Organizing My Crappy Stuff

After a week-and-a-half of working at the temp job (which should run through May), I've felt rather plain and sloppy. One reason was the long bus ride/near-1-mile walk to the office. It's been rainy in Austin the past couple of weeks, and every time I arrived at work, both my hair and I looked frazzled and like shit. Another reason is my tired-looking clothes. Although I had plenty o' money for 5 years at my old job, I still hardly ever went out shopping for new things. I would buy new jeans/colored pants and some new cheap sweaters from Old Navy online, and I would buy new Chico's shirts on sale and used shirts/sweaters from eBay online. (The Chico's shirts are great, but the used shirts... there's a reason people were getting rid of them! Most of 'em turned out to be shaped kind of funny, etc.)

Anyway, I'm currently working right next to several 30-something women who all have nice clothes. Their body shapes aren't fantastic, but their clothes/shoes are fashionable and new, and they look a hell of a lot fresher than I do. While I can't go out and buy a new wardrobe right now, what I could, and did, do this weekend was at least go through all of my winter sweaters and pants and try them all on, and sort them out by (1) OK for work, and (2) OK for home/weekend only, and (3) get rid of. For the past week or so, I'd been throwing something on, thinking it would look OK, only to discover in the work mirror that it looked like crap. Weeding out made me feel like I had some control over the situation. I currently may not have a varied wardrobe, but at least I have a small section that I know is presentable! (NOTE: At my old job, we could wear jeans every day, and everyone pretty much threw on whatever. I was actually one of the better-dressed!)

As for shoes: I actually have a good collection of shoes! But because I was walking so much in bad weather for the past week or so, I had about 4 comfortable and/or weather-proof pairs that I was alternating wearing all the time to work, never wearing the good ones for fear of ruining them. Finally, though, last Friday, I got brave and took my car to work for the first time---turns out the parking permit from the job I left in October is still good. Terrible (and tense) Austin traffic, but the travel time was cut in half, and I looked a lot better upon arriving, sans being weather-beaten! I plan on taking my car from now on. Which means I can wear the shoes I want to wear, without fear of ruining them! (I can also set my alarm a half-hour later: Getting up at 6am was godawful.)

Another crappy thing about my appearance over the past week or so: My reading glasses. I have no prescription glasses (though I need them), so I wear readers. I had a big pile of them, with various-colored rims, in a small box, but was only alternating between two pair, one with black rims and one with black/clear rims---just because I didn't feel like digging through the box every morning and finding the pair that actually matched what I had on. There were also a lot of random, ugly readers that I wouldn't want to wear, except maybe at home by myself, mixed in with the cuter ones. Overall, a pile of about 20, which I today whittled down to 11 and organized by color, then put the others in storage for emergency or home use only.

And finally, I went through all of my makeup, lipsticks in particular, and threw out the stuff that's been sitting around for 10 years! And, as with the glasses, I'd been using only about 2 pairs of lipstick because I knew they were good shades. Because the rest were all just jumbled together, I never took the time to pick THE right shade for what I was wearing that day. And I didn't even know which, exactly, were dried out. As I did with the sweaters, I tested them all out, dumped the ones that had gone bad, and organized the rest by color: Dark purples, reds, mauves, plums, raisins, browns, naturals. With the appropriate liners at the head of each column.

Again, I don't have money to buy new stuff right now, but organizing/weeding out all of my crappy stuff made me feel a lot better!