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Wednesday, June 06, 2018

Preface To Style: The Style That Is No Style

Anyone who's ever looked at me knows that I don't really have much style.  It might be concluded that I don't care very much about how I look, but it might also be concluded that there's a part of me that wishes I could care about my look but a) that seems like a hell of a lot of work & 2) have you seen how I look?

When I was younger I took a kind of spiteful sort of pride in not giving a shit about how I dressed.  I remember saying something of the sort to my German teacher in college & he said, "What are you talking about?  You have a definite style!  Those ratty tee shirts, the same old pants?  People recognize you right away?"

It was a bit deflating.

Years later, someone at KOOP, totally unsolicited, said to me when I walked into the station, "Oh god you dress like a thirteen year old boy!"  I told her I was uncomfortable with her referring to me as "god."

There have been women in my life who liked to dress me up, but that never lasted too long - again, I never had much patience for it.  Tee shirts are comfortable, you gotta wear pants, I never liked wearing sandals or flip flops so it's basically tennis shoes, & that's pretty much it.  The faithful ensemble.

One thing that I might have discussed before is the liberation from style that leaving high school brought me.  Who knows how I was judged in high school but I remember realizing when I first lived alone that no one gave a shit about what I was wearing.  In college, people would drag their asses into class barely out of pajamas.  I remember in eighth grade these guys I was sitting next to making fun of some kid who wore the same pair of pants every day - they checked because they made chalk marks on his leg or something - & that made me make sure to change pants every day.

In college?  I pretty much owned two pairs of pants for four years.  No one gave a shit!

Or they did, I guess, but I didn't hang around those kinds of people.

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