The Evolution of T-Shirts

Does anyone else have a t-shirt problem? You know what I'm talking about--the fact that t-shirts are used by just about every sports team or extracurricular activity or road race or volunteer event to represent your involvement and participation. And as someone who enjoys participating in said events, my t-shirts tend to pile up. In the past years I've started to come up with a system to keep the problem from growing out of control, and I noticed a significant trend. My different "phases" of t-shirt use represent the different phases of my life. Confused yet? Let me demonstrate.

This is a (very) small sampling of my current everyday t-shirts. They are the ones that I primarily use for the gym, for lounging around the house, and for going to sporting events. As you can see, this group consists of shirts from the school I currently work at, shirts from road races (we got that one on our honeymoon!) and a volleyball shirt from a few years ago. I would affectionately consider these my "post-college" shirts.

My next group is a little bit more worn and ragged. This is the group of shirts that I've slowly been pulling out of my drawer as it gets filled with new shirts (I only allot one certain area for shirts and if it starts to get too high for the drawer to close then it's time to pull some old ones out).

This shirt "phase" has slowly grown into a collection of my college shirts that I wear only when desperate for a t-shirt or to do grungy work. I have a shirt from a service trip to New Orleans, a shirt from a May term in Alaska, a shirt from my soccer team's annual "Smash Cup" (the green shirt reads: A night we won't remember with friends we won't forget), and a volunteer shirt from Unified Sports Day. This pile doesn't get trashed right away though... They sit around for a little bit until I'm motivated enough ready to move them into the final phase: The cut-off

This is quite the raggedy bunch of shirts. And if the lighting was better, you could see some serious stains (I used to wear them weekly for sand volleyball in the summer: sweating plus diving in sand equals gross shirts. Plus I also occasionally wear them outside on runs when it's crazy humid--and then they get crazy sweaty). This is actually the group that spawned this whole random realization: I was finally getting around to tossing out some of these shirts and I realized that all of them are from high school (my senior class shirt, a shirt from a track meet that my then-boyfriend was running in, and a rec-basketball jersey). And it made me a little bit sad to be getting rid of them and eliminating my "high school" phase of shirts. Sure, I know the cycle will continue and I'll sooner or later I'll phase out my college shirts once I start getting more post-college era/marriage era shirts, and then eventually I'll get shirts for events my kids are in and schools they are at.... But nothing will quite replace my own high school shirts.

Oh, and for the record... I know that I sound really nostalgic and attached to items from my past, but at no time did I ever consider keeping these bottom phase shirts. I fully realize the ridiculousness of that; if you know my mom and sister you know about their hoarding tendencies and I've definitely learned not to be like that. So instead I'll just blog about them (and I promise, this will be the only time), and then be done with them. And for that, Darrell is infinitely glad.