Clothing the Family

There comes a time in every girl's life when she looks around and wants to fit in. It's fun to start new classes when your notebook and books and classes are new, mapping out the semester so you can watch how fast it goes. But I'll tell you something that's not quite that fun. Snotty. Snotty. Girls.
On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, I leave work and head for the longest afternoons of my life. I honestly don't know how I survived elementary school with all the same people in the same room all day long. But then, I guess we had crafties and math class next door and recess and all that. These 5 hour afternoon butt-busters are nothing like this. They would be ok, except for what I thought would be a double header of a class that I would enjoy and a class I knew in advance I would hate but had to take has turned into a class I hate and a class I hate.
Girls, on occasion, turn nasty. In my clothing the family class there's a nice little assortment of ex-hair-school fancy dresser opinionated girl, ex-Fashion Institute of Technology ex-Betsey Johnson intern opinionated girl, baggy t-shirt opinionated girl, and the rest of us who can't get a word in edge-wise. The thing is, though, that a lot of the time the "cute" girls are just regular girls who think they are better than the rest of us because they have expensive jeans and a real Louis purse.
I started this post with the idea of fitting in. On day one, I wanted to fit in. For about 5 minutes. And now I know that if I ever did fit in (at least with the girls that ever say anything) I would have to be thinner, cuter, wear more expensive clothes to class, and basically be them, and to tell the truth I don't really wanna.
A conversation during a little group activity today:
Enter hair school girl and t-shirt girl. T-shirt girl doesn't understand why you would pay sometimes hundreds of extra dollars for something (shirt, purse, necklace, anything) with someone's name on it (read: high end designers). Hair school girl is totally on this one. Of course she thinks it's "totally worth it" no matter what the circumstances or the item and if she was the designer she would want people to respect her enough to pay for her name because her name would mean quality. After a little back and forth between the two, increasingly heated as it goes on, we had two very adamant girls on our hands. One, that a name brand has no bearing on anything and it a complete waste of money, the other that name brand is the be all and end all of the world. I exaggerate not at all.
I have to say I definitely fall somewhere in the middle. I don't think there is any reason to avoid buying clothes with someone's name on them just to not buy them, but I definitely don't understand setting your life up in such a way that you are only as good as the name on the inside of you collar. Ok, so I lean toward t-shirt girl. And I think hair school girl and all the rest of them are obnoxious. This class is turning out to be "how to make yourself feel ok about buying the most expensive stuff you can find," which is not at all what I thought it would be.
I will round this post out with a quote from Joseph B. Wirthlin's talk Press On:

"I feel that some are so concerned about the type of car they drive, the expensive clothes they wear, or the size of their house in comparison to others that they lose sight of the weightier matters. 8 We must be careful in our daily lives that we do not allow the things of this world to take precedence over spiritual things."

Couldn't have said it better myself.