The insanity of women's sizes

Allow me to rant for a minute. If you have read Sherri's recent blog post, you learned about the awful experience of trying on clothes in a department store dressing room. It's a peculiar form of torture for women, as all the mirrors are designed by carnival workers especially talented at distortion, and the lighting was developed by sadistic surgeons using laser technology to create actual bursts of greenish-grey light that illuminates your every pore. We've all faced it.

Dressing rooms are bad enough. The other part of the insanity is the sizing in women's clothing. Oh lord, the sizing. The variation between clothing designers, the attempt to fit everyone into the S-M-L-XL model, and especially the "vanity" sizing that seems to go along with very expensive stuff in an attempt to get some poor schlub to spend $$$ for a size 4. You're petite, but only if you are between 4'11" and 5'3". If you are 5'4", you are average, just like someone who is 5'8". WTF??? Just pulling a pair of pants off the rack isn't enough -- now we have to obsess over petite, average, tall, apple-shaped, pear-shaped, fitted, relaxed, curvy, boot-cut, athletic, full-figured, busty, zippered, button-fly, racerback, prepubescent, military-cut, clown-sized midget circus trapeze-flying..... OK, I exaggerated those last few, but not by much.

There is so much competition between women when it comes to sizes. Why do we do it to ourselves? I went shopping a few days ago, like Sherri, because it was fun to get a couple of new things for spring after being an "official" Project graduate. Whoopee! I lost 14 pounds, surely I'd be down a size or two.

I tried on a few things. Some smaller things, some not. I was disappointed that I wasn't a full size down, but I haven't shopped for pants in awhile. Then it struck me that again, I was focusing on numbers that don't matter -- numbers that I DO NOT WANT to matter anymore. As was every woman around me in the dressing room.

I overheard two women in the next booth talking about their sizes. Two very petite, lovely women who may or may not have been best buddies but seemed to be in a tiny snit about their bodies and the clothes they were shopping for. One of them was complaining that the pants she was trying on, a size 6, were "just hanging on me. Just HANGING. I swear, I need a size 4 or I'll look like a COW." The other one commiserated with her on the difficulty of finding pants that were "small enough but still long enough for me. I had to buy a size ZERO the other day and I KNOW I'm NOT a size zero. I'm so pudgy I can barely walk!"

Can you begin to imagine my thoughts, as I pulled my size 8s over the gelatinous columns of flesh known as my legs.

Seriously, it took all my yogic calm not to speak my thoughts out loud, which were basically "what the fuck size do you need to be? A size 00? Size 000? Size 12 in children's clothes, size 6x, size 18-36 months? Do you want to be infant-sized, or would that still be too chubby? Maybe you'd be happier if you were an actual zygote? Would that be thin enough for you to actually stop bitching?"

I thought those awful thoughts, knowing that a very pissed-off Jesus is up there listening and thinking "Oy, do I need a bong hit. Why did I give people numbers when they do this to themselves? Sheesh."

Eventually I bought a couple of cute new tops that look very nice on my much fitter body, and I vowed to stop looking at the size every five minutes. Just don't get me started on swimsuit sizes, OMG.....