Asking the Hard Questions, Part One: Why Is Everything Melting???

Asking the Hard Questions: 

Why Is  Everything Melting???

A few weeks ago, I went with my friend Frankie to volunteer at a local art show. She had called me the day before, disturbed by her observation that a great majority of the art depicting human beings portrayed them in some stage of what could only be described as melting. As I walked around the venue, I realized that she was right. Almost all paintings, sculptures, or photos of people showed them in various stages of fragmentation, squishiness, distortion, or most commonly—simply melting away. It was very disconcerting, and we had an interesting conversation about the artist collective consciousness, etc. etc. but we didn’t reach any real conclusions. 

I have noticed this same squishy, melting trend when it comes to women’s clothes for quite some time now, and I am getting really sick of it. I had to completely overhaul my wardrobe for a new job recently, and most trips the mall have found me in tears, hysterically texting my husband and telling him I was going have a full-blown anxiety attack for the lack of wearable, professional clothing in every women’s clothing store in the entire…fucking….mall!!!! 

This has been a repeating pattern with me:

1. Work up the courage and fortitude to actually decide to shop for clothes, which I HATE doing more than almost anything on this earth, including cleaning the cat box and being forced to do math in my head.

2. Head off to mall, repeating my affirmations: I will find scads of professional, adult-type-person clothes that fit me flawlessly and reflect my highest spiritual nature and innermost soul. Thigh fat is beautiful. I will purchase only quality fabrics.  I am a “Fall”. I will not hyperventilate in Nordstrom’s. Shopping is fun!

3. Go to mall, resisting almost overwhelming temptation to avoid demoralizing shopping experience by hiding out in the journals-and-pens section of Barnes and Noble. 

4. Survey, with increasing panic, the shockingly prolific array of bizarre “clothing” on display, replete with floppy ruffles, giant deconstructionist bows, inexplicable strings or flaps hanging down for no reason, flimsy, foofy, weirdly-pleated fabric, in color combos that look like Timothy Leary vomited. 

5. Give up on finding tops and go to try on pants in Express, attempting to avoid thundering-club-music-induced tinnitus. Heroically avoid strangling horrifyingly perky teenage sales "person" when she pounds on the dressing room door and shouts, “Have you found a big enough size yet?”

6. Text Mr. Typist with trembling hands, threatening to drive car into oncoming traffic on the way home, develop diet pill addiction, or “open my own store with only clothes that fit me and that I like”. 

7. Go to the food court and drown my sorrows in bad Thai chicken.

8. Drive home empty-handed and spend the rest of the day despair-napping and plotting triumphant, Sara Rue-like transformational skinniness through iron discipline and just the right amount of anorexic thinking.

All I am asking for is one store…just one store, somewhere out there…to please, please, please sell one or two items of clothing that don’t involve the god-forsaken ruffles, flopsy, drooping, drippy, extranea,  “whimsical” designs, or epilepsy-inducing color patterns. Please. I am beginning to experience trendy-clothing-induced paranoia. I am having intrusive thoughts that this all a giant conspiracy to keep women down by infantilizing and softening and melting them out of existence by cutting off our supply of authoritative clothing. 

And well, that’s just downright irrational…right?

--The Good Typist