Ladies and Gentlemen, I have a problem. Before I start this post, however, let me just put this out there for my friend Pitchit: You go to Hell! I’m not metrosexual!

I don’t even know where to start. When I came back from North Carolina I didn’t think I had that much of a hard time moving my clothes. In her zealous, whirling rampage to pack up the apartment Angela did her best to neatly put most of my clothes in packing containers. Well, more like stuff them in garbage bags. It did the job so I can’t complain. The problem stems from what happened when I got home.

I have no clue how it happened but the amount of clothes that I had moving back home somehow doubled from when I moved away. I now have umpteen dozen pairs of dress pants, about a dozen suits, and…gulp…more shoes than my wife. At last count I had over 30 pairs. Which means that there would be casualties in my closet. Unfortunately, that meant items such as my bowling shirts. My bowling shirts like my precious Simpsons shirt that had the Pin Pals logo emblazoned across the back (click the images!)

It used to be that I would wear these shirts to work all the time. Of course, this was during the dot com boom of the 90’s and early 2000. This was also when I had more of a creative bent to the work I was doing – Michael the Rogue Designer/Project Lead/SysAdmin/Security Wonk/Programmer/Playboy. It was a time when I didn’t care at all what people thought of me.

It is weird how things change.

I know that some of you will say something like “SELL OUT!” or “YOU’VE DESTROYED YOUR SOUL!”. My rebuttal? Kiss my ass. I’ve learned to embrace my love of clothing. Angela might say I’ve embraced it too much. Today, while I was walking to my car after work, I looked at my clothes and sighed. I had a sand colored suit on, brown shoes and a brown belt. I kept thinking that my purse…er…briefcase didn’t match my other accessories because it is black. At that point I considered asking Angela if she wanted to go to Coach with me so that I could buy a brown briefcase.

It is a sickness. I didn’t have any second thoughts about buying another one of these but in brown.

So I’m packing away all of my bowling shirts. For now, no more funky shirts with flames, dragons, tribal decoration, chinese symbols, palm trees, martini glasses and the like. They’ll be tucked away nice and neat while I fill two closets and another bedroom with my suits, shoes, belts, neckties, cufflinks, collar stays, etc.

Who knows? Maybe this is just another cyclical phase and someday I’ll pack all the suits and stuff away and wear my gold old friends again. Ugh. At the moment the thought of looking like the ‘old guy at the club/bar trying to look cool’ makes me feel oogy.