The Shirt Off My Back

I really don’t know what to say.

But it is my intent to use this forum to say it anyway.  What have I got to lose?  And I’m assuming you have nothing better to do since you clicked on this post to read it.  That will be a lesson to you … that in the future when you see one of my insipid, meaningless posts pop up, you can just keep on scrolling down to the next post that is monetized and is literally selling you the shirt off their backs.

Speaking of shirts, let’s see if any of you have this same problem.

I have two shirts in my closet that are very similar.  They are both dress shirts (or “business casual” shirts).  They are both striped with thin blue stripes (standard issue corporate world pattern).  They are both button down shirts.  They both look very much the same (i.e corporate drone uniform).  The only difference is that one of them fits me really well, and the other one fits me like it had been tailored to fit someone with a third arm and two very distinctive humps just behind each shoulder.  When I wear the second shirt, I spent most of the day trying to wrangle it to lay flat against my skin to keep the front of the shirt at the neck actually facing front and not over my shoulder.

Sometimes I grab the second shirt in the morning in my early morning fog and put it on.  I usually don’t realize this until I’m at work.

At first I get mad at myself for grabbing the wrong shirt.  “Of all the rotten luck!” I say to myself later in the day as I am wrestling with the shirt for control of which direction the shirt faces.  “Leave it to me to put on the shirt that doesn’t fit.”

And then it hits me.

Why do I even have the second shirt in my closet?  I knew a year ago that it fit me hideously.  I could just donate the shirt to the Salvation Army and I would never, ever again grab the wrong shirt and put it on in the morning.

But the shirt was a gift.

NOW you see the complication, don’t you?

First, there is my own guilt.  How can I possibly get rid of a shirt that someone bought for me, thinking that I would look nice in it?  It doesn’t matter that I look like Quasimodo trying to free himself from a strait jacket every time I put it on.

Secondly, there is the midnight mission to slip the shirt unobserved into pile of things that are slated to be donated to the Salvation Army.

But I am greeted the next morning with a tapping foot, an arched eyebrow, and she shirt, now retrieved from the pile.

“I thought you liked this shirt.”

“Oh, I do!” I say enthusiastically, choosing to play the “ignorantly unaware” card.

“Then why is it in the donation pile?”

“What?”  I asked, feigning shock and disbelief.  I pretend to examine the shirt closely.   “Oh!  This shirt!  You know what?  I think somehow the wrong shirt ended up in the donate pile.”

And that is how my favorite shirt came to end up in the Salvation Army pile, while the Hideous Strait Shirt of Doom ended up in my closet in my regular rotation.