Call Me Color Challenged

I am not a clothes horse. No one would ever call me a fashionista or accuse me of stalking designers. Clothing is a practical matter and not something that I care all that much about. Oh I want to look nice. I pay attention, enough to notice whether my shirt is wrinkled or my pants stained.

But on the whole I just don’t care all that much about clothes. Comfort is my priority.

I am a Taurus and built like the bull. I frequently have a hard time buying off of the rack. I always have. When I weighed 205 I wore a 44 jacket and had a 33 inch waist. Sometimes I would have to get a 46. It always had to be tapered. Broad shoulders and a broad back with a flat stomach meant a trip to the tailor.

Pants weren’t much better. My legs have always been muscular, esspecially my thighs so I always needed an easy fit pair of jeans. Not to mention that Charles Barkley and I share the same style butt. It is great for boxing out, not so great for buying jeans off of the rack, especially when I need a 29″ inseam and most were 30″.

Now ten years later my waist has expanded to a 38. That means that pants are something like 38′ 34′. They don’t make 38′ 29′. Bastards. 😉 My jackets are not as problematic, the tapering isn’t as big an issue as it used to be, but I am working on it.

All this really means is that I am still built a bit like a truck but instead of being a small pickup it is a little bit more like a big rig. Whatever. Either I get serious about getting back into some semblance of shape or I don’t. My ego is big enough to be bruised and dented by comments about being well fed, but not so big that I have felt the need to change just to avoid those remarks. In part that is the advantage to having a large frame, it is easier to hide things.

Anyhoo.

I own at least nine white dress shirts and about a dozen others in various colors that I wear in conjunction with a half dozen pairs of pants. But the sad truth is that I sometimes wish that all I had were black slacks because I am “color challenged.”

Yes ladies, I am that guy who is not quite sure what goes with the blue shirt with the checks/stripes or whatever the hell you call that pattern.

I wear one of three pairs of black shoes even though I own a brown pair because I am never quite clear on how things should match. They look ok to me, but I suspect my own judgement so I tend to play it safe.

In many areas I am a creature of habit and routine and I tend to stay with what I know. But I do have an adventurous streak and it is not completely unusual for me to branch out. So I am taking inventory of my wardrobe and trying to figure out if there are new and exciting combinations to wear.

One other thought occurs to me as I ramble on here. It is tied into my post about cheap sunglasses. I always found it funny how the women of my life would look at the clothing and sunglasses that I had been given or gotten while shopping with another woman and snort derisively.

I never told them how I got those items, it is like they knew instinctively that there had been another woman and were marking their territory. Or so it seemed.

• Saved: Things About Jack