The me eye for the me guy

I’ve been trying to dress a bit better at work these days. Today I took it to the next level – a tie!

Vicki watches “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy”, and makes pointed comments towards me. But there are a lot of reasons why I’m a slob. First of all, I’ve got bad, bad, bad knees, and wearing dress shoes makes them a lot worse. I have to wear shoes with good support and which I can fit my orthotics in. And for the rest of me, I guess the main problem is that I don’t want to give up my ability to go “Oh shit, it’s 8:00 and I’ve got to be at an 8:30 meeting”, throw on some clothes, and make the meeting. Bad excuse, I know. The better excuse is that I have no sense of what goes with what.

It mostly started a couple of weekends ago when I did a whole bunch of laundry and found all my semi-good shirts – some of them hanging in the basement closet, some of them on what I’d formerly considered Vicki’s side of the bedroom closet. For two and a half weeks now I’ve worn “business casual”, Dockers and collared shirts instead of my usual blue jeans and denim shirts. It felt pretty good to be a little better dressed up. And mostly I made my morning meetings.

But then this weekend I kind of went a little crazy – in Oshawa I found a men’s store that was going out of business and bought a bunch of shirts that were marked down a lot. Two of the shirts were boxed sets – shirt, tie and tie clip. Hey, I don’t even have to figure out what goes with what! Today I wore one of them to work.

First off, the problem – the shirt didn’t fit extremely well. It’s an XL, and the collar was too small to do up, and the sleeves where a hair too short. I probably need an XLT or a 19″ collar in a “long” fit. So it wasn’t extremely comfortable. Also, ties always end up too short on me – if I tie them so the front part is long enough, the back end is just a tiny little stub. I think that’s because I like to have the knot symmetrical – I’ve seen lots of people tie them so that one side is flatter than the other. Oh, a bit of googling seems to indicate that what I’m talking about is the difference between a full Windsor and a half Windsor. Maybe I should try one of the other knots.

But in spite of the mild discomfort, it actually felt pretty good. If only I didn’t have scraggly hair and an untrimmed beard.