Being Deviant for a Day
...flip flops. That is how I dress on a daily basis unless otherwise. At this point, after being dressed to go out, I really felt that I violated my norm and my self image. I am not trying to say that I am against this type of attire and style at all. It is just something that is not of my preference and for anybody that prefers this type of attire and clothing choice is their preference and I respect that. I started my day in the early afternoon, even though I didn’t want to do this, I knew I had to. I had to go pick up new tires I ordered from Discount Tire and get them mounted on. I know there are a bunch of men that work there and I know there are cute ones that work there too. In my mind, I was thinking a lot of things and I knew I was going to get stared at really bad. It’s so funny, I remember when I pulled up and parked, I was saying to myself “Why am I doing this?” I just sat there for a couple minutes and just opened the door and went in. I think the guy that helped me last time didn’t remember me looking like this, so when he saw me he kind of smiled but just stared. I think most of us know when a person is staring to stare! I just felt weird and I felt like I didn’t want to be there. I wanted them to hurry up and get my tires mounted and I was going to leave as quickly as possible. The night before, I made arrangements with 3 of my friends to meet me at La Madeleine in Rice Village to have lunch. I knew that they didn’t know what they were in for when they come to meet up with me. Majority of my friends are pretty much like me, we follow society’s norms and basically we are real proper in any setting. Before going into this, I didn’t know if they were going to be embarrassed that they were with me. I knew for sure they would be surprised and shocked. La Madeleine is a nice place to go have lunch and in my experiences in being there, I never noticed any stares when I was myself. Usually, the people that go there are older people and most are very conservative looking. I was the first one to get to the restaurant and my friends showed up at different times. I got the reaction from them that I expected, which was a “drop of the jaw” kind of look. I expected that, but because my friends were with me, in a sense I felt “okay”. I still felt weird, out of place, and I still “felt” the stares but despite all of that, I think since we were kind of just laughing about it the whole time, I felt comfortable. I think the only reason why I was so comfortable is because I wasn’t there alone and I had my friends there to laugh it off with me. And, I knew no matter what, they were accepting of me regardless of how I looked. Even they pointed out that they “felt” all of us being stared at because of me. After we ate, we decided to go scope out some stores that we regularly go into. If you are not familiar with Rice Village, it is a shopping center where you have to walk outside to get to each store. When I go there with my friends we go into the same ole’ stores we always go into. We went to Banana Republic, Gap, MAC, Victoria Secret, Express, and Urban Outfitters. I did not feel comfortable when we were at any of the stores we went to except maybe one and that was Urban Outfitters. I am sure most of us know that Banana Republic has very, very conservative type of clothing and I definitely felt like I didn’t need to be in there at the time. I felt a little more uncomfortable in the stores than I did at La Madeleine even when my friends were still with me. The reason why I felt a little more comfortable in Urban Outfitters was because they had a real rugged type of atmosphere there. They sold clothes that maybe a typi...