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Every shirt I have that is okay to wear to work is at least three years old, so I’m starting to face the uncomfortable truth that I’m going to have to do some clothes shopping before this school year starts.

(Fun fact: I have two polo shirts that date back to my first teaching job. They are twenty-five years old. They somehow still fit and they do not, in any way, look their age. I promise I’d have tossed them by now if they had gotten ratty.)

Anyway, the tl;dr of this post is that it’s astonishing how many clothes websites are scams, and I came across an especially crispy example of the genre today. I’ve been scammed twice by clothing websites before, and I’m at the point now where before I order from any website I’m not familiar with I Google the name of the site and look for drama. If I find it, they don’t get my money. I saw a shirt I liked in an ad on a website I go to a lot (honestly, I’m at the point where “advertises on websites” is a reason to suspect fuckery is afoot) and clicked on it, and it wasn’t twenty seconds later before I decided the site was a joke.

That shirt above isn’t the shirt I clicked on, but take a look at that picture. There is no fucking way that’s a picture of a real shirt. Like, I’m not bothered by the idea that they might have dropped a model in front of a beach; that’s whatever, but that entire image is AI, and it’s not even fucking good AI. Look at the bottom seam of the shirt. It looks like plastic, and the colors on the entire thing are way too saturated to be real. The collar looks suspicious as hell, too.

This is so obviously a scam– and, upon doing my due diligence, the clothes ship direct from China, because of course they do– that I’m honestly tempted to order that shirt just to compare whatever I get– some cobwebs in a Zip-Loc bag is my guess– to the original image.

Shopping for clothing online, at least for anything more complicated than a T-shirt, was already ludicrous for a whole host of reasons, but it’s gotten to the point where I’m going to have to refuse to shop anywhere other than Amazon or brick and mortar places, and there aren’t a lot of brick and mortar places left that carry my size that aren’t ludicrously expensive.

Slightly related, I got an email from my district earlier today that spirit wear for 2025-26 was available, and went to take a look. Feel free to look around on the site for me bitching about my salary; I know there are plenty of issues with teacher pay, but I personally feel like I’m well-compensated for my work, but they still don’t pay me enough that I’m going to drop $60 on a fuckin’ polo shirt. If I’m wearing a shirt with the logo of the organization I work for, that shirt should be cheap or free. Not more expensive than any other shirt of that style I own.

Anyway, point is, you’ll get a post soon enough where I’m bitching about clothes I actually bought, instead of websites that expect me to send them money so they can send me a bag of ebola. Something for y’all to look forward to.

I realized a couple of weeks ago that I was out of date for a new prescription for my glasses, both in the strict calendrical sense and in the fact that I can tell my current glasses aren’t quite cutting it any longer. I’ve been weird about eye doctors since moving back to my hometown; the guy who took over for my original (birth to age 26 or so) eye doctor after he passed away was a bit of a brusque ass; the dude after him was fine personally but his office sucked, and a new optometry practice just opened up a couple of miles away from my house. So time for a new eye doctor for this visit, and time for a new face, too. I wanted, in the abstract, a new look, something radically different from the style of my last several pairs of virtually-identical frames.

Hah.

So here is a thing about me that I hadn’t realized: despite the fact that I’ve had glasses on my face for damn near every single day since second grade (there were a couple of detours into contact lenses that didn’t stick) I apparently don’t actually want to see glasses when I look at my face. My preferred style for years now has been to have no frames on the lower part of the lenses, and I found myself quickly gravitating toward “screw-mount,” or frameless, glasses. The pair I ended up with is in that picture up there; on my face, they’re nearly invisible.

(Don’t ask why I didn’t get a selfie. I’m not a millennial. I didn’t think of it.)

And I discovered two other things about myself, one of which kind of alarms me and both of which deserve a bit more personal interrogation: 1) it turns out that I don’t actually have any idea how to distinguish “frames for women” from “frames for men,” beyond obvious considerations of the size of the damn things, and 2) my first thought, upon putting anything more substantial than the frameless or half-frame look on my face, was almost always “Man, these look really gay.”

To be clear, we’re talking about frames like this:

…

Okay, this whole post just fell apart, because in my attempt just now to find a “not gay” pair of men’s glasses, I initially grabbed a picture of Zachary fucking Quinto, who is actually gay.

Sigh.

Anyway, point is, under on-someone-else’s-face circumstances, I don’t think these glasses look gay:

84th Annual Academy Awards - Arrivals

Nor these, and yes, I did deliberately look for a picture of Clark Kent:

Clark_Kent_-_Tyler_Hoechlin

..which, goddamn, are those the same glasses? Has Zachary Quinto played Superman? Maybe he should. The point is it is exceedingly rare for me to look another man’s glasses and think that his glasses make him look gay.

But if you take those same glasses and put them on my face, all the sudden what I see is this:

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(That’s Leo, from season six of Worst Cooks in America, and probably a bunch of other places but that’s where I first encountered him. He’s hilarious. And he can rock whatever look he wants. I cannot.)

Anyway, point is, that’s weird, right? I am, under normal circumstances, sufficiently secure in my sexuality, or at least I thought I was, and while my wife will probably be able to come up with a counterexample, I can’t really come up with any other times where I’ve rejected an entire genre of apparel because it “made me look gay.” But, shit, that was the reaction to every single pair where the frames were actually visible, and it was immediate. Like, what the hell, brain? Where did that little bit of internalized homophobia come from, and how do we beat the shit out of it?

I probably ought to just buy the thickest pair of brightly colored glasses I can find and make myself wear them until I don’t give a shit anymore.