That's My Bix!

“I miss online journals.”

I hear that a lot. I miss them too.

I promised Bex that I’d write an old-fashioned blog post this month. It’s still this month, right?

I’m resisting starting this with “It’s been a year since our lives were basically rebooted.” It has, but let’s not turn this into a sappy weird thing, okay? You’re with me on this? Cool.

After what was basically the world’s worst winter and most wintery spring, we appear to have plunged headlong into summer. Solid slap your ass summer.

I like summer, but I have officially broken up with capri pants.

Why? Because there are exactly three body shapes that look good in capri pants – six-year-old girls who are just hitting that one growth spurt where their legs are way longer than their bodies; eighty-four-year-old women who usually wear elaborate printed capris paired with sleeveless button-down shirts, allowing their fabulous underarm wings to give a tremendous “Fuck you, buster” to the entire patriarchy; and finally, Audrey Hepburn. Well, and women who are proportioned like Audrey Hepburn.

Do you doubt me? People, for the love of god, look at Mario Batali. Now take away the beard and the Crocs and basically that’s what I look like in capris. My big ass makes an inverted triangle with the tiny-cropped hemline. And if that weren’t bad enough, the entire thing cuts eight inches or more off your legs visually, so if you’ve got a proportionately long torso (like I do) then you’re looking at an end game with no win in sight. Just stubby ridiculous legs and an inverted pyramid shape that shines a giant spotlight on your big ass.

To be clear, my big ass and I are friends, for the most part, which is why I protect it from its frenemy, capri pants.

(Can I vent a minute? I loved watching What Not To Wear when it first started, because I was like “Oh yes! HELLS to the yes! Sing it about the bras, sista!” but then they took a lady who was pretty curvy and put her into a Lane Bryant capri Garanimal situation and explained why it made her look more petite, and it was SO many shades of wrong. Like, they were showing the before and after and she CLEARLY looked better in the boot cut jeans! And I felt like everyone on the show had lost their ever-loving minds. Or maybe I was the crazy one? But no, I just think Lane Bryant sponsored the show and Clinton and Stacey were trying to justify what they were told to spin by the producers. Total man-behind-the-curtain moment and I never looked back.)

Now, shorts are another matter. I will tell you this thing: I was regularly ridiculed as a child for my appearance in shorts. It was so bad that I would wear jeans on 100 degree days, and then stay at my grandmothers’ houses, who each had air conditioning, where I’d have to listen to constant reminders that I’d feel better if I took off the jeans and put on shorts. I own probably four pairs of shorts and I can’t bring myself to wear them out in public (they are, however, fabulous to sleep in). Clearly, I have other issues at play, but suffice to say, shorts? Shorts are my trigger warning.

Also, what am I going to wear, short shorts? Bermuda shorts? There is no final strategy for shorts.

So that leaves one thing: Dresses.

I’m a fan of the dress. We’ve discussed this before, in fact. I always wear them whenever I go to Vegas, because it’s actually cooler than wearing shorts (less bunching of fabric around the waistline) and you can go out to dinner at a nice restaurant without feeling like a hobo.

But? I feel weird going to the farmer’s market in dresses. All it takes is one ill-timed gust of wind or one overly aggressive hornet and you’re resenting the entire dress industry for the rest of your life. Also, I have a hard time working outside in a dress, because when you bend over to pull a dandelion out of the flowerbeds my friend This Fat Ass likes to peek out and say “Hallo!”

So, I’m back to the entire short pants oeuvre. My favorites are actually shitty Avenue yoga pants that shrank in the dryer. They still fit everywhere else, but they just start shrinking upward. Eventually, they shrink so much that they transform from “high waters” to “cropped yoga pants”, in theory hitting at the perfect spot on the calf (instead of higher up at the widest part of the calf, which is just basically a loose capri and causes me to faint.) Of course, I could probably expedite this process by whipping out my sewing machine and actually hemming a pair of pants, but then I’d be freaking Donna Reed and THEN this blog post would be about finding the right gauge pearls to go with my shirtdresses.

By the way? I love a good shirtdress.

So, there’s an exception for the larger lady with the shorter pants, but it only works if you have a single color so that you make a long line that’s uninterrupted.

(Melissa McCarthy and I are very similarly proportioned (although she’s probably a size 16-18, whereas I’m a 26 and have a good six to eight inches of height on her). She’s kind of rocking the cropped pants here but she only gets away with that inverted triangle by making it into a very elongated shape. Here, she’s wearing almost the same pants, but visually it’s an entirely different story.)

I’m about thisclose to buying a skort, by the way. For some reason, in my head, skorts are okay but shorts are not. I…. I don’t understand why that is and yet it is so. It’s kind of like how it’s obscene to walk around outside in just a bra and panties, but it’s totally okay to wear even less fabric and covering on the beach in a bikini. Or how we get to see Amy Adams boobs in movies but I still haven’t seen Hugh Jackman’s junk. Not even once.

Okay, I’ll make you a deal: Hugh Jackman shows off his junk in a movie, I’ll reconsider my stand on the capri issue. Deal? No take backsies.

So tell me, ladies of That’s My Bix! land. What are your summer fashion strategies? How do you deal with the heat while still looking like the fresh fashionistas that you are? Or how do you NOT deal with it because life is too short to eschew comfort for style? Sound out in the comments! I need your coping strategies!