Dressing game and life.

What’s going on people? Once again I find myself falling short on my blogging duties. I swear, I really do try to keep up with this thing because to tell you the truth while my goal is to encourage people to become more independent writing this blog has helped me deal with a lot of the stresses in my life. I sometimes appear to just brush stuff off my shoulders but in reality there are a lot of things that make me want to slap a ho. Pardon my language but that’s just the way it is, as a high-level quadriplegic it is unavoidable that some things will just irk you sometimes and I feel that this blog really helps me be just a cool guy all around with everyone. I would just hate myself if I wrote on here about how you should be happy and positive and just let everything brush off your shoulders because we can’t stress everything and then turn around and acted like a jerk to people that annoyed me or lose my cool because I can’t do something fast enough. I am trying to drink my own Kool-Aid here and for the most part I think that I do it pretty well. Nobody’s perfect and when I ask people to just look at the world with a glass half-full perspective I’m not saying that you have to be this perfect person because God forbid that’s not who I am, I just believe that life is better if you look at it in a positive light. You’re going to get out of it whatever it is that you put in. karma folks.

Anyways, for the longest time I wanted to do a dressing video because I didn’t think that there was a good enough tutorial online on how to dress well. There are however, multiple videos on how to get dressed with sweatpants and basketball shorts and things of that matter. There is nothing wrong with wearing that. I have been known to wear basketball shorts 4 weeks straight. They’re comfy and super easy to put on for a quad. Also, I’ve had plenty of quadriplegics tell me that they are fine wearing sweat clothes because they don’t care about what other people think about them. This is not why I like to dress well. I’m young and I consider myself a pretty attractive guy so why shouldn’t I wear stylish clothes? I find that a big problem for high-level quads dressing well is the fact that a lot of the clothes that are in style aren’t very easy to put on. I guess you could have somebody help you out but in the off chance that you want to do this yourself and save somebody the time here’s a few hopefully helpful tips.

Buttons. I hate buttons. they're kind of my arch nemesis (along the with stairs). When you’re quadriplegic you don’t have the use of your fingers. Fingers and buttons go hand-in-hand; this is crucial. Whether you just want to put a nice shirt on by yourself or whether you bring in a cute girl over and want to.. how do I put this delicately.. let’s just say you have a lady friend over and she gets something on her pants and you just want to help her relieve herself of said pants haha. I can definitely help you out with the former but with the latter you are on your own (try using your teeth).  Anyways, I found this handy little tool:

 It has a hook in one end and a button grabber on the other side. It's great for buttons on T-shirts, pants, and zippers. But to tell you the truth who really wants to spend that much time working on buttons? I was thinking the same thing. I mean, I guess you could eventually get good enough at working that tool or finding your own way to do it but I just went ahead and took a little shortcut on this one because I’m not trying to make dressing a big part of my day just because I’m stubborn and don’t like using tools. I just got a bunch of my clothes tailored.

 These are just some of my clothes that I just got back and what I did was take out the button and put a clip in. Kind of like the clip that’s in tuxedo pants. I’vw done this before with another pair of pants and it worked wonderfully and it was pretty cheap as well. It really does help me on the time. Also I found these cool T-shirts (I rock the flannel) and they have clip in buttons so you might want to like look out for these.

 if the zipper is really small you might want to try adding a ring at the end

 I’m not going to lie to you, getting dressed by yourself is a pain in the butt. But when you can do it it really is liberating. Maybe sometime in the future I’ll make a dressing video but until then these are really good.

This guy has triceps but I use a lot of the same concepts that he does when getting dressed. I prefer to get dressed on the bed. Just because I find it a little safer. I haven’t fallen getting dressed on my chair but I’ve come very close to doing so. Also, this dude is nuts tying his shoes, I guess I’m lazy but I just tuck them in. He has some serious cojones putting a video like this on the Internet. For those quadriplegics with lower injuries then a c6 I would also recommend doing most the dressing on the bed. But yeah, this is a great video. This following one is good too. You get a different perspective but in the end you’re going to figure out how to do it on your own way. It’s going to take time and hard work but like I said earlier you only get what you put it.

 Last thing, you want to make sure that your room is accessible to yourself. If you’re going to be dressing yourself, you want to be able to pick your own clothes out. Here’s how I do it, don’t make fun of me I know I have a lot of clothes.. it a problem.

 I hope that this post can help one individual out. I know that looking nice isn’t everything in life but I like to dress well and I’m sure there’s other people out there that do as well. There is so much more I want to write about at this moment but this is already gotten pretty lengthy so maybe next time. It’s hard for me to open up about my personal life sometimes because I don’t know what the line that tells you “Hey man, youre getting too personal on the Internet here” is. I guess it really doesn’t matter since it is my blog. I can write about whatever I want so who knows. I met someone really special and she’s probably the most amazing thing that’s happened to me in a long time. Things are going good with school, I’ve been struggling a little bit because of lack of focus but I hope that I’m able to jump back on track soon. I talked to my vocational rehabilitation counselor the other day (I got a new one) and it really hit me that I’m graduating in just a few years and a plan has been set in motion about what I really want to do with the rest of my life. It’s really exciting and scary at the same time but it looks like all the pieces are coming together. I just have to make it happen. You can do anything you put your mind to. This has to be the most corny saying ever but it’s the truth. You’re the only person that can make your life better in the end. Friends and family are great support but it’s your decision to make shit happen. I’m looking forward to writing my next post. I’ll try my best to do it as soon as possible.

Enjoy.