I Bought a Hat

In case you haven't noticed, or you're one of those people that live in an annoyingly warm climate (I don't want to hear it, ok??), it's been pretty cold this week. Almost every day I've woken up to a nagging little red exclamation point on my Weather.com app that warns me that I will freeze and die of hypothermia immediately upon stepping outdoors.

Well, I'm currently in New York and sometimes staying indoors all day is just not an option. Ok, it kind of is for me because I'm working from my apartment, but yesterday I needed stamps so I had to walk to the post office. Life is just hard sometimes, you know?

At the beginning of this frigid week, I had decided that I should probably buy a hat. Simple enough right? Well, I hate hats for one. And they hate me right back. Put a hat on my teeny, tiny, short-haired head and I look like either a 12-year-old boy or a cancer patient. Many people have tried to convince me over the years of the merits of hats, to no avail. But I decided to give this whole hat thing another try, however, and set out on a mission to find the perfect one on Wednesday after work.

Macy's may not have had a hat for me, but at least their escalators are wooden.

I went to 34th street because of its concentration of relatively cheap clothing stores and thought I'd have my pick of the best winter hats in the world. It's January in New York City after all right? Well, I went to about ten stores — Macy's, H&M, Forever 21, Old Navy, etc. — and found not one single decent winter hat. The selection was terrible — I actually found more swimsuits than I did hats. I get that fashion moves fast, but seriously, it's still January. I even went into a K-Mart, you guys. I came to New York from Ohio, ended up in a K-Mart and even they didn't have a hat for me. As a last resort I trekked all the way to Brooklyn just to go to Target, thinking they would most certainly have what I needed —nope.

I went home sad, cold and hatless thinking I was right to hate them all along.

Then yesterday, after one very cold walk to the post office, I stopped into an American Apparel a few blocks from my apartment. Hats were far from my mind, but hats are what I found. An entire wall, in fact, of perfectly suitable hats, in every color imaginable. I grabbed a Mozart-colored (gray) one, of course, tried it on — and I didn't hate it! I might have even liked it a little. The girl at the counter rang me up and asked if I'd like the tags cut off — I must have looked as cold as I felt.

I put on the hat and walked over to Riverside Park and felt warmer than I had any right to. After five minutes I was a convert. Now I totally understand why so many people in the city have been wearing hats — why didn't someone tell me about this sooner? I feel like I can go anywhere now, weather be damned. You're not the boss of me, cold, I have a hat! 

Now if someone could just solve the problem of hat hair, I'd be really set.