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Shut the front door! There must have been a Harmonic Convergence or a return of Halley's Comet or some astrological cataclysm today because I just found out I've been a fashion plate all my life and didn't even know it.

There I was, sitting at my computer, wearing my work uniform of black knit pants and the heather gray sweatshirt I bought in London's Camden Town in 1997. Still looks like new.

I opened the latest email newsletter from "Lenny," created by Lena Dunham, the writer, producer/director of the TV show, "Girls." I read quickly through the introduction and stumbled across the word "normcore." I promptly Googled it and found an article on the Vogue-UK Website describing this latest "trend." Which is really not a trend. The article was accompanied by photos of people wearing my favorite non-designer clothes: jeans, t-shirts, sneakers with no labels and plain black fanny packs.

Leave it to the fashion industry to co-opt my "look" and the "looks" of millions of us, which is to say, those of us who don't think much about our "look." The Kardashians have a "look." I have, according to the article, "high-end pedestrian dressing." Although in my case it's more low than high.

The writer of the article goes on to quote the New York trend agency K-Hole's publication, Youth Mode: "Normcore doesn't want the freedom to become someone . . . Normcore moves away from a coolness that relies on difference to a post-authenticity that opt into sameness." I'd like to know in what MFA program that author learned to write such a strangled, tangled seaweed of a sentence. Do you get the feeling the fashion industry is trying a bit too hard? Like they're running out of fads so now they have to co-opt the way millions of us dress every day? So they can steal the look, raise prices on ordinary garments and gouge us ever more?

Ah, capitalism. No one ever said it was pretty.

The article continues with a quote from designer Richard Nicoll: "I've been inspired recently by my idea of The Special Normal and The Perfect Boring. Trusty wardrobe staples that last but have something unique and personal. . . . "Normcore says, 'I have soul and intelligence. I'm unique and I don't need to shout about it.'"

Reminds me of Al Franken's "Saturday Night Live" character, Stuart Smalley, who stands before a mirror and says, "I'm good enough, I'm smart enough and doggone it, people like me!" If you say it often enough, it might become true.

But wait. Now that I look more carefully at the article, I see that it was published in 2014. Oh, no. For the amount of time it took me to drink a cup of coffee and read the article, I was "in," I was "hip. I was normcore. Now I'm just another trend, come and gone. Back to being plain old boring. Sigh.

That's OK. The stress of keeping up with normcore was killing me.

- Rosie Sorenson

Rosie Sorenson is the award-winning author of They Had Me at Meow: Tails of Love from the Homeless Cats of Buster Hollow. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, San Jose Mercury News, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review and others. In 2007, she won an honorable mention in the Erma Bombeck Writing Competition.