My usual day ends with a challenge: What pajamas to wear because tomorrow, I will wear them to work. I'm sure many of you have experienced the same quandry.

Do I wear my Stewie Christmas pajamas, where the maniacal Griffin glares at the shins of passers by, calculating their destruction once he has escaped his two-dimension cotton prison?

Do I don the paint flecked pink plaid pair that fall off and reveal the not too decorous sight of my rear end?

Do I pull on the new blue pair from Target that are possibly the softest sleepwear ever formulated in a chemistry lab? Give myself a little hope that by wearing a new pair I'll magically become Louise Erdrich or the New Yorker will be calling me, frantic for a piece of genius?

A challenge I'm sure I and other freelance (read: mainly unemployed) writers face, day and day out. It's difficult. Maybe we need a support group.

When I was in college, most of us dreamed of coming to work in our pjs. Some of us did. We even had one boy who waundered around campus in a fleece blanket festooned with yellow ducks for years at a time.

We craved the slovenly, the comfort, the security blanket afforded by our polar-bear decorated legs.

Now, sad to say, I grow tired of the game. I would almost pay someone to demand I come to work in a suit. Barring that, a blazer and pants that aren't made of soft, much-slept in cotton. If circumstances were different and a job that involved writing opened, I'd pull up stakes this instant.

When I was a reporter west of Chicago, I used any excuse to dress down. Mostly because, as a reporter for a small paper, you don't need to wear the Calvin Kline navy pinstriped suit. You'd look pretty ridiculous at the Elburn corn boil.

Now, eeking out a living in my home city, doing most of my reporting over the phone with only a story or so to concentrate on, I again, would pay to have to dress for work. I have grown increasingly tired of my pajama game.