Prepare to fight the professional dress monster

Seeing how I only have a limited amount of time with the Web site down (it’s coming guys, I swear!) and I therefore have the ability to personally censor content to my parents, I must take this opportunity to make a confession.

A few weeks ago when Barack Obama came to Kansas City, my best friend and I went to the rally. We stood for hours in the cold waiting to get inside the building. I’ve been assured we were outside for only about a half an hour but I’m sure they are lying to me. In any case, it was only then that I regretted any of my fashion choices. As each of my toes went cold and subsequently numb in my bedazzled converse, I thought two things: 1. Frostbite was imminent and 2. I would not be able to make that phone call to my mother that I was in the hospital, short two toes in a freak “Little-House-on-the-Prairie”-esque loss of foot digits due to the fact that I was wearing the shoes she hated the most in the world.

My mother and several friends have been telling me for months that I need to dump the Chuck Taylors because they are ugly (not true), worn out (slightly true) and bedazzled (very true). They also aren’t exactly the most “grownup” footwear choice I could make but wearing them makes me feel cool, like a slightly older, non-pregnant Juno. They also make the call of a more adult wardrobe seem a little fainter.

Dressing as an adult has been a traumatic experience. I’m in a sorority which means I have one day a week that I have to dress professionally and even that is a tedious ordeal. Trying to purchase clothes for job interviews has not gone over well at all. Blazers today still have shoulder pads that make me resemble a football player or Melanie Griffith circa “Working Girl”. I find myself already longing for the days of throwing on whatever I can find in my closet.

Unless you have chosen a fabulous career which allows you to wear jeans, T-shirts and flip-flops on a daily basis, you will have to face the professional dress monster as well (I call the monster Kevin but feel free to pick a name with personal negative connotations for your own.) Slaying the monster is going to, in a word, suck. It’s all about repetition, I’ve been assured. After a certain point, you just naturally get up in the morning and just know how to make it work for the day. You learn to resist the sirens calling you to put on the wildly inappropriate MST3K shirt and jeans with holes in them. The day of reckoning will come.

The shoes are still in my closet but I haven’t worn them much since the unfortunate incident of near frostbite. I’ll get rid of them eventually but it’s comforting right now just to have them. Plus, it’s not like I’m actually going to wear them to a real job or anything. I just ask you to not tell my mom I met Obama in them. Telling her about the whole thing would make her right about something and I can’t let that happen.