Cute Outfits for Winter When You Are Always Freezing

A subtitle for this would be: I am from Florida and Never Learned How to Dress for Warmth

My fatal flaw as a person is that I am a Floridian by birth. Considering that I never experienced a real winter until I was 19, I have no idea how to look like a normal person during the winter. AI had an endless assortment of summery outfits, because in Palm Beach, it is perfectly acceptable to wear Lilly Pulitzer in any season. I sure that there are people in SoFlo who learned how to add fall colors and silhouettes into their wardrobe, but I spent most of my adolescence judging people who whipped out the Ugg boots the moment that the temperature dipped below 65 degrees.

Now that I am an adult with a real job, not only do I have to venture into the winter cold every day as I commute to the office (with a broken window that will not roll up, no less), I also have to look professional. Gone are the days when I could wear fleece lined leggings and a bigass coat over a triple layer of sorority sweatshirts.

If you grew up in a land that had actual seasons, you may now take this time to laugh at me. If you are just as clueless as I was, you can take this time to learn along with me as I attempt to battle the cold. Considering that the low in Dallas tonight is 25°, I think that this is pretty fitting.

As we eased into the season of temperature dropping, I wanted to find a way to still wear my summery dresses while making sure I didn't die of frostbite. If the dress is not too thin of a material, you can easily layer it over a warmer turtleneck or even a sweater.

This is a floral dress from Target that I never had an occasion to wear during the summer. It has a cool detail of a handkerchief hem, so it almost counts as a midi length. The mock neck I am wearing was a hand-me-down, and with the proper black coat, this look was warm enough to venture outside of my apartment. I topped it off with my trusty, square-toed ankle boots from the deep archives of Madewell (spoiler alert: you're going to see these a lot. I have yet to find a good arsenal of winter appropriate shoes that are not heels). I topped this off with geometric earrings that I had painted black in a fit of DIY-ing, and very thick socks.

The secret of this next look is that it is only kind of warm, which is great if you want to embrace the season but the weather won't really cooperate.

This look was perfect for last week when Texas weather was fickle and it was still 60° outside. I thrifted this bomber jacket and it is not very thick at all. Luckily, it does have pockets, and the gorgeous embroidery makes it worth it. I sacrificed my hands for this look. Jackets are pretty easy to thrift if you are not particularly squeamish, and if you plan in advance, you can find really good deals on them at the beginning of summer when everyone has abandoned their warm clothes for seasonal appropriate beachwear. I got this jacket in July and did not find a chance to wear it until October.

If you think you recognize this dress, it's because I wrote about it in my post "How to Get Away with Wearing Pajamas to Work" and it's technically a sleepshirt. It's steadily becoming an essential part of my wardrobe rotation considering it is comfy as hell and really easy to style. I tried my hand at pattern mixing with the black and white socks that I let peek out of the top of my ankle boots. It's that easy, folks.

The most important thing about this look is that it is sort of inspired by Regina George.

If you recall from the scene in Mean Girls where Cady meets the Plastics for the first time, Regina is wearing a V-neck sweater over a button down with a popped collar. This is only vaguely inspired by that look as I am too dignified to pop my collar. I thought of this outfit while watching an amazing video from Vanity Fair where Mary Jane Fort, the movie's costume designer, explained her thought process behind some of the key looks. She calls this Regina's "power suit," and I highly recommend watching it.

This sweater is one of the first articles of clothing my mom bought me when we discovered I would be moving to a state that sort of had seasons, and I layered it over a classic white button down. It's from Madewell, because that is the kind of person I am (I bought this specifically for a job interview, and for the two interviews that I have done while wearing this top, I have been offered the job. It is magic!). I'm wearing this with my favorite high rise jeans and my Steve Madden over-the-knee boots which are the footwear loves of my life and which were also a gift from my mom. Moral of the story is that my mom furnished most of my winter wardrobe and for that (and also for giving birth to me), I owe her my life.

One of the things I find the most difficult about styling myself is trying to play with new silhouettes. I tend to keep it safe with fitted jeans, but these wide leg crop jeans are my favorite way to wander out of my comfort zone.

If every single article of clothing here looks familiar to you, you're right, it is because I have literally already talked about them in this exact post. That's the secret y'all. You don't have to have the vast wardrobe of an Instagram influencer, you just have to tweak tiny details to keep from outfit repeating. The jeans stand out enough that it doesn't matter if I'm just wearing a boring black mock neck. If you want to keep your ankles warm unlike me, you could easily wear tall socks or tights that will also add a pop of personality, or you could just wear tall boots and hide them under the leg of the pant.

My last look for this post is my favorite, since I never get to play with sleeve silhouettes in the other seasons. I'm sure I could, but I've never been clever enough to consider it.

This is another Madewell sweater from last year, and it is super cozy. They sold this as a "balloon sleeve sweater," but as I know now from my copy of The Fairchild Fashion Dictionary, it is actually a bishop sleeve. It is a cousin of the "imbecile sleeve," a term that is one of my favorite discoveries of working in fashion, pertaining to a really fat balloon sleeve that ends at a narrow cuff. It is at times called the "Gigot sleeve" and the "leg of mutton sleeve," and it is also a big mood.

Since the sweater is such a statement with sleeves that make me comparable to a governing leader of the clergy, I kept the bottom simple with black jeans and my trusty-over-the-knee boots. Apparently I only have two pairs of boots in my preferred rotation for winter. The earrings happen to be the exact shade of red because Madewell loves their signature shade of poppy red, and considering that I had seven different shades of red lipstick, I was able to find a color that matched perfectly to top off the look.

I'm doing my best to survive this winter season. We will see if I am a frozen popsicle by the end. The delicate line I am attempting to toe is of finding looks that are still cute when you get inside and take off your big coat.

Bonus content for those of you who stuck around this far:

This is what I actually look like when I drive in the cold with a broken window. I attach this massive furry hood and zip the hood up to cover the bottom half of my face. Now accepting recommendations for a good mechanic in Dallas.

Being Broke and In Your Twenties Is No Excuse for Not Cleaning Your Apartment

I have a cold take that no one asked me for: Just because you are broke and a twenty-something does not mean you are excused for having a disgusting apartment. Everyone can tidy up, no matter how wealthy they are.

I’m not talking about people in a depressive episode who don’t feel like leaving their bed or leaving their room, or parents with children, or people with long work hours who don’t have the time or energy to vacuum after a double shift. The transgressor is the usual suspect—it seems that once again, I am mad at straight, young men.

Has this ever happened to you: You go to the residence of a gentleman, be he a casual friend or a potential love interest, only to find out that they have never once emptied the dishwasher? You find your attraction for this person slipping away as you wade through piles of dirty clothes in a low lit room with only a single poster on the wall. He suggests you open a bottle of wine, which you drink out of questionably clean coffee mugs since all of his wine glasses are stacked in the sink. Under the guise of “freshening up” you escape to the bathroom to reconsider your decision, only to discover that he has never cleaned his toilet and that there is only one square of toilet paper left. You text your best friends to help you weigh out whether getting laid is really worth the possibility of getting tetanus from the exposed nails poking out of his poorly constructed headboard. Results of the poll are inconclusive.

This has become an instance of increasing regularity in our unfortunate world of modern dating and friendship. If I had a dollar for every time that exact scenario has occurred in my personal life, I would be able to afford to put guac on my Chipotle burritos. It’s not just dating, either. Every male-inhabited dorm room or apartment I ever entered in my college years was just vaguely sticky, as if they had never discovered the joy of Clorox wipes.

Perhaps it is because young men are so often coddled when it comes to splitting labor in the household as children— an article in The New York Times from last year stated that “Although there are a few signs that the gap is shrinking, a variety of data shows that girls still spend more time on household chores than boys do. They are also paid less than boys for doing chores and have smaller allowances.” However, I grew up with only sisters, and my dad loved cleaning more than any other human I have ever met. Given that this article is more than a year old and without a subscription to the Times I can only click on it once without hitting the paywall, can I really stake my claim upon it? It seems that I will have to base my conclusion on personal experience without peer revision. This is a blog, people. Nobody is here to edit me.

Whether it is because household chores are unevenly split among children, or because Home Ec no longer exists and thus no one is learning these skills anymore, or because few 20-something cis men have aspirational Pinterest boards about apartment décor, the disgusting apartment epidemic seems to be sweeping the nation’s straight boys. If I have to enter the home of another man where my shoes are virtually shellacked to the floor with sticky beer juice, I will light it on fire. Good thing I am swearing off of dating for the present moment.

You don’t have to be a woman or love interior design to have an apartment that smells pleasant. You don’t have to be able to afford an expensive one bedroom in the city to have a residence that is not terrifying. You don’t even have to have a housekeeper or a regular cleaning service. The generic paper towels at Target will do the trick, y’all.

At the end of my senior year of college, I lived in a disgusting apartment. The floors were uneven, and we had roaches (shout out to my landlady for calling multiple exterminators even when my roommate said she had never seen any bugs because she didn’t want them to come in and find her illegal dog she had smuggled in). But even though the walls were barely soundproof, and we had no furniture, I still kept my side of the apartment clean. I put my dishes in the dishwasher instead of allowing them to pile up in the sink for a week and a half. I had to keep my cat’s litter box in my tiny room, but I still swept on the regular to keep litter from sticking underfoot. I always flushed the toilet. It’s the little things.

It’s okay if you can’t afford expensive furniture. Your apartment does not have to look like a West Elm catalogue. It just has to be free of accumulated debris. Even if you live in a tiny shithole and you don’t want to spend money on furniture given that you frequently move, you can still at least empty the trash before you have company to at least create the illusion that your apartment is not a hotbed of microbial activity.

If you can’t set up a weekly cleaning schedule or at least get a toilet brush for the bathroom like a functioning adult, you can at least tidy up when you are expecting guests. Do what you want on your own time. But don’t expect me to look over your faults just you’re a busy twenty-something with no money. I am too. But I still clean the moldy fruit out of my refrigerator every once in a while.

So, to any straight, cis dudes who might have had the misfortunate of stumbling upon this aggressive rant: If you want to decrease the chances of your date sprinting out of your house at full speed because they almost contracted rabies from a rogue rat, consider cleaning up after yourself. Or, perhaps, when you text a chick sayying “im bored come over,” take a sweep of the premises and gather the litter of fast food wrappers that has collected in every available empty space. Do whatever you want on your own time. But if you have guests and especially a guest of the romantic variety, do the considerate thing and hide the mess. It’s simple manners.

I think it should be in the guidebook for millennials and Gen Z: If you can’t keep clean on the regular, at least pretend like you do for guests. Not only does it make it less likely that visitors will talk shit to their friends, it asserts that you cared enough about that person to make an effort.

If you can’t muster up the energy to do any of this, consider the classic cop out phrase that suggests this mess is a rare anomaly: “I’m sorry about the mess, I didn’t have time to clean.” I’ll at least appreciate the lie.

Can Tattoos Empower Your Mental Health?

Every time I go through a depressive episode, I have an intense urge to permanently alter my body with tattoos. Perhaps it is the feeling of permanence on such a fleeting, impermanent vessel. Perhaps I'm looking for a way to ground myself in this life. More likely it is that need to feel control over my body. People with depression are often likely to make a drastic change when faced with a down wave, like chopping off their hair, which I have certainly tried before. I personally am a big fan of using tattoos to empower myself against my mental illness.

One of the most overpowering depressive episodes of my life came in the first semester of my senior year of college. It was the longest and most enduring bout of depression I had ever faced. I always considered myself a "high-functioning depressive," always powering through the worst of it. But my life came to a grinding halt in September 2018. No longer exuberant, I struggled to drag myself out of bed and didn't want to talk to my friends. I didn't have the energy to go to class, to participate in my sorority, to wash my hair. I barely had the energy to be alive, to be frank. I was consumed with thoughts of death and decay, obssively Googling suicide methods and attempting to talk myself out of the idea. It was the lowest I had been in more than a year, and it wouldn't go away.

Depression is fun because even though you logically know that you very much do want to be alive, your depressed brain is often much more convincing. When I am in my right mind, I am thankful for my life. I am grateful that I overcame so much trauma to live longer than I ever thought I would. I desperately looked for a way to pull myself out of what seemed like an endless slog.

A little more than a year earlier, in another depressive episode (they seem to always hit me in September, which is... interesting) I poured over Rupi Kaur's new book the sun and her flowers. One poem stuck out to me in particular.

The idea that "healing is everyday work" really stayed with me. Every time that I was convinced it was time to give up, I forced myself to remember how hard I had worked on my healing thus far. It wouldn't be like this forever, and I had to remember that I had survived through much worse before. Healing doesn't just "finish," especially if you have a chronic mental illness that essentially attacks you from the inside. I'll never be done with depression. I have to work to heal every single day from here on out. I wanted to have a constant reminder of that.

In an intoxicating mix of impulsivity and the blind support of sisters, I got that tattoo while in Indiana for my cousin's wedding. I suggested to my sisters that we go wild and get tattoos, and since we are a very suggestible group and they wanted an excuse to get tattoos, we all went to a tattoo shop in Indianapolis the morning before the reception.

We did not tell our parents, and we all left with the permanent (non-matching) memory on our bodies. They made me go first. The resultant feeling was one of surging empowerment. I might not be better yet, but dammit, I was going to commit to getting better all the time.

In a way, the tattoo was a promise to myself. I was not going to kill myself. It would be extremely ironic if I was found dead in some backwater motel room with a tattoo about emotional healing. It gave me a swell of motivation that forced me through the next few months. I don't care if quote tattoos are "cheesy" or that every other white woman who gets a tattoo in her 20s puts it on her ribs. It's a lasting vow that I am working very hard on keeping.

Now, as I attempt not to succumb to a deep, post-graduation depression, I am fixated on the idea of getting another one. If I had unlimited money, there would be a series of mantras running down my ribs. But while I do love my tattoo, I wish I could see it easier. I think it is a good idea to not ink visible skin until you are certain that it won't impact your career or life goals. But that stigma is fading. And though it is a reminder to myself, it's not like I can glance down at it as a reminder. I'm only able to see it if I'm topless or just happen to have a dress with strategic cutouts.

But while I just want to cover my wrists and forearms with endless ink, I know myself, and I know that I am very flighty. I didn't want to get a super visible tattoo if I was going to hate it. I also tend to dream up tattoo ideas when I am at a terrible place in my life, so I want to make sure that I still like it when I am out of that place. If I was tattooed every time I had that impulse, I would have a litany of depressing quotes, like "beauty means the scent of roses and then the death of roses" by Fitzgerald, or "The blaze, the splendor, and the symmetry, I cannot see – but darkness, death and darkness," from Keats' Hyperion.

I chose Inkbox to test out my idea, which has proved to be a semi-success. The idea is solid, but my execution of it was... flawed, to say the least.

The idea comes from a sketch in my journal of flowers sprouting out of a ribcage. It says something about entropy and growth that fascinates me. And in my head it symbolizes growing beauty coming out of pain. I got a precut ribcage from Inkbox, called "Inhala" and added the flowers myself with their freehand ink. And while my execution is very poor-- I have shaky hands and never should have been trusted to draw, plus I smudged it the moment I put on my seatbelt in my car-- I'm vibing hard with the idea. Inkbox supposedly stays on for about two weeks, so we will see if staring at this for two weeks will convince me whether or not it should be permanent. If this was permanent, I would want to smaller and more detailed. But I'm getting a chance to try it, and that's what I appreciate. I'd much rather spend the money on the ink that will fade if I hate it than shell out a large sum of money for something I regret.

Maybe I'll check back in two weeks to see if this should be a permanent addition. Opinions should be postmarked and sent to me directly at 100 Charming Avenue. Virtual comments will not be considered. If your opinion is strong enough to put in the mail, then and only then will I trust you.