Schlubs

I'll own up now, I am not a fashion plate.  Never have been, probably never will be.  I clean up well but sartorial endeavors are generally not on my screen for most of daily life.  So I'm not sure just how much credibility I have in this particular area of human interest.

This is not to say I am completely ignorant of how to dress, or what to wear, or at least how to put on clothes and not look like a dweeb when I leave the house.  Most of the time I do want to maintain a minimum standard of neatness and decorum, just by personal inclination.  What that means is that sometimes I even tuck in my t-shirts.  And I don't go grocery shopping in flip flops and cutoffs.

Which brings me to the subject of this post:  Schlubs, and the women they inflict themselves upon.

I took Wee Lass out for dinner over the weekend, after which we went for a stroll down the main street to window shop and have ice cream.  Something was bugging me, though, something that started during dinner and came into full bloom while we were out walking.  There were an unusual number of schlubs out that evening.  It started with the guy in the restaurant who was wearing a tank top and what looked like satin basketball shorts, along with bizarro black tennis shoes complete with red piping.  He looked like he had just crawled out of a hamper.

His wife (I assume she was his wife, they were eating together with two kids and behaving like a family unit) on the other hand was dressed casually, too, but so much more put together.  Simple black top with white capri pants and canvas deck shoes.  Maybe not knock-'em-dead elegant, but it looked good.  It looked like she gave a hoot about simple things like matching! and neat! and 'I didn't just get up!'.

When we left the restaurant I was sensitized to the phenomenon, as I really started to notice the walking fashion victims attached to arms of (for the most part) much more 'with it' lady companions.  Wrinkled t-shirts, river rat shoes, baggy cargo shorts, ragged jeans with flip-flops and far too many logos for beer and cars and drinking establishments.  All of these contrasted with nice summer dresses, well-fitting shorts, interesting shoes (I confess, my knowledge of womens shoe etiquette is sketchy), even just simple tops and intriguing accessories.  While it wasn't a top hat and tails evening, just a casual weekend night out, the ladies looked a lot better than the dudes.  Like they actually thought about it.  The guys, they made me wonder in some cases if they had scintillating personalities (or money) or if maybe they were just plain lucky to be in the company of the women with them.

In the interest of full disclosure, I was wearing a plain tan t-shirt (tucked in), off white shorts and canvas tan casual shoes with light brown laces.  I wouldn't have won any awards for world-class casual dress, no doubt, I felt I could hold my own against the Larry, Darryl and Darryls out that night.  My daughter was wearing a casual summer top over flower-patterned shorts, along with her favorite golden sandals

To paraphrase Al Pacino in And Justice For All..."Don't you care, guys?  don't you even care?".

I know it isn't earth-shattering, maybe even flirts with shallowness, but I bring this up because I didn't used to care. And now?  I do.  I don't know why, I just do.  While I'm not so much a block head that I would try to outshine the sun, I do want feel like I belong in the same part of the sky.  And that means, for better or worse, that I have to care about how I shine.

On The Flight of Certain Bees

 
I noticed the toothbrush holder askew on more than one occasion.  As it put an elbow in the rib of my neurotic architect obsession with plumb and level, I always adjusted it back to its upright position.  It never looked right, to my adult eye, and I could not explain it.

Just as many times as I adjusted it, I always returned later to find it an angle.  Must be leprechauns I thought.

Little did I know.  Wee Lass set me straight, and it crooked, last night when she came to brush her teeth.  She opened the holder, took out her brush, and then carefully twisted the bee so it was slanted.  She then said to me, in a casual aside, "I like it tilted, 'cause that's how bees fly."

Well, then.  I could not refute her aesthetics, or her observations of the natural world, so the bee remains as you see in the photo.

The more I looked at it, the more I decided she was right.  I like it, too.

The Good Thing About Being A Girl

So the other night I was watching television with Wee Lass, channel surfing to get my recommended daily allowance of Spongebob Squarepants and Fairly OddParents, when Her Royal Sweetness decides to get all Disney-channel on my decidedly pushover ass. She insisted that she wanted to watch ‘Phineas and Ferb’ or the ‘Mickey Mouse Crack House’ or something. Ooops. Did I say ‘crack house’? I meant ‘Playhouse’. I’d swear, though, that programming is like an audiovisual form of a controlled substance. Odds are that if you have a tyke in the house, you WILL be watching Disney at some point. No way around that.

Anyway, we are layin’ eyeballs on whatever it was that she wanted to watch and a commercial comes on. Not a commercial, exactly, but one of those “behind the scenes” looks at whatever the hot ‘tween show du jour is: you know, the ones that show shiny, buffed and/or artfully messy boys and girls running production studios or being fashion designers or just ‘chillin’ and being annoyingly “cool”. This one was interviews with the stars of the a show, purportedly showing you just achingly hip they are, and willing to share their “wisdom” with you. I’m sorry, it’s not wisdom they call it, it’s dating and fashion advice.

No problem so far. I’m a curmudgeon when it comes to stuff like this, but it seems pretty innocuous. The pretty little (and suspiciously well-attired; oh, right she has a wardrobe department and make-up staff and catering, etc.) pop starlet on screen is blabbering about how you can have an outfit that isn’t quite together but never fear! It can be fixed! She then proceeds to lay this little gem on us (not verbatim, but you’ll get it):

“The good thing about being a girl is that girls get to wear purses.”

I guess our little fashionista hasn’t seen anything like this:*

Crap. I have SOOO many outfits that could be accessorized if I could get to wear a purse. But I burp a lot, scratch myself and have nards. So I can’t be a girl, at least without a WHOLE lot of therapy and multiple operations. Sigh, a guy can dream, I guess.

I know, I know, it’s all supposed to be good fun, something that will appeal to the ‘tween set** and get them all ‘in the know’. I was a little taken aback by it, though. Here we have one of the largest media companies in the world with tremendous influence over the (buying) decisions and impressions of millions of people, including young girls and their parents (otherwise known as ATM and Money Tree) who watch them all the time, and the best they can do is purses?

I am fortunate that Wee Lass is only four years old now, and a lot of the advertising that she sees is like water off a duck’s back. She never says anything about the commercials unless it is something very obvious like “Moon Sand” or “Princess Playset” and the like. But wouldn’t it be cool, just once or twice, to see an infomercial that the good thing about being a girl is that girls get to be:

A Head of State

or


A top-notch footballer

or

A Well-known Scientist

Or even a…


A Really Cool Mother

I don’t know. I am a little at sea as to how I can handle this when Wee Lass gets bigger and starts asking bigger, better questions about life and all its possibilities. I know it isn’t realistic to tell her that she can and will be able to do everything under the sun, but I don’t want her to grow up thinking that her life choices are to be dictated by what other individuals say she should be doing or who she should be. There is nothing inherently wrong with wanting to look pretty (and don’t we all?) and have good taste in fashion and exhibiting those traits traditionally associated with being a girl. She IS a girl, and I have a feeling she will grow up to be a spectacular woman.

I just hope that I can help her understand that what is important is that she be herself, to not let others dictate to her what she can and cannot do. And if that means she goes to college on a full soccer scholarship and wins a World Cup while studying nanotechnology whereupon she invents a little machine that can get rid of cancer and goes on to be President while raising two wonderful kids of her own, well, that would really cool. Not mandatory, but cool.

Head of state, footballer, scientist, mother or something different: She may be Daddy’s little girl, but more importantly, I hope she knows to be her own girl, purse and all.

*For you football, er, soccer fans out there, yes that is Cristiano Ronaldo, one of the best ‘ballers in the business. Pretty isn’t he, ladies? I hate him. He doesn’t play for Arsenal. Carries a manpurse well, though.
**In fairness, there was a well-groomed young lad in a polo shirt, cool jeans and some sort of Vans-like shoes, showing the ‘tween guys how to look cool. He did not have as much bling as the lass with the purse. Pity.