caught up in thoughts and then decide to make something to drink. I still have no idea how I managed to get some coffee on me that day, but with a newfound presence of how I look I now change shirts at least once a day.

For no other reason than I feel like the spots on my shirt make me look worse. What’s worse is that when I find a shirt with some stains on it, I immediately think of chucking it. Which is disastrous, mostly because I am still without much money, looking for a job that can help sustain my apparent newfound frivolity.

Which helps me circle back to the TV shows, where characters fall into two very neatly made groups. They can either have a brand-new dress in every second scene of the show or they somehow wear the same clothing for ten years without ever getting them washed out, stained, or torn.

For the best spot to understand this weird dichotomy we can look at the ever-present Big Bang Theory. Penny, our titular blond bombshell, somehow has a slew of new clothes in each episode, somehow going through four to five wardrobe changes without skipping a beat. This all on a waitress’s salary. Now she becomes a sales rep later for medicines, but that only increases it, as she now changes from business clothes to fully comfort clothes in literally every location change.

But, BBT has the opposite as well, somehow Sheldon Cooper and Leonard Hofstadter never have a wardrobe change. Wearing the same clothes throughout all 12 seasons, even now I cam see that brown jacket that Leonard wears in almost every episode, or that flash t-short that Sheldon somehow never washes out.

Now, obviously, as is cursory for these articles, I know this is just a series, these are all made up things and everything is fake. But it does make me wonder how I could achieve the same. When I happen to walk passed a mirror, I want to at least accept that is how I look.

The big belly that takes up half the mirror is being worked on, by starving myself of the traditional three meals a day. But the clothing problem is something I feel should be a thing I can work on, after all, it is something I can physically change and fix. Which helps me ask the question of how the hell do I accomplish it.

I don’t want to go back to wearing black clothing simply because I want to hide the stains, but I also don’t want the nice new clothing I have been gifted to be stained by my everyday life. One thing I can do is probably find taller cupboards to use, but that only solves a few minor solutions.

What I need to do is learn how not to use myself as a place to wipe. Which, yes, as a man of 31 I still have the bad habit of washing my hands and then immediately going to me pants to wipe them off. Which is a habit that I learned when young and working in workshops.

Just wipe those bad boys on the coveralls, they’ll absorb all the problems, and they did. But now I sit in a home office each day and still I find myself washing my hands and then instead of grabbing the towel right there it is straight down to my pants.

Of course, as I have grown conscious of this issue it has become much less of one, I now am fully capable of handling my hands. Wiping them on cloths that I often must hunt for, just to help keep myself cleaner and therefore much more presentable.

What I cannot fathom is how the small spot stains are appearing on my bright and clean shirts. Something they just appear, as if a passing by (invisible) bird has decide to target me with a stain colour of unknown origins. There it goes! Boom yellow stain on your blue, oil stain on your brown, and the ever so lovely blackish stain on your pure white.

Each time I find myself wondering what I did to get these stains, and then fearing that something there is something much worse on my back. As being a man that is addictively single, I have absolutely no idea what I look like from behind. I mean, I have pictures and videos, but I always just look like a giant blob.

What I need is just someone to go “Dude, there is a giant streak on your ass, going all the way up to your neck!” which would be a weird thin to say. But at least then I would know that there is something strange going on the chair that I call my office chair.

When things get tough, I also must deal with the issue that the big belly causes, and it is something I feel no one really talks about. Somehow, I know thinner men never even imagine it. But having a beer belly like I do is one of the worst things that you can imagine for keeping your shirt just stain, drip, crumb, or otherwise food free.

You see, I eat a pie and the crumbs don’t fall to the ground or get swept away by the wind. They all fall, straight down, onto the top of my belly. So, after each thing I eat, I must wipe hands, mouth, and then dust off my belly.

And you know what, sometimes you get that order all wrong, making it go mouth, belly, stomach. And there we go, I just figured out one of the origins of those damn oil streaks. So it goes, and so it grows, as I have grown, and my styles have changed I have found myself almost unable to dress how I want simply because of how and where I am.

For example, I would love nothing more than to have a wardrobe made almost entirely of lighter coloured clothing as well some with prints. What I would give to have some button downs that are not just dark blue or black with some prints on it. Anyway, I am pretty sure I have already said that.

But my issue is how the hell do the spots appear. This all started because I grabbed a blue shirt that is no older than two years, and after wearing it for just over 4 hours I looked down at it. With the small voice in the back of my head going “there is something there”.

And there it was indeed, two massive yellow stains at the lower right of the shirt, with a bunch of oil stains all over the thing too. And I was and still am completely flummoxed. Mostly because I remember washing the shirt only a few weeks ago, and checking it, finding it entirely clean.

Then folding it up and putting it away for safety until I started my so-to-say vacation. Yet there they are, and they are of the type that makes me know I won’t wear it ever again. Not even around my house, as I do frequently go out to talk to people while I am at my house. Which makes me automatically think of dressing nicely whenever I am at home the whole day, which is every day.

As I continue to grow older, I find myself wondering if it is ever possible to really find a style of clothing that I will always enjoy. More so, I think one of the things I should set for myself at the age of 40 is to have a closet in which I can comfortably throw away the older things and then to also have space to hang everything that I would like to wear.

Preferably somewhere I can easily wear long sleeved shirts without having to roll the sleeves up to stop myself from overheating. I am hoping that I may even be able to wear a nice trench coat with it all too.

Oh man, I am describing Frasier Crane’s wardrobe and I think I may have to go rob a few banks…

I wonder if anyone knows of a cold city that needs a rambling, bubbling copywriter.