"New"

I made a big commitment today.

I cut the tags off my washcloths.

Yes, this is stupid, but somehow I didn't consider the washcloths I bought, that I use to wash my face, to be mine.  Mine enough to have the right to cut off the tags, at least.  But today as I was folding the laundry, the little tags sticking out of every single washcloth in the pile seemed to taunt me.  I have scissors.  I have power.  So I cut them off.

All of them.

This might be a symptom of a larger issue I have of sensing the age of soft goods.  I've had these washcloths for months, ever since I started doing the oil cleansing method and found it disturbing to scrub my face with Pixar characters (Wall-E, get deeper into my pores!).  And recently I've realized that clothes I consider "new" are three to four years old.  I looked at my Facebook photos and saw that I'm wearing the same three jackets in all of them. 

Part of my problem with clothes is that I've been following the advice to periodically go through your clothes and get rid of everything you haven't worn in a year - but I haven't been shopping to make up for it.  So I have one drawer of public-eligible shirts ("top drawer" shirts) and one drawer of jeans, a foot of closet space of work shirts, around a foot and a half of skirts I can't wear to work because I'd splash chemicals on my legs, and those three jackets. Three other drawers are yardwork and gym t-shirts ("lower drawer" shirts), pajamas, underwear, and socks.  The rest of my minimal closet space is slacks I only wear at conferences and sweatshirts.

I've tried.  In the past few weeks I've gone to my normal stores (Target, JC Penney, Sears, Kohls) both here and in the East Bay, and I've found a few things.  An embellished t-shirt (for the top drawer), a sweatshirt jacket (simply because it was fuzzy).  Ah dang it, is that it? Didn't I buy anything else?  No no, I bought two blouses at Target.  But I did figure out I purchase around 3% of what I try on.  Or, I have to try on around 33 items to find one I want to buy.  And that doesn't even account for everything I look at in the store before even selecting those 33 things to go into the dressing room with.

I made that one clerk at Target really sad.

I should get a button that says "I'm sorry I'm doing this but it wouldn't be necessary if your store used consistent sizing."