A Staining Coward
Week of May 11th to May 17th, 2021.
You panic bought a pair of shorts last summer from a slow fashion brand that was going out of business. They were not the savvy purchase you believed them to be at the time. The shorts make you look like someone’s rogue, rabid father.
You regularly struggle with how to be both an ethical shopper and also someone who does not look like total shit all the time. All your natural/wholesome/brown-colored-packaging-which-you-just-assume-is-healthy-for-some-reason products make you look oily and shabby, but you live your life in a hopeful space that suddenly one day this will no longer be true. It will always be true, but go ahead and cloak yourself in that magical thinking, frump girl.
These shorts do not fit you, so you decide that taking them to a tailor is a logical first step towards your lofty dreams of Looking Okay. You’ve longed to find a tailor you trust in New York, and so far have not had any luck. You tried many tailors, and all of them have had a really uncomfortable dressing room, where you change in a dark, dank corner with a flimsy curtain that gives you no real privacy.
But this magical year, you finally find a place you feel comfortable. The lighting is flattering, the mirror is one of those lying mirrors that makes you look svelte, and the curtains are sturdy and give you the illusion of actual privacy.
The tailor is kind and knowledgeable and helps you shape the slow fashion dad shorts of last year into something with the potential not to humiliate you.
You’re in ecstasy at the thought of coming to this flatteringly lit tailor all the time. This is your place. You imagine yourself developing a magnificent relationship with this warm and wise tailor. You will always ask the right questions about his children. You will bring him a holiday basket that has an interesting olive selection. He will be a guest at your anniversary party (you didn’t have a wedding and when you don’t have a wedding you are legally required to fantasize constantly about anniversary parties you may one day have).
Thrilled to finally have some tailor/shorts related hope, you change back into the ill-fitting clothes you arrived in. As the shorts fall to the ground, you see a horrifying truth. A humiliation beyond what the human heart can take. In the cradle (that’s a nice word for crotch that the skies like to use) of your shorts is a massive Revealing Intimate Stain.
You don’t know how you didn’t see it before you left the house. You gave the shorts a quick once over to see if they were suitable for public consumption (they were not), but you didn’t open them up to inspect the inside (the place where humiliating Revealing Intimate Stains often lurk).
You will become paralyzed with shameful anxiety. You know you need to take the shorts home, wash them and bring them back another day, but you don’t have the social skills needed to be like, “Actually never mind, after several minutes of very hands on customer service where together we decided how long these shorts should be, and after you carefully pinned those shorts in several different locations, I have decided to run away with those shorts, never to be seen or heard from again.”
You will leave the dressing room and approach the counter with the wretched shorts, your hands quivering, your heart thumping. You don’t know how to socially get out of this.
So you just give up and flee the scene, leaving the shorts behind.
You know you can’t live with this guilt and shame of sending a garment so gross into an innocent man’s tailoring queue. So you’ll spend the next two hours lurking in the neighborhood, pacing desperately while you try to harness the courage to go back and rescue the marred shorts, terrified that perhaps the tailor has already started the alterations and seen your shame.
You’ll start workshopping excuses to give the tailor about why you had the sudden change of heart regarding your shorts alterations.
When you finally get the courage to return to the shop two hours later, you expect to see the shorts on the sewing table, spread eagled with your shame on full display. You expect that when you walk in the tailor will shriek, “You are no longer welcome here! This lovely tailoring business where you felt comfortable for the first time is repulsed by you!” Your fantasy gift basket has gone up in flames.
You will give WAY too much information (notorious tactic of liars, liar) to the cashier. You apologize profusely (too profusely) and tell them you forgot that a friend needed the shorts for “a shoot”.
There is no one on this earth that would look at your rogue dad shorts and believe there is a time sensitive photo shoot relying on these shorts remaining intact. The blemished shorts would literally flatter no one, not even your made up model friend who is apparently responsible for bringing her own clothes to “shoots.”
The staff predictably will not have time to care about you, or your Revealing Intimate Stain, so they simply return the shorts, no questions asked. As you scurry out of the tailor, tail between your eager to stain legs, you look over your shoulder to gauge the employees’ reactions to you. No one has a look on their face of stifled laughter, the sort of laughter one might choke back if someone paraded around their place of work oblivious to the stains they were cloaked in. Perhaps your stain remains a secret after all.
You race home with the evidence and immediately hand wash the shorts. You dodged a real social bullet this week, Virgo!
Yesterday’s Horoscope made a series of preventable mistakes that necessitated the creation of a new instagram. Here is where you can find me now.