Hello, my name is Megan Ulrich and I am addicted to stripes.
*Monotone Voice* "Hi, Megan."
I also enjoy social experiments, so when I realized that I had unintentionally bought enough shirts to wear stripes for an entire week with no repeats, an idea blossomed. What if I wore almost the same thing every single day for an entire week? Would anyone notice?
In high school, I was one of those super self-conscious people who was paranoid that everyone would notice if I wore anything more than once a month. I think that's just an adolescent thing: you feel like everyone is judging you all the time. However, when I got to college, I realized something magical.
No one cares what you wear. At all.
I'm not just talking about arbitrary and sexist dress codes either (boys in class could suddenly focus on their schoolwork if my shorts weren't longer than fingertip length. Huh.) Show up to class in your pajamas? That's cool. Wear the same thing that you wore yesterday? That's cool too. Your Tuesday/Thursday people don't have to know about your Monday/Wednesday/Friday life.
I was excited for my experiment because this meant that I had to do minimal outfit planning all week. My outfits were all different enough - different pants, shoes, accessories - but every single day I wore a white top with black horizontal stripes.
No one. Said. Anything. I thought that by Wednesday someone would at least say something like "Hey I feel like you wear stripes a lot" but NOTHING. I have class with some people every day and none of them said anything all week.
One of three things was happening: 1. No one was noticing 2. They noticed and didn't care 3. They noticed and were all silently judging me. After stripe week, I posted on Facebook about it and some people claimed to have noticed, but I'm not sure how much I believe them.
A few years ago I had a professor who had a "uniform." He would willingly wear the same outfit every day because he was tired of worrying about what to wear all the time. At the time, I thought it was odd. Now I get it: my life was so much easier when I just automatically knew what to wear.
The only unfortunate outcome of this experiment is that now when I wear stripes people are like "Hey, you're wearing stripes!" And when I don't wear stripes people are like "Changing it up, I see!"
After I published my article on my burrito quest, people starting telling me that they thought of me every time they ate/smelled/dreamed about burritos. I'm going to get a weird reputation as the burrito/stripe girl on campus. That will be my legacy, and I am slowly embracing it.
