Advice from a life coach: Accept what you can't change, including your clothes

There is a commonly held misconception that you, or they, will grow out of it. This is not true. Whatever it is, it will just get worse. And the less desirable it is, the worse it will become. The best you can hope for is that something else will come along that's even worse that will distract you from it. This advice is especially useful when you have children, but if you are simply a hot mess, it applies to you too. 

Bonus advice: Once you find articles of clothing that you like, buy it in bulk, preferably off the internet. The results of doing this are that, first, you'll be more comfortable more often, and, second, people will recognize you easier when they see you. If you are worried that people will think that you never clean your clothes if they see you in the same thing every day, or that they'll think that you're a tramp and didn't get home last night to change, buy it in different colors. But careful about that. No one has ever bought the orange one, and you don't want to be the first. 

Advice from a Life Coach: Travel

You no doubt have articles of clothing that you do not like. Maybe they were annual polyester sweater vest gifts in the wrong size from your impoverished grandmother who saved up all year to buy just the right one for your birthday. Maybe they were hand-me-down Hello Kitty underwear sets from your weird Uncle Norbert now serving time up in Attica for crimes no one in the family wants to talk about. Maybe it was the classic laurel shirt that looked perfect in the store that somehow managed to morph on the way home into the brightest item of shamrock green ever seen this side of St. Patrick's day. Whatever items like these that you have, they are no doubt stacked somewhere in a corner of your house, because you just can't bring yourself to throw them away without wearing them, while at the same time you know that giving them to a clothing drive so that somebody else could wear them would be pointless, because they don't want them either.

Well, here's what to do. Gather all of them the next time you're heading on vacation and throw them into your suitcase. Problem solved. You've now created the perfect travel wardrobe!

First of all, you're going away, and no one knows you there, so you can wear any damned thing and not have to worry about it.

Second, and here's the beauty of it, after you wear any of this stuff, thus eliminating the guilt of not wearing it, you throw it away at the end of the day. You won't have to do laundry, which is always a drag on vacation, because the cleaners take it out in the trash every morning and you never see it again. (Maybe they'll wear it. Maybe polyester vests are big where you're going.) And finally, you'll be steadily emptying your suitcase, making space you otherwise wouldn't have had for souvenirs. I mean, who can go to Paris and not buy a beret to fit in with all the French people? And you know you want that Eiffel Tower with the barometer in it, if only you had a way to carry it home. Going to the Vatican? A pieta with a barometer to match the one from the Paris trip? Of course you want it, if you only had a way to carry it home. A Big Ben with a barometer where the clock ought to be? A leaning tower of Pisa barometer? Your house needs these decorations, and now you'll have a way to acquire them all.

And finally, by bringing all of your soon-to-be castoffs to foreign shores, you'll be making space in that corner of your home for all the new clothes you will inevitably acquire by misadventure sooner or later, while at the same time always knowing the air pressure, if you can get any of those barometers to work.

Genius, or what?