I am having a fashion crisis.

It’s basically the conflict between what my friend Jess calls “The Ross Mentality” and what I feel SHOULD be the Quarterlifer’s way of thinking about clothes — buy quality, even though it’s more expensive, because now you have a paycheck.

I’m leaving for Chicago tonight, so on Saturday I had two friends, one from Staten Island, one from Orange County, come over and assess my wardrobe. We found *barely* five days worth of clothing and shoes they said were acceptable for a journalism conference in Chi-town in the middle of summer. Which made me worried.

A brief history: Throughout high school, the most expensive article of clothing in my closet was a pair of jeans which cost $25. When I was 16, I discovered Ross. It wasn’t necessarily because I couldn’t afford to shop someplace else that I bought most of my wardrobe there, but because the temptation of being able to get three shirts, a pair of jeans, a bag and shoes for under $50 was just too alluring. And when you’re in high school, it’s all about quantity — heaven forbid you wear the same article of clothing twice in one week.

College was a hazy time in the maturing of my fashion sense. I was introduced to sweaters, coats and scarves. But when it’s 20 below zero, as it sometimes got in Williamstown … let’s just say that not freezing to death was on my mind much more than whether my orange scarf clashed with my striped sweater.

At Williams, dressing up was strictly for weekend evenings. Anything else, and people stared at you, wondering why on earth you were wearing more than sweatpants and a baggy sweater to English class. I mean, who the heck were you trying to impress anyway?

Now, as a young professional working in Hawaii, my quest to build good personal style is, I feel, caught between a number of factors. Climate is one thing. My job is another. I would love to look fabulous every day, but just can’t figure out how to go stomping through piles of manure at a horse stable in 96-degree weather looking totally chic.

I love the “Looks for the Office” that Stacy and Clinton put together so effortlessly on TLC’s “What Not To Wear,” but since my “office” on any given day can be (a) the newsroom, (b) Starbucks, (c) in front of a grocery store talking to people who don’t want to talk to me, (d) the beach, or (e) anywhere else on Oahu, I’m in a bit of a bind.

Help me, Tim Gunn!

It seems the only place you’ll ever see people dressed up in Hawaii is at the W or the Pearl clubs on Friday or Saturday night. Fashion in this laid-back, tropical, beachy place located thousands of miles from style meccas like New York or Paris just isn’t a priority for most people.

I’m working really hard to shake “The Ross Mentality.” I still have threshold amounts above which I will not pay for a shirt, tank-top or pants. I roam the sale racks at Banana Republic, but cringe when I see the price tags on some of the regular priced items.

After all, I don’t have oodles of money to spend of clothes, and I’d like to think that there’s more to me than what label I’m wearing. But, I’ve also realized the importance of first impressions and of looking professional in your twenties — and not like you’re still in high school.

This may mean a closet purge and/or some serious shopping. You know, the kind that makes your head hurt. Or maybe I just need a device I can strap to my arm that will deliver an electric shock every time I want to purchase something $12.99 and polyester.

On Monday, I read this article in the NYT about a “sustainability house” at Oberlin College with interest.

The house, called SEED (Student Experiment in Ecological Design) represents a growing effort on college campuses — including the University of Hawaii — to consume less energy, reduce carbon emissions and recycle.

Although it seems they’re still trying to nail down exactly what it means to have a “sustainable house,” the eight housemates in the Oberlin house mastered such skills as worm composting, staying warm with the thermostat set at 60 degrees (a feat — Ohio winters can be COLD), living without TV, and taking shorter showers by sticking a photo of Sen. John Edwards on the ceiling above the showerhead.

They even consolidated all their food into one fridge (there are two kitchens) and unplugged all the appliances in one kitchen.

My college held a contest with similar goals. The different houses competed to see who could lower their electricity bill the most from the previous year’s. The month-long competition was called “Do It In The Dark.”

Some students went to great lengths to compete, pushing each other to turn off lights whenever they left a room, unplug lap tops and take quick showers. Unfortunately, our house, which had eight girls, did not win the contest. But the campus did save $10,000 in electricity bills during spring 2006, my senior year.

(AND we earned a nod from Thomas Friedman.)

The University of Hawaii at Manoa is working on its own sustainable building project, Sustainable Saunders, a student and faculty-led effort to make 7-story Saunders Hall a model for sustainability on the UH campus (see photo). UH is the second-largest consumer of electricity on Oahu, after military services, and according to the Sustainable Saunders web site, about $1.5 million in student tuition goes to pay the university’s electricity bill each month.

“Sustainability” has become a buzz-word that’s often easy to brush off as a vague and unreachable idea. But it has to be a very real idea in Hawai‘i, which remains the most oil-dependent state in the nation. And for young people, who may see many of the natural resources we now take for granted disappear within our lifetimes, caring about sustainability is more than just a trend — it’s caring about the quality of our lives, our future.

So go ahead, no shame: Tell your friends to do it in the dark.

Photo: Sustainable Saunders Earth Day 2008 on Flickr.

Women: What if you walked into the ladies room and saw a person standing up to pee?

Men: What if you entered the men’s room and saw someone applying lipstick and mascara in the mirror?

According to an article in The Williams Record (my college paper), a group of students are asking the school to make campus bathrooms more welcoming to the transgender community by removing gender designations from all single-use restrooms. The students have the support of some senior staff members of the administration and would eventually like to see locker rooms modified (for more privacy for those who feel uncomfortable changing in front of others) and all campus buildings outfitted with gender-neutral restrooms.

It’s one thing to switch the signs on single-use bathrooms, but as the article acknowledges, adjustments beyond that are going to require more resources … and more acceptance from the community.

The public reaction to Thomas Beatie, a pregnant man who used to be a woman, indicates that the “T” in the GLBT acronym might very well be the hardest for our society to accept. As homosexuality is accepted gradually, transgendered individuals are still met with stares or awkward glances. Media still struggle with how to refer to transgendered people — whether to call them he and she, or “he” and “she,” or even he/she.

As more people now identify themselves as transgendered, there’s a new call to avoid separating people based on “male” and “female.” In one example, a former (mostly straight) dance club in Scottsdale, Ariz. transformed itself into the premier spot for the GLBT community following a widely-talked about 2006 incident involving the owner and a transgendered woman.

According to an article in The Arizona Republic, the owner asked the woman, Michele de LaFreniere, to leave the club after female patrons complained about men in dresses using the bathroom designated for women. De LaFreniere responded by filing a claim of sex discrimination with the Arizona attorney general, and the owner, Tom Anderson, became the subject of dozens of articles pitting him against the GLBT community.

(Anderson reopened the club in Dec. 2007 with a gender-neutral restroom and the place now caters to the GLBT community, attracting more than 700 patrons on Friday and Saturday night. Each.)

I’ll never forget walking into a multi-stall mixed-gender bathroom in a club in Beijing, which was attended mostly by gay men. In the stall to one side was my female friend; in the stall on the other side, a guy. The stalls were private; the bathroom was bathed in soft red lighting and the sinks with their basins of smooth stones and soft cascading water made you feel like you were washing your hands in a small waterfall. It was a weird experience, to say the least. But surprisingly, “uncomfortable” wasn’t one of the feelings that came to mind.

Many people would feel uncomfortable. Williams has a fairly open-minded student body, but even there, as with most places, you’ll likely find people who want to keep the women’s room for women and the men’s room for men.

Is our traditional way of thinking about gender confining? Are we ready for all things gender-neutral?

pic: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-neutral_bathrooms