05.29.01
I don't ever want to be one of those old ladies that truck around town in young-adult fashion trends from years past. You know the ones, they still run around town in acid washed jeans and jungle-print shirts, gigantic dangly earrings suspended from their already pendulous lobes.
I would absolutely die first.
So here I am, a little out of sorts, a year and a few months away from being thirty. I suppose it isn't entirely unreasonable to question my wardrobe when I regularly exchange fashion advice and ideas with my 18 year-old sister, and my 9 year-old sister frequently says things like, "I wanna wear Kristen's clothing!" or "Kristen, can I borrow your Monkey Joe shirt?"
And I think about how I own several pairs of mary janes, and cable knit kneesocks that Catholic schoolgirls wear, ruffled ankle socks, and t-shirts with crystal-studded flowers or pastel butterflies flitting gaily across their fronts.
I shop in the children's department, for Christ's sake.
I suppose it doesn't help that people constantly tell me that I look a lot younger than I am.
I suppose it doesn't help that most of the people that I still know in this town are barely out of their teens and early twenties.
I suppose it is because I live in a college town, and I feel strangely compelled to compete with the local populace.
Fashions subtly shift from year to year, and it's tricky to keep up. Track pants are still cool, but they aren't gathered at the bottom with elastic anymore -- they hang straight down to the floor, usually covering the feet of their wearer because they are unsnapped at the bottom, left to drag around. Cheap plastic shoes are still cool, except instead of sporty athletic slides from Nike and Adidas, it's flip-flops from K-Mart and the Gap. India-chic is out, but disco hooker-chic is in.
And it doesn't help that all of the dewy-skinned girls that I see in magazines, radiantly portraying the look that is now, actually are dewy-skinned 15 year-olds, dressed up as women who are just on this side of 30.
I didn't get to be dewy-skinned at 15. I think I was greasy and shiny at that point in my life. I want to be dewy-skinned and radiant now.
Instead, I feel old.
