Hey Little Child

I went to school for nineteen years (excluding pre-school and kindergarten). Every single one of those years was spent deep in the bosom of Mother Church. Yep. I'm a Catholic school kid.

I spent the first twelve of those years in a uniform. No one knows more about the properties of natural and synthetic clothing fibers than a Catholic school kid. When I started grade school, all the girls wore polyester jumpers with fake brass buttons and big, stiff patches with the school emblem and a Peter Pan collar polyester shirt underneath. I remember as my sister and I got chubbier beyond our first grade years, the buttons started to strain a little and eventually to pop off. My mother and grandmother got so sick of mending that they taught us to sew buttons. The first rule of Catholic school is you only get one uniform. The price per square inch of those things is indexed to the gold standard. This is my jumper, this is my blouse. There are many other uniforms like it, but this one is mine. Don't get me started on the shoes.

Then there were kilts. Kilts are the hairshirt of the chubby girl world, which is weird as they were imagined as a solution to the problem of kids growing out of their criminally overpriced uniforms, but make a young lady in her awkward phase look like she was wearing a pleated bath towel around her waist. Non-chubby girls fight an entirely different kilt battle -- the art and artistry of skirt rolling. When your mom refused to hem your skirt to an appropriately almost-slutty length, it was easy to take matters into your own hands -- but the practice was/is about as popular with your average band of nuns as is smoking crack under bridges with boys who ride motorcycles.

As you might imagine, uniform enforcement becomes a pretty major focus in Catholic schools. skirt rolls, shirt tails, knee socks, shoe heels, shirt collars. Myriad ways to fuck up and divert five to ten minutes from actual learning. The rules extended beyond attire to makeup (don't consider it), earrings (nothing that dangled below the bottom of the earloab), haircuts (for boys, above the collar but no head-shaving). "Dress down days" were a mixed blessing of freedom and chains. In fourth grade, when the Simpsons debuted and became an overnight hit, the ubiquitous Bart Simpson t-shirts were banned. Then any shirt with a logo or "phrase" on it. Word has it they've now excluded designer jeans from dress-down day and designer handbags all the time. Dressy dress down days (grandparents' day, Christmas pageant day, senior portrait day) were a special brand of confusion. I'm still talking about grade school, by the by.

My high school thought they were doing everyone a favor by adopting something of a hybrid uniform/dress code policy. Starting with my class, female students could pick one of two uniform skirts or pants of their own choosing, any shirt, and a school-sanctioned "wool" blazer. The blazer in particular caused a shitstorm of controversy, leading the school to enact a policy whereby students could earn varsity letters for activities and not just sports, thereby earning the right to wear the coveted letter sweater. Before my year, the uniforms were black skirts for girls and white shirts for boys and letter sweaters for those who had letters. That general combo persisted in spite of the revised rules and an alien visitor who stopped by on an average school day would likely have thought he had stumbled upon the Bishop Eustace Happy Days Cater Waiter Training Academy.

The only thing everyone liked about school uniforms was the opportunity to change out of them as soon as humanly possible. Thanks to unflichingly rigid Leahy family policy, when I finally started to drive I became the proud possessor of a set of keys to a 1985 Honda Accord SEi with a manual transmission and am proud to say that, to this day, I can completely and demurely change my entire outfit while operating a stick shift automobile at highway speed.

When I went away to college, I thought wearing civilian clothes every day would be the best thing ever. I thought I would stumble to my 8:00 AM class in pajamas and so would everyone else. I didn't count on two things: supermodel hot female classmates with full wardrobes of designer clothes and good old fashioned Catholic guilt and indoctrinated respect for authority. My own limited wardrobe of non-uniform clothes was paltry and, it turns out, embarassingly non-designer. Out of sheer laze and complete lack of motivation, I barely ever wore makeup. You can imagine my reaction when the girl in the next row in my 8 AM calculus class popped into the room sporting a handbag worth more than my car and a full face of makeup complemented by pillow creases. And then I just started to feel like an asshole showing up to class looking like a mental patient. It wasn't long before I was getting up early to iron my clothes.

Now I wish life had uniforms. I'm not going to lie . . . total state control of industry, while a bad idea, would at least have the benefit of predictable, mindless dress. I've sort of never understood why some female religious have been so dedicated to getting rid of the habit; what freedom, I think. The amount of time and brain power I spend in an average day to find something to wear, determine how dirty it is, and administer the correct undergarments is depressing when calculated. There are only, really, two ways for me to be happy: working a full-time service industry job where I can blob out of bed, shove a toothbrush around in my mouth a few times, and mindlessly shrug on my standard-issue polyester and nametag OR by lottery, genius, or marriage become so fantastically wealthy that someone cool and stylish does all my shopping and picks out all my outfits. Six of one, really.