Sizing It Up

I generally make my coffee at home or at the office, but I am a fan of the Timmys, and treat myself once in while.

I'm not a big fan, though. I'm a medium fan. Medium regular, that is.

Before long though, my medium will become a small as the coffee company changes the names of its cups. Large will become medium and what's now extra large will be renamed large to make way for the biggest of the coffees, the Extra Large, which will be a whopping 24ounces or 710 millilitres.

While Tims is at it, I suggest we get rid of all the smalls, mediums and larges, and find some way to standardize sizes elsewhere, to perhaps bring some sanity to sizing.

One day recently, as my mother continued the seemingly never-ending process of divesting her house of my childhood stuff, I took delivery of a pair of skirts I had worn during the early years of high school. I tried them on in the hope I might be the same size as I was way back then. Since I've taken up running and am watching what I eat, I thought maybe, just maybe, my high school skirts might be too big. Imagine the bragging rights!

Well, the skirts actually fit just right, even with their far-too-high 80s waists. Here's the thing, though: the skirts fit, but my pants, the ones my sweetie urged me to buy three pairs of last year because they fit so well, they are now far too big, but their labels say they're four sizes smaller than the perfectly-fitting high-school skirts. As Tina Fey would say, "What the What?"

Why can't clothes be the same as shoes? The sizes are pretty much standard, so if you're an 8, you're an 8 everywhere and you likely were an 8 last year, too.

The confusion about sizes might have to do with the fact that our feet stay the same size for a long time, but our, shall we say, assets, sometimes don't. My girlfriends tell me the size labels are all about psychology, and that retailers have done a number on them so people who are getting fatter don't have to feel bad about it and thus will keep buying more clothes.

So to straighten this out: I was a size 13 in 1989, but I'm an 8 now, even though I'm actually the same size in both centuries, which means 13 and 8 are really the same thing, the reason being that girls who were 13s in grade 12 still want to buy a 13 even though they might now be what would have been a 20 back then?

My head hurts. I wonder what size hat I need? Probably a medium.