Back in a dress.

This was going to be my New Year's Eve dress with the addition of some fancier  tights and more exciting accessories. As it happens we are going to spend the last night of the year on a search for the perfect cheese steak. It's a long story. Luckily this dress can go either way, out for cocktails, or on the great cheese steak hunt.

While getting dressed today I was participating in a protracted interior dialogue session with my better self. After my two experiments with the 'dad jeans' (you can see the results here and here), my better self was wondering why I just couldn't let go of wanting to make these jeans work when the photographic evidence confirmed that they just did not look that great. My better self offered up the arguments that an outfit like today's is more flattering, more age appropriate, and even more comfortable (those jeans have an unfortunate tendency to crawl up my butt.)  My regular self grudgingly admitted that all those things are true, BUT, and she was adamant about this, she wasn't willing to stop experimenting with clothing, even if some of those experiments were destined to fail.

"And besides," Regular Self countered, "the dad jeans were not necessarily a failure. It was more like a C plus in a situation where you were hoping for an A. Trying new things is not always going to result awesome outfits, but if you don't try, how will you know?" My regular self is just as smart as my better self.

So here's where I'm at, as a result of all of the internal back and forth: Although I can see that oufits like the one I'm wearing today are perhaps better for a woman of my age, weight, and station, and even though I know that part of my reluctance to send the dad jeans back to the thrift store stems from the fact that they remind me of something my younger, thinner, funkier self would have ROCKED, I'm going to keep them (for now) because I'm not convinced that I need to let my funkier self go completely just yet. Maybe that's a mistake, but it's my mistake to make. I carry that brave, crazy, earnest, hopeful girl around inside me still and sometimes I need to let her wear the pants.