I’ve been in a clothes slump lately. Some of it is the weather; I find this time of year nearly impossible to dress for, because it tends to be cool in the mornings but warm by the afternoon! And when it’s sunny, I immediately want to wear light, springy clothes, but it’s not quite time for them yet, even in Atlanta. (Similarly, I excitedly switched out from our flannel sheets this week and then found myself shivering under the cotton sheets and coverlet one night when it was in the 30s…hah.)

Normally my response to  clothes slump would be to go out thrifting and just buy some things that make me happy, but I’ve been reading a blog called Putting Me Together that’s inspired me to put a bit more thought into what I bring into my closet. I’ve never really been into fashion, and in fact am sort of turned off by most fashion magazines and blogs because the clothes are over-the-top and expensive and I could never envision myself wearing them. But Audrey at Putting Me Together shops at Target and is all about finding clothes to fit your lifestyle…amen! In fact, she’s done a series lately called “Wardrobe from Scratch” that I’m hoping to try to follow, and I’ll report back here as I go!

I started with a ruthless purge of my closet on Saturday that filled one big trash bag and several regular plastic grocery bags with clothes. If my initial reaction was that I didn’t love it, it went in the bag. I’m planning to get the bags out as soon as I can so I’m not tempted to second guess myself! Some things I’m taking straight to the thrift store, but I’m going to try to sell some at Plato’s Closet in order to help fund step 2 of my wardrobe venture. Some of the clothes are fine but I’ve just had them for so long that I decided I could let go of them.

Though my lifestyle is fairly casual, I’ve decided I want to feel more polished, so that’s the word that’s going to inspire my wardrobe revision.

My next goal is to give some thought to Audrey’s color palette and then to use her Starter Kit Shopping List to make a fairly specific list of things to shop for. I’m hoping to take a trip to one of the outlet malls near Atlanta to try and get high-quality items, because I think that really is worth it. I’m already working on reminding myself that I might go shopping and not find anything, but that not being intentional about shopping is what got me here in the first place. If it’s not on my list, I won’t be allowed to buy it! It’s a little overwhelming to think about, but I think it’ll be worth it to invest a good chunk of time and money into making sure I have great clothes in which I feel great about myself.

How do you approach shopping? Have you successfully overhauled your wardrobe at any point?

It’s crazy what my brain decides to hold onto. For example, when I play the *NSync Pandora station, I can sing every word along with every song, including being on time for random bridges, refrains, and key changes. As another example, at one cleaning checkup YEARS ago, my dental hygienist told me that I needed to focus on brushing the teeth on the top right of my mouth because since I’m right-handed I didn’t have as good an angle on them. And without fail, EVERY night when I’m brushing my teeth, that admonishment runs through my mind.

While it’s a myth that we only use 10% of our brains, it still sometimes amazes me to think about what my brain could do if I could somehow re-appropriate those sections that are tied up with song lyrics and tooth-brushing instructions. I wish I knew what it was about those particular things that made them “stick,” especially as I’m trying to make learning for fun more a part of my lifestyle.

Walt Whitman wrote, “(I am large, I contain multitudes.),” and I think of that often when I ponder what all my brain holds. Since I keep being able to memorize trivia, remember book titles and my bank account number, and learn Spanish vocabulary, it feels like perhaps it has infinite capacity. Or are things being constantly replaced: when I add something new, is something older and less useful bumped out? If so, why are the Brittney Spears lyrics still there?

I read an article in The Economist about some scientists who are trying to get funding to embark on a project to map the human brain, similar to the human genome project. I wonder what they will find in the rabbit hole that is the vast mystery of the human brain…

When you live in, work in, or frequently visit the intown neighborhoods of a big city, it’s a foregone conclusion that you will encounter people begging: asking for money, asking for food, sitting on the sidewalk with a cup. You’ll probably also encounter people who aren’t asking but whose demeanor indicates that they’re not in the best shape. You could write a whole book on this topic, and in fact plenty of people have, but as I work in emergency assistance and live in the city, it’s a problem that I ponder a lot. I’m not going to lie, people often make me uncomfortable. I want to be a model of “Christian charity” and be friendly and generous, but I’m also a young, reasonably attractive woman, and fear tends to jump to mind before generosity. Also, working at a nonprofit where I encounter people in need most days, I think I’ve become even more skeptical of the stories people weave to try and sway me on the street. I don’t like this about myself, but it’s a fact. Watching the news makes me feel justified in being afraid, but reading the Bible makes me feel convicted that I’m falling short.

So what to do? I don’t know all the answers. Here are two situations I’ve encountered recently.

One Sunday afternoon, a teenager in a baseball uniform came up to me with a grungy laminated paper and a bucket with a story about collecting money to try and get his team to some tournament. I smiled politely and said, “Not today.” (That’s my canned response…it sounds polite, but I also know in the back of my mind that it won’t be tomorrow either…) He very well may have been collecting money for his baseball team, and a lot of people would say it’s not my place to judge: I should just give if I feel led to give and move on, not worrying about what he did with the money. But I think sometimes our charity can hurt more than it helps and so I am wary of generosity in the form of cash.

Another night, I was driving home late after a work event. Andy was out of town, so no one was expecting me. I had multiple takeout containers of leftover catered food in my backseat. As I exited the interstate to a mostly deserted intersection, I saw a man standing by the red light with a sign that said something about being hungry. I glanced at the food in my rearview mirror. I didn’t need it. But I was afraid to roll my window down; afraid to be a woman alone in a car opening the window to a man, even just enough to reach out and hand him some food. I sat awkwardly avoiding his glance until the light turned green, and I went home. I felt ashamed, but I also felt like I had made the right decision for my safety. I hate that dichotomy, and I’m in awe of stories where people go above and beyond to help a stranger, especially this one I read recently where a mom and her kids did things I would have been terrified to do.

I’m pretty buttoned up with my cash. Andy and I keep a budget, as you know if you’ve been reading this blog for any amount of time, and it’s a zero-based budget: we give every dollar a job, and some of those dollars’ jobs are to go to charities of our choosing. So for me to hand someone a 20 on the street would be outside of my budget. That’s a lame excuse, but it crosses my mind. Should I budget some 20s for those situations? I don’t know. I’m also a rule-follower and trust in our systems, probably because the system has never let me down. I can’t imagine what it must be like when you fall through the cracks, or even when you follow all the “rules” and things still don’t turn out right. I would hope that people on the streets could find other avenues for help than my wallet, but perhaps my trust in those avenues is a little too strong given the number of people that still need help.

I love the idea of keeping “blessing bags” (though the name is pretty patronizing) or even just granola bars in your car to give to people. Food is tangible, and I’m not skeptical of giving it like I am of cash. I don’t know exactly what I think is going to happen if I engage with someone enough to give them help in the form of food. Andy and I were semi-approached by a guy one night when we were walking home with a to-go box, and Andy happily turned it over to him. He said thanks and kept walking, and we went home. It was fine. But whenever I see someone who looks they might be going to approach me, my heart starts to race a little bit. When I see someone hanging out by the sidewalk asking everyone who passes by for help, I put my eyes to the ground and pick up my pace. I usually try to at least give a quick glance and a smile, not that that helps them at all.

I’m not proud of these stories, but they’re the truth, and I think this is a conversation we all need to be having. It’s not okay to turn a blind eye to folks in need, but I think you also have to be true to yourself. I just wish my true self were a little more open to fearless generosity.

How do you handle situations when you are approached for money or assistance? What philosophy colors your interactions with people who need help?

I have a confession to make: I like my movies and TV utterly vanilla.

I am notoriously late to trends. Not only am I late, I usually scoff at them (at least internally) until all of a sudden one day I decide I MUST have fill-in-the-blank trendy item.

Maybe I get so accustomed to seeing them around that they become part of my psyche. I don’t know. But what I do know is that I’ve done this with a lot of things: North Face jackets, Tom’s shoes, skinny jeans, cowboy boots. Once I decide I want it, it becomes my quest in life to find the perfect version, and once I acquire it I love it. I guess by waiting so long to buy into trends I get past the impulse of it and have already decided it’s something I like and will use rather than buying it just for the sake of fitting in.

ANYWAY, this is an odd facet of my personality but one that I fully acknowledge. And the latest fodder for my late-coming ways are podcasts. (I know podcasts aren’t exactly a trend, but my process of coming to enjoy them has been just like my trend-personality, so I thought it was relevant.)

Andy has seemingly always listened to podcasts. I’ve always had trouble paying attention to someone talking unless I was also reading along or was able to watch them or something else going on in front of me, so I never understood how he could process them. He listens to them while he runs, and I’ve always thought, “Oh, I HAVE to have music when I exercise.” I’d listened to a few podcasts here and there at his prodding, and I’d caught bits and pieces of ones when he and I listened together, but I still thought podcasts were not for me.

As I was preparing for my last book club gathering, though, I found myself wanting to listen to the Slate audio book club podcast about the book we were discussing so I’d have some ideas of what to talk about. I didn’t think I had time to listen to it, so I put it on while I did dishes. It was long, so I left it on while I Googled for discussion questions and wrote out a few thoughts. Its 45 minutes flew by, and as we were talking at book club I realized I had absorbed a fair amount of what they had said!

Shortly after that, my dad sent me a link to an episode of The Splendid Table that had to do with Alabama cuisine. I was intrigued enough to actually listen, and I tried it on a Saturday morning while washing dishes again. A switch had been flipped–all of a sudden I liked podcasts!

They key for me was figuring out when the ideal time to listen was for me–my use case, if you will. Washing dishes is perfect because you can’t do much else at the same time. Your hands are busy but your mind is idle. Folding laundry is also good. And, in fact, I have listened to a few while running or elliptical-ing; I found that if I was excited about what podcast I had to listen to, it served as motivation to get to the gym!

Listening to them while driving does not work for me; for one thing, my car doesn’t have an auxiliary plugin, and my phone by itself is not really loud enough to hear over road noise. But I also find driving takes more of my brain than washing dishes and I can’t pay attention as well!

Another key, though, that I discussed with a friend of mine, is deciding that if you miss something it’s okay to just keep going. My instinct was along the lines of “oh, someone is teaching me something, I’d better take notes, I’d better not miss a single word, I’d better absorb everything they’re saying.” But it doesn’t have to be like that. As I saw with Slate, it was an enjoyable way to pass the time, and even by passively listening, I caught on to a lot.

Andy has not yet let me live down my 180-degree shift on podcasts. It’s okay. I’d probably make fun of me too.

Since my lightbulb moment, here are a few of the podcasts I’ve subscribed to and am enjoying:

• The aforementioned The Splendid Table Host Lynn Rosetto Casper talks about a different kitchen or cooking-related topic each week and also takes calls from listeners with culinary questions.
• America's Test Kitchen Yes, another cooking show.
• Slate's Culture Gabfest and Double X Gabfest
• Quick and Dirty Tips: Grammar Girl, Domestic CEO, Nutrition Diva, Money Girl These are short 5-10 minute weekly shows. I listened to 2 walking to church the other day and 2 on the way back. They're just what they sound like: short tips on very specific topics! They probably won't interest me every week, but I bet they will more often than not. There are a whole slew of tip-topics to choose from.

Do you listen to podcasts? What are some of your favorites? When do you find is the ideal time to listen to them?