Boxing Week

Today I was fit for a bridesmaid dress and it was an eye-opening experience.

"It's too tight," I whined to the lady who had just been hugging me with measuring tape. "I need a bigger size."

She looked at me critically. "Where?"

"My tummy," I said, brushing it.

But she would not agree. She made me go sit down and then walk around until I agreed that in fact it was not too tight around the tummy; that indeed, I looked dangerously good and that the size up I subsequently tried on looked like crap.

"It's up to you, of course," she said. "It's a comfort level thing. But if you go up a size you'll need lots of alterations and you looked good in the first."

"Alright, I'll get that and then drop weight on purpose if I need to," I said, remembering both the series of perhaps seven consecutive huge meals I'd had over the past week with shortbread scarfed in the breaks, as well as the strange adolescent taste of a toothbrush to the back of the throat.

"Don't do that," she said dismissively. "If you're really worried about the waist just wear a ____." This was some word for a dressing concept I didn't understand then and don't remember now, but it seemed to be built in to pantyhose to act like a stomach squisher.

Anyways, I ordered the dress and got a 10% discount on an already good value sale (although since its a very pale lime green for a late spring wedding I'm going to have to pay, financially and physically, for some tanning sessions before a pallid death's head like me dares wear it in public) which I almost immediately squandered on some thigh highs from American Apparel (I don't like American Apparel but Lady reccommended these thigh highs by looking really good in them). And I thought about how I like baggy clothes and how I can almost never tolerate them actually touching my waist. At first I wondered if it's some weird sort of neurotic modesty or a conviction that girls like me should be draped, not wrapped.

Then I realized itreally is just a comfort thing, but in the sense that if there's ever an impromptu war or other disturbance of some kind, I want to be able to leap into unhindered action. That's the reason I don't wear shoes I can't run and kick in. But here's the thing: I'm 28 and I still haven't started my career as a superhero. Something has to give.