sit right back and you'll hear a tale

PellMel and I love to travel, so it's not unusual for us to discuss places we want to go, packing strategies, and travel gear. A couple of years ago, I told her that if we were dress-wearing women, which generally speaking we are not, and we were going someplace warm, packing would be easy-peasy because you could just pack three or four of those travel dresses and be done with it. You wouldn't need to color coordinate shirts and pants, and you'd only need about half the clothes I usually take.

But as I said, I am not a dress-wearing woman, and often ideas that sound good when I am planning a trip actually turn out to be pretty bad when I get there. Case in point: on almost every trip I've been on since then, I've packed a dress. But since I don't normally wear dresses, I never actually wear them.

So I decided that if I was going to make this work, I would have to pack only dresses, so I didn't have any choice. That is Part One of this convoluted tale.

Part Two is that when we started reading about what to wear on our trip to Cambodia, pretty much everybody said, dress conservatively. So I immediately go in my head to what "dressing conservatively" meant in the area where I was raised and the era in which I was raised, and I think baggy clothes, clothes that hide the female shape, knee-length skirts, wide-legged pants, and baggy tops.

(Actually, it's not so far from the way people think in the place I live now-- Montana is, after all, the state where a legislator introduced a law to ban yoga pants in public spaces, which fortunately did not pass.)

So I decided that in the interest of being cool, since shorts are out, I will wear knee-length skorts (I think I have all female readers who will know what those are, but just in case, they are skirts with attached shorts underneath). And because I knew I might not wear them if I had any choice, that is all I packed. Seriously. I packed three skorts, and a pair of capris I traveled in but that I wasn't really intending to wear once we arrived because they have no pockets and are synthetic fabric. (And a dress, which, true to form, I never wore.)

Part 3. We arrived in Cambodia, and I discovered that the Cambodian version of dressing conservatively has nothing to do with baggy clothes. In fact, almost every Cambodian woman I saw was wearing leggings or skinny jeans and a normal shirt (i.e., not necessarily a shirt that covered her posterior).

It turns out that dressing conservatively in Cambodia has nothing to do with being ashamed of the female shape. It is about whether or not the skin of your knees and shoulders is showing. And in case you didn't know, if you're wearing a knee-length skirt, when you sit down, it hikes up well above your knees and there is ALL THAT SKIN.

So there I was in Cambodia, with nothing to wear that met their definition of conservative, and a bunch of clothes that I didn't really like or want to wear.

So why am I telling you this story? I have no idea. It's mainly just a great example of how convoluted my brain is. I was trying so, so hard to do the right thing, and I ended up not making anybody happy-- I had a bunch of uncomfortable clothes with me and they didn't even serve the purpose they were supposed to, even though I bought them specifically for our trip.

So I walked around for two weeks with my scandalous knees showing, tugging my skirts down whenever I stood to make them as long as possible, and generally being uncomfortable. And at home in my closet, I had three or four pairs of comfortable, broken in, cotton capris with pockets that would have been perfect. *eye roll*

And lord I cannot tell you how disappointed I am that Alabama won that game. Ugh.