So last weekend, I was on suicide watch. We spent a day at the mall, where I was ostensibly searching for something appropriate to wear to the fancy holiday part of M.’s employer. Last year found us all dressed up and completely trapped in traffic.

I thought it might portend a better omen to start with a new outfit. But at the mall the clothes neatly divided into two categories — complete whore of Babylon for the 25 and younger set or “Jesus, why bother?” frumpiness for those of us still living post here’s my cooch, I just checked out of the clinic and the chlamydia is clear. Seriously, I’m in my 40s, I’m not dead. I don’t want to dress like either an ex-nun or an extra from the finest in San Fernando Valley’s other film industry.

I actually tried on silk separates, a top and a skirt, in a festive holiday, satin sheen, looked in the mirror and thought, “Fucking Christ, a satin sack.” It may as well have been burlap. By the end of the weekend, I had given up all hope of not looking like the mother of the bride in whatever evening where I could find.

M. offered I could where something with black dress pants, like maybe a fashion-y, stylish tuxedo jacket or velvet jacket. I was equating that look to Ellen and Portia at the Oscars.

I embrace the friends of Sappho, but, yeah, not really my thing.

At work, though, I bitched about my dilemma, and was reminded by the chick from Paris that San Francisco is not a city without hope, or fashion. Although, SF fashion tends towards scarves and layers, because it’s fucking cold and/or unpredictable in that there city with its fog and bay and all, and a certain kind of casual that I can’t describe but you know when you see it. (Check out “Smug Alert” from South Park. About five minutes in an beyond, they capture the essence of SF and the Bay Area.)

So the French chick, who clocks in about the same number of years I do on the planet, made a few solid recommendations. Strolls around Hayes Valley and Haight-Ashbury, I was boutiqued out and poorer. I also discovered labels like Cop Copine and Lauren Vidal. For a couple of hundred bucks and surviving the withering stares of a snobbish sales chick, who I fucking swear was judging me and my pasty, chubby whiteness from her place of adorably and petite-ly and beautifully Asian superiority, I think I’ll look alright at the fiesta. An asymmetric hemline with an under layer of kind of raggedy silk sets off the basic black cotton dress above.

I won’t look French, but I also won’t look 80. (Not that there’s anything wrong with octogenarians.)