Dressing for Success: Harder Than it Sounds!

My boyfriend, Joe, recently started his first real job.  His usual outfit of t-shirt and jeans or t-shirt and basketball shorts was no longer going to cut it thanks to a laid back, but still business casual, dress code.  In the past couple weeks, he's built up a respectable base wardrobe with collared shirts and khakis.  Jeans are ok, so our next mission is to find him some better fitting jeans, but that man is impossible to buy pants for.

Every week day, I get to watch him go off to work dressed like the brand new yuppie he is.  And then I look down at what I'm wearing.  And I get sad.

See, working in a chemistry lab, your dress code is:  long pants and no open toed shoes/sandals.  There's really no point to dressing nicely.  With my luck, the first day I wore a nice new shirt, I'd probably spill acid all over myself.  Not that I've ever done that so far (knock on wood) but that's just how life goes.  So 95% of the time, I'm in a t-shirt and jeans.  But come on, I'm closing in on 25.  I shouldn't be shopping in the junior's section anymore!  There's gotta be some sort of compromise between looking nice but still casual enough for a lab, right?

What I'd love to do is box up half of my current wardrobe or more, donate it, and go on a massive shopping spree.  I don't know quite where I'd go, though.  Kohl's and JCP are two of my go-to cheap clothing stores, but then I have to deal with the fact that if I try to shop in the "misses" section, I'm pretty much limited to styles which come in an x-small.  I'm not trying to brag here.  I don't normally complain about "vanity sizing" but it's a bit ridiculous.  I don't care much for my own sake because I can almost always find something that fits, but I am by no means "extra small."  There are people out there who are much smaller than me - what do they do when they want to shop for something outside the junior's section?

Sorry, tangent aside, I just want to find a way to dress a little nicer than I currently do without having to worry incessantly about ruining the clothes in lab.  Well, I say that, but here's what I bought on my last shopping trip:

- yoga shorts (They're longer than the ones I currently use as pajamas, making them acceptable for public!)
- crop top (it's summer and it's hot, wah wah)
- muscle tank with neon rainbow zebra on it (wah wah hot summer, plus gym shirt..?)
(all from the junior's section)

So, as it stands, I still haven't solved the problem of what to wear to work.  I'm going to keep trying, and in the meantime, I'll still just be wearing band shirts and my rainbow of v-necks...

Why I Run

As my inaugural post, I thought I'd start off with one of my newer hobbies - running.  This is especially timely, as I'll be running my first 5K next weekend.  I'll be participating in the Color Run, which isn't timed, so it doesn't really count in my mind.  However, it's the first time I'll be involved in any sort of organized running event, so it's still exciting to me.  Plus, you get covered in colorful powder, and I can get on board with that!

Now, if you know me, this may confuse you.  For most of my life, running has been one of my least favorite forms of exercise.  So why do I run, you ask?  There's a variety of reasons I started, and keep running, so here they are.

Let's start with the most obvious - exercise is healthy.  Life expectancy is always increasing due to awesome advances in medicine and science.  If I'm going to live for a hundred years or so, I'd like to enjoy all that time.  I want to be able to take care of myself and keep doing the things I love.  Sure, by the time I'm 100 they may be able to transfer my "consciousness" into a robot body or whatever, but the idea of that weirds me out, so I better take care of the body I have now.

Of course, there are plenty of ways to exercise, so why run?  Turns out, a lot of forms of exercise require some sort of equipment.  For running, you just need your feet.  Well that and a pair of shoes.  I'm a very casual runner, so I don't need, or want, to have all the latest running gadgets and gear.  I have a pair of running shoes, but not the kind that cost hundreds of dollars.  They don't give me blisters or anything, so I think that's good enough.  If I became a serious runner, I might have to spend a little more on shoes.  But for now, running is easily one of the cheapest forms of exercise I can do.

Here's the most important reason:  Running burns more calories per unit of time than just about anything.  Swimming is also up there - think Michael Phelps and his 10,000 calorie training diet.  However, I suck at swimming even more than I suck at running, and I don't want to deal with pools and chlorine in my hair, etc.  The problem with life is that food is delicious.  I want to be able to eat yummy things, and sometimes I want to eat more food than I should.  By running, I can eat more food and not get fat from it.  That counts as a win in my book!