On Shopping

I bought pants.

I'm not going to go through the standard How Guys Shop thing. It's a cliche now. Suffice it to say, I was efficient. I was meeting my sister and mom at the mall to pick some stuff up. While they were in the dressing room I had time to select AND purchase 3 pairs of pants plus a visit to the dressing room (buying a slightly different style and I had to make sure it was sized right. Twas.) AND I moved my truck closer to my sister's car for easier transfer of goods.

My sister was doing some school clothes shopping. See recent For Better or For Worse strips for illumination on this topic. Ya see, my sister is 16. I don't know how tall she is--maybe 5'8. Athletic. And that ultimate brother-bane, Huge Tracts of Land. She's really quite proud of her rack and most of her clothes serve the express purpose of emphasizing said Advantages. So she jogs up to me and insists I tell her if I like the shirt she's wearing. Well, yeah, it's nice if you don't mind that you can see through it, and won't she be cold? And maybe she should be wearing a larger size? Ah, she helpfully pointed out, I will thusly always wear this little spaghetti-strappy thing UNDER it! She didn't say thusly; that's my word. I'm paraphrasing, hence the lack of quotation marks. And my terminology is admittedly (proudly!) deficient. Then she wanted me to decide twixt a bright pink cleavage shirt and its bright green cousin. I suggested blue. LG was flumoxed because the blue would make her look "washed out". Clean! That's a step in the right direction! But my mom helpfully explained to LG that given a choice, I will always choose the most conservative clothes. Modest, I explained to my mom. Modest.

And frankly, I will choose the most modest clothes for my sister and cousins. Elseways, as they say in wet t-shirt contests: Skin 2 Win. And knee-high boots. Can't go wrong with knee-high boots. There was a chick in high school that had those things and, well, whew. It's seared into my memory. When I got to college, hot chicks in knee-high boots were pretty rare. Lots of guys in knee-high boots and that's not my bag, and the senior chicks in the Corps and their knee-high boots, hm. I don't remember whether or not the Corps chicks wore the boots in their little Corps skirts, but that would have been pretty swell. If they weren't otherwise generally unattractive. And my social circle didn't make any contact with that bunch, except for High Ridicule.