Foray into Fashion

I spent yesterday morning with my Wonderful Smart Beautiful Daughter. You probably think that's a pseudonym, but actually that is what I call her in real life. Her pseudonym is Daughter. Anyhow, she is only home from college for another week, so I want to spend time with her whenever I can. That's how I ended up going to the place I detest: Stupid Suburban Shopping Mall. (If I seem unreasonably angry at the malls here in the Snowstorm City region, it's because I remember what life and the landscape was like before they existed. Oh, but that's a different post.)

This mall has many stores with names that might be familiar to you, but I am going to change them because I don't want to give them any free advertising. Most of them are clothing stores: American Raptor, Urban and Short, Antique Dark Blue, Sizzling Themes, the Queen's Mystery, Big City and Company, Empty Space, Burns Horribly, and several well-known department stores. Oh, and the bigger mall in Snowstorm City has a restaurant called Peckers, a place which deliberately hires well-endowed men to wear tight shorts so that female customers can ogle them.

So here is how the mother/daughter bonding goes. We go into a store and each gather an armful of clothing. That's the rule: we both have to try stuff on, even if one of us doesn't like the store. Even if one of us is too old for the stuff in the store. Then we go into the dressing rooms and try everything on. Here's a typical conversation:

Me: "Well, how does this look?"
Daughter: "Uh ... that depends."
Me: "Depends on what?"
Daughter: "Were you going to wear it in public?"

I save a lot of money by shopping this way. Of course, what money I save by not buying stuff for myself gets spent inevitably on Daughter because she just happens to look good in everything. And she wears an extra small, which is always the size on sale, so she comes home with all kinds of new clothes, paid for by me because her scholarship doesn't cover wardrobe expenses.

As for me, I went to the mall with the vow to buy something decent, something different than what I usually buy, and I came home with a pair of jeans (Empty Space Store Flare Size 10 Average). They were identical to the jeans I was wearing. But of course, they were on sale, so that counts for something.