Use it up, Wear it Out, Make it Do, or Do Without

Unfortunately, this is a different age. This is not the age my grandfather,the hoarder, grew up in. I do not want to keep using my laundry bag with the large hole and pokey-out wire. I will, but I grudge it. I do not want to use my dirty, holey tennis shoes. Well, I don't use them, actually, since I don't go to the gym. So never mind. I do not want to wear the sweatshirt that is uncomfortable at the collar and has a stain on it and isn't flattering. Ah ha! Pay-dirt.

Early in my life I had to wear hand-me-downs. Cheap is what mattered, not style or comfort. Then I got into comfort and I was always in trouble for lack of style. Baggy sweatshirts did not impress my mom. Why don't you wear something more flattering? Of course, now that my body is not-so-little I wish I had taken advantage of it, but I thought I was covering up my "fat" as it was back then. And as soon as I wanted style I could not afford it, my body would not allow it, and it turned out that style, comfort, and affordability were long estranged friends or, rather, sworn enemies.

Use it up? I'm trying to think of something I wouldn't normally use up but now do because it's uneconomical not to. I suppose I use stale flour, but that's only because you can't really get fresh flour in this humid state. OH and I definitely used some not super-fresh eggs in a cake recently. And as long as we're actually supposed to be talking about style here, I definitely use makeup products longer than I probably should because I can't afford them. It's too bad, too, since makeup and accessories are the only flattering things left to me.

Wear it out? My socks have holes in them that, in a previous life, would have had my mother tossing them in the garbage. My underwear has strings of elastic hanging pathetically by my thighs as if to beg the question: which has lost more youthful tautness and sex appeal?

Make it do? I stopped buying expensive Nordstrom bras and Target was getting me by for a while. Lately, though, my shirt is all kinds of not-human shapes in that general area and I spend half my day discreetly or not-so-discreetly yanking the straps back onto my shoulders. I blame the notcheap, notexpensive bra from the Gap. Oh, and my size and shape. Oh, and the fact that I have to wear one at all. Sure, I'm making it do. But it ain't perty.

Do Without. I don't even want to talk about it. I don't want to talk about what I do without that I shouldn't. I don't want to talk about what I should do without that I get anyway. I simply do not want to talk about it. The end.


I'm not going to be my grandfather. I will not save the rings from around the cap on the milk jug. I will not wash ziplock bags or flatten foil so they can be used again. (I think that means I will also not be my father.) I am not going to save the condiment packages from the restaurant so that I can save on groceries. My life is already run by this thing, whatever it is, in too many ways big and small.

I'm not saying that these are not good things to live by. I'm simply saying that I would like to be skinny and have money to buy things to dress my skinny self and not have to worry about saving milk-jug rings.

Not that I have any milk.