The Choice is Yours: Ugly or Skanky?

I went clothes shopping a couple of weeks ago. At Wal-mart.

Maybe this was my first mistake, but hey, had to take the car to get lubed, and also had to get some food, and why not look at some clothes while I'm at it? Wal-mart is made for people like me, who are totally into one-stop shopping and a small sampling of brands. Though they totally don't carry the face goop that I love anymore...

I had a college roommate that worked at Wal-mart, and besides providing her with endless stories of crazy co-workers (seriously, I think some of them needed psychiatric evaluations) and ornery customers, she would occasionally come home with some cute shirts.

So I found an adorable skirt. Nice and cheap, multicolored so I could possibly place many different tops with it, making it versatile and making me feel like I really own 6 skirts. Go me, right? (I would love to go on "What Not to Wear" someday, but that day is oh so down the road. Come on, do I really want a $90 shirt that I have to dry clean when I'm battling the spit-up and drool and who knows what else?) Then I went looking for a cute top to go with it.

I grabbed a few shirts from both the "junior" section and the "ladies" section and headed toward the dressing room. I figured if I looked good in the clothes I picked out under the pasty death lights, I would look fabulous everywhere else!

Top #1: totally baggy and craptastic. Picked up from the "ladies" section. It made my hips look wide, my chest look droopy, and my waist nonexistent. Hmm.

Top #2: pretty decent. Also plucked from the "ladies" section. Sure, I'd have to wear a tank top thingy underneath, but what shirt do I not have to do that with nowadays?

Top #3: absolutely positively the cutest top I may have ever put on my body. Picked up from the "junior" section. LOVED this shirt. But...it was a tad too tight. I mean, I was looking for a top to go with a skirt that I planned to wear to church, and no one needs to see exactly what lies beneath, if you get my drift. So I decided I'd go back and get the same shirt just one size bigger.

But...Top #3 didn't exist one size bigger. Either they didn't make it, thinking that every girl that would shop in the "junior" section is either semi-slutty or itsy-bitsy, or the bigger sizes were all gone, because that shirt was the cutest top on every other person's body, too. *sigh*

I bought Top #2. And really, it's rather fetching. (You wanna see this hot hottie in Top #2? It's what I'm wearing in my header pic.) But it made me a little sad, because I'm not a junior anymore, but I don't quite fit in the ladies section, either. I get weird looks while shopping in both, the "why are you in my section?" looks. Where's the cute young mom section? Where, Wal-mart? (A side note: I don't buy all my clothes at Wal-mart; I totally have to have Gap jeans. So yes, I wear my $5 T-shirts with my $50+ jeans. No one does contradiction quite like me.)

So, is the choice going to always be the shirts that are too tight and say "spoiled brat" on them, or the shirts that are frumpy tents? Maybe I'll have to branch out my shopping center choices until someone makes a "cute young mom" store.