I love them. But I'd love them more with actual garters, I think.

Says the girl who wears jeans 98% of her life.

How do people organize their clothes? When I was a kid, I had one dresser and one small closet, and it was plenty of room for the relatively few items of clothing I had. Now? I have lots of clothes, including sizes that are too small (hope) and sizes that are too big (fear), and things that I never had/needed/wanted when I was younger, like shrugs and camisoles and business garb and exercise/yoga wear and underwear that isn't bras and panties. I have five closets and three dressers and various storage boxes, and they're overflowing. I can't find half of what I have, because I'm basically just shoving stuff wherever there's room for it. The items I'm wearing most are hanging on a chair and a coat tree in my bedroom, and everything else is chaos.

I've always been a t-shirt and jeans and occasional skirt wearing girl. I don't know what to do with all this stuff! Besides giving it all to Goodwill and starting over, of course, but I fear that won't solve the basic problem of not knowing how to organize.

Well, I managed to stay in bed until 7:30. But still up at 6. Loki playing dive bomber under the covers, MK poking me in the face and Devi sharpening her claws on the sheets didn't help...

Amarna came in at 5:00 am and started stalking around the bed, meowing at full volume. I had to pet her for a few minutes before she finally settled down and let me go back to sleep. She started it up again a few minutes before 7:00, but that was okay since I had my alarm set for 7 anyway.

I'm on lunch break from class. My teacher spent the morning discussing right brain/left brain types and how our thinking impacts our management style. She wrote down on the board what area each of us tested at in our morning activity, and then looked at the board and said, "You guys have been together for at least this semester--who here could have possibly guessed that Kathy was a people person?" That got a big laugh from everyone, including me.

The teacher likes to kid me and mock-hassles me because my wide range of library jobs on my resume gave her difficulty in assigning our interview topics in January. At our last class, I was having brain blockage and not coming up with the right answers, so I told her I'd rather not respond at all, and she stopped everything and set me straight. At times, I think I can take over a class in terms of participation, and that's always my fear (that I'm too dominating). She said that she'd rather I say something even if it's wrong, especially if no one else is saying anything, so now I feel much easier about speaking up.

Oops, gotta get back to the classroom!

How do people organize their clothes?

Zenkitty, I keep out-of-season stuff in storage, and rotate it out onto my clothing rack and into my dresser as seasons change. I also use the seasonal rotation as a chance to weed out stuff I'm not wearing-- if it hasn't been worn since I took it out at the start of the season, I think long and hard about whether I really need it. I'm also lucky that my friends hold clothing swaps on a regular basis, so I can get rid of the stuff I'm not wearing and pick up some new things for free.

I still have way too many clothes-- I keep a rack in my room because my closet is too full-- but this methods seems to keep things from getting completely out of hand. It would probably also help if I went to the thrift store less.

ZK,

I have the hope and fear clothing as well! Those I keep in storage (up in the attic) along with the unseasonable clothes and go through them once a year along with the rest of my wardrobe, shift things around as needed. I pretty much try everything on again, find that styles and my tastes have changed, and find it easier to part with the currently non-wearable items that much more easily.

I have a tiny apartment with one 4' wide closet for hanging and another 4' wide closet with shelves and another one out in the living room for coats and emergency sweaters during the warmer months. I don't even have a dresser. The shelves have baskets for socks and undies and jammies. and if I can't fit my work and play pants and shorts on the shelves, then I simply have too many pants and shorts and have to purge/move to the attic.

I think you just need to organize with the space you have. Start from scratch, get it sorted and organized, and only keep on hand what is immediately needed for the current season. If storing the unseasonable and unwearables is not really an option, there are low risers to prop beds on that allow slim tupperware tubs to slide under.

Be realistic, practical. Bring a friend over and have a fashion show and purge. If I haven't touched something in more than two years, definitely donate it. Be more ruthless with your hope/fear piles. Because really, styles/tastes change. I had some fearsome baby-girl/slutty clothes that were far too sparkly/girly for me and I couldn't believe I'd worn them at one point.

bagels: man, I miss the apartment where I had fifteen feet of hanging closet space and changing out for the seasons meant grabbing coathangers from one closet and walking over two feet.

depths of what I would like to call the Gibson-Sheen Abyss.

I'm grabbing this phrase and running away to stuff it into my personal lexicon, along with geographical descriptors like "Mariana trench" and "Gobi desert."

Julie, I think now I miss that apartment too, despite never having lived there.

I'm at the point where I want to start selling more vintage clothes on Etsy, but I literally have nowhere to put them, short of setting up a rack in the dining room. It's very troublesome.

not to belabor the point, but as a sort of PSA: 911 is entirely appropriate for any crime in progress or need for fire or medical. When in doubt, best to call 911 and explain the situation as succinctly as possible (ladder on the freeway! people fighting! wierd smell in the air!) and expect that you might be referred to a non emergency number. Because if there is any doubt in your mind as to whether an immediate response is needed, get the info out there rather than waiting and looking for another number. I love that buffistas are concerned about tying up a 911 line unneccessarily (love you guys!!!) but i can assure you that anyone answering a 911 line is well practiced at quickly assessing the situation and blowing you off the to non-emer line when appropriate. Seriously, we have a button that transfers the caller to a recording that repeats the non-emer number ad infinitum until the caller hangs up. I can triage most calls in about 10 seconds and then make the transfer with a quick "here's the right number to call." We can make that decision for you!

ION, my darling little cat is so thoughtful. He knows i've been very concerned about his "output" since the overnight vet stay so he left his latest poops on my bed where i'd be sure to see them. While i appreciate the thought, he has THREE clean litter boxes as his disposal.

The only annoying thing, for me, was that if I have a message telling me to say, "emergency" if it is an emergency, I REALLY ASSUME that not saying it will get my call transferred to a nonemer place or hear nonemer options, not hung up on.

Clearly next time I will go about it differently but really I just was frustrated and I know that when I've called with actual emergencies, I've waited for an operator and I didn't want to be the person tying up the line.

Live, ask the hivemind and learn...