T-shirts, introverts and adverts

The past few months I've been on a big T-shirt buying kick. Facebook's algorithm finally figured out something it could sell me - clever T-shirts. And it's gotten to the point where I've had to allocate an online T-shirt-buying monthly budget.

I'm just going to leave this up here. 

It got me thinking. My entire life, I've worn the least flashy, most ordinary clothes in existence. Plain colored shirts and blue jeans or khaki shorts. Boring suits when dress-up time arrives. Anything to keep me from standing out from the crowd - because when you're an end-of-the-bell-curve introvert, attracting attention means attracting compliments and questions, both of which you try to avoid.

My guess is a lot of this goes back to junior high and high school. Half the time, my poor mother didn't know what to do with her introverted, ADD, space cadet of a youngest son as he entered his long 'rebellious teen' stage. I hated 99 percent of the clothes she tried to buy for me (yes, my mom still bought my clothes into high school -don't judge), and so finding clothes for me to wear outside the house was a challenge. Jeans were easy, because ... well, jeans.

 But the only shirts I liked on a consistent basis had advertisements, movies or other fun stuff on them - Spuds McKenzie, the Marlboro Man, Atari, The Goonies, some random Hawaiian surfboard shop, Huey Lewis and the News (one of the most underappreciated bands in our lifetime, IMO), whatever. So that's what I got. And I got a bunch of them, and I wore them. Did I ever wear them - with no preference for the message, genre, or anything else. If it had words and pictures on it, I'd put it on. I was a walking advertisement, although one with no clue of that fact, and those companies may not have picked me as their best spokesperson if they'd had the chance. 

Let's pause a moment to reminisce over those carefree days of the 80's, when you could wear shirts advertising beer and tobacco products to high school. 

One of the big challenges of being an introverted kid is learning how to dress yourself. Introverts are wired differently from extroverts, and to me fashion of even the most rudimentary level has always been a mystery. I'd rather run into a burning building than try to figure out what clothes to wear to a party. But at least now I have decades of experience to draw on. When I was a kid, not so much.

Anyway, I was a long way from the most popular kid in high school, and somewhere along the way my brain may have deduced it was partly because of my clothing habits. In any case, as soon as I started buying my own clothes, I drifted towards the plainest wardrobe possible, and stayed there for another 20 years or so.

A few years ago my friends begin to gift me T-shirts with nerdy designs on them. I loved them, but it was tough to wear them out of the house - in fact, sometimes I would change to a plain t-shirt before going anywhere. (Again, don't judge!)

This suave fellow, not voted Most Popular? I know, right????

But eventually I started wearing them out of my house. Then I started buying them. Like most addictions, the process has been gradual, but somehow I've ended up with a drawer full of nerdy/cool/awesome shirts. In fact, I had to throw out a bunch of my old shirts to make room - which is a bigger deal than you may think as I tend to keep clothes until they fall apart on their own.

So yeah! I'm thrilled to live in an age where I can scroll down my Facebook page, spend $20, and have a cool new T-shirt within a couple of weeks. So thrilled that I don't even mind answering a few questions from strangers about where I got them. In fact, my dream is to bump into Felicia Day on the street one day and have her say, "hey, nice shirt!" If you're gonna dream, dream big, right?

It all kind of makes me wish Mom had Facebook back in the day. If it had been this easy back then, I might have even started buying my own clothes earlier. 

Eh. Probably not.