Your turkey sub, your clothes, the fact that a woman of your resources and position lives like some boxcar hobo, or maybe it’s the fact that while I’m saying all this, you have a piece of lettuce stuck in your hair.

Here is a thing I do: Whenever I am about to go out for the evening -- generally with Mr. Gleemonex, although sometimes with "the gals" because in my Suburban Mom lifestyle I have to invest social time on my kids' behalf so Ava Gracelynne and Tallulah Stringbean and Kal-El Darth Transformer, et. al., will invite my chirren to their parent-child slumber parties (1:1 supervision, can't be too careful) and "fun" soccer-based outings at some steaming sunscraped park or whatever it is instead of shunning them because I'm a social zero -- anyway, whenever I'm about to go out for the evening, I realize I have a closet full of:

• Office clothes I don't wear anymore and wouldn't even if I started back at an office tomorrow because they're all a minimum of four years old at this point and tbh mostly about 6-7 years old
• Evening dresses, like you'd wear to a fancy wedding
• Mom Outfits for a Hot Arid Climate (e.g. J. Jill tank tops, J. Crew chino shorts, stuff from Eddie Bauer)
• Jeans
• T-shirts with words on them (band names, Vandelay Industries, RBG, etc.)
• A shit-ton of workout clothes & athletic bras

What I lack is: going-out clothes, e.g. the kind of top a grown woman wears out with some skinny jeans, like kinda sexy but not trying to be 21 years old, a little more special than plain knit stuff, you know what I mean. I ain't got any of that.

So what I do the day after this inevitable fail is, I go online and look for stuff like what I'm picturing in my head. I troll the sales, I load up carts with this that and the other hilariously aspirational item (while my brain screams GIMME A FUCKING BREAK YOU KNOW YOU CAN'T WEAR A BRA WITH THAT), and I buy -- or should I say, rent -- a bunch of stuff. Then it comes to me, trickling in over the next couple of weeks, and I try it on, and go "UGH NO," and send it all back. I only buy with free shipping and returns, so I'm only out the $$ temporarily (plus also the ass-pain of packaging it all back up and filling out those stupid forms you're supposed to include with the return), but it is a dispiriting process that does cost me, mentally. Christ I wish I knew someone who liked shopping and would do 100% of it for me ...