What Happened to Mr. K-Mart?

Today my mom asked, "What happened to my high school son? When I threatened to hide all your clothes and buy you designer jeans and izod shirts you said you'd go to school in your underwear, Mr. K-mart." Mom is right, my general attitude toward clothing was a shrug of the shoulders if not an outright hostility to looking presentable. My senior superlative was, "Biggest Bum Dresser." Is it any wonder that I only had two girlfriends in high school?

College wasn't much better as far as fashion went. I at least decided to wear shirts that fit, but most of the time you'd see me in relaxed fit jeans and a hooded sweatshirt. After my junior year, it was rare for me to be seen without a baseball cap. That was my fashion statement, a backward hat. Luckily, most college kids dress like they fell off the back of a Good Will truck, so I wasn't too terribly out of place. My hostility to fashion had turned to indifference.

The party ended. I grew up and got an adult job teaching. I resigned myself to having to wear button ups for work. I dutifully put on dockers and large billowy shirts that could double as sail on a windy day. My shoes came in brown and black, mostly plastic and compressed cow scraps. Sometimes I polished them and my roommate Mark was nice enough not to ask me why I bothered with that farce. He was fairly non-judgmental for a guy with a good sense of personal style, and he endured my sartorial jabs when I maligned boating shoes without socks.

Like most of my hobbies, my interest in fashion started with an idle thought. I told myself I was going to improve my wardrobe with a nice pair of shoes, a new suit, and a watch. It was a New Year's Goal. It started with a new pair of shoes, a pair of 300 dollar Magnanni cap toe Oxfords. As it turned out, I had some good instincts about shoes, but I also had a lot of advice from Mark and my other friend Ben. I still pester the two of them for feedback on clothes and shoes.

From there it snowballed. I bought a pair of Sperrys which my students obsessed over. I am a believer in boating shoes without socks now.

Good will was kind enough to provide these Cole Haans for 12 bucks. I stuck them in the freezer, got them resoled, and they're a nice pair of cap toes for the price.

Eventually, it got to this level. This isn't including the three other pairs of shoes I've bought since this picture was taken.

At the moment, I have a pretty fierce interest in clothing and shoes. I taught myself how to dress and learned what looks good and what doesn't. Is it perfect? No. Is it better than how how I used to dress? Yes, by leaps and bounds. 

During this process, I've started to develop my own personal sense of style, something beyond hooded sweatshirts and baseball caps. Is it vain to take this much interest in how you look? Of course it is, but I make no apologies for it. I've discovered a lot of advantages to taking an interest in how you dress and I'll focus my next blog post on why it's worth it. 

Where are you from?

For as long as I can remember, I've had strangers ask me about my ethnic background. Some do this in a rather pointed fashion. Others ask in a round about way. The other night I was at a Cardinals game and the man sitting behind me tapped me on the shoulder. The following conversation ensued. 

Man: Do you speak Mandarin?

Me: No (I turn away)

A few minutes go by. 

Man: Are you sure you don't speak Mandarin?

Me: Pretty sure.

Man: Oh... So where are you from?

Me: Kansas City. 

Man: Where are your parents from?

Me: Chicago. 

I understood what he was asking, but I'll be damned if I was going to satisfy his curiosity. It's been a while since I've been asked these sorts of questions. It happened more in small town Kirksville than it does in St. Louis. From strangers, I find the inquiry rude and invasive. I suppose, what I find offensive about it is that the guy just wants to find a label for me, and with that label, whatever other assumptions he has. 

Most of the time, I don't think of myself as Asian or Korean. It's not part of my identity and it holds little value to me. It's something I stick on a census form. Perhaps one of the reasons I find the ethnic background question from strangers so off-putting is because it's asking me to assume an identity that I don't identify with. I don't mind answering the ethnicity question when asked by friends, because they already know me. They aren't seeking another label. It's just something that naturally comes up. 

I grew up in overwhelmingly white communities raised by white parents and I am happy with my upbringing. The values of hard work, integrity, and curiosity were instilled in me by my parents. My love of writing was nurtured by many great English teachers. My love of reading comes from my mom. My politic beliefs grew first from my Dad and eventually changed in college much to his chagrin. Those characteristics and traits define me. I own them. 

This is not to say that ethnicity is the only sort of label people can place on you. Gender, socioeconomic status, sexual orientation, language spoken, and religion are all used to define others wrongfully. However, ethnicity is the label I've had the most experience dealing with, so it's what I decided to write about tonight. 

Where I almost Die While Driving to See My Parents

When I think road rage, I think about angry drivers shooting people with crossbows because they got cut off. It sounds absurd, but it's happened. I'm not to the point where I'm crossbowing people in the face quite yet, but I do have a fairly serious case of road annoyance. Road annoyance is caused by bad driving. For example, always driving in the left hand lane draws my ire, as well as cars constantly changing speeds. Leap frog is best left for the playground, not the hwy. People who don't signal when changing lanes or keep their brights on all the time deserve a special circle in hell. It's even worse when you are driving with someone who doesn't know the rules of the road and you feel like you need to mouth apologies to every car you pass. 

Until such a time that America invests in some heavy duty public transit, I'm just going to have to deal with bad driving and being annoyed from time to time. I suppose I should be happy that I'm capable of being annoyed right now. Had my day gone slightly differently, I might be lying in a hospital bed or dead in some morgue. 

I'm not ready to be dead quite yet. There are a lot of things I want to do like change the world for the better or finish one of those roadside burger challenges and get my picture on the wall. God help me if I go to my grave without one of those two things happening. 

Currently I'm visiting my parents who live about 400 miles away. The trip from St. Louis to Little Rock is a long and tedious one. It's one I've made a number of times and most of these drives are uneventful. The roads are straight and eventually it's all very flat. I listen to my mp3 player for the most part. Actually, most of the time I'm singing along with my mp3 player and anyone who tells you they don't sing in the car is a liar and a scoundrel. 

I was a few hours into my trip and for the 100th time that day, I started to pass another car. I wasn't thinking much of it. Unlike my transmission, passing cars is mostly automatic. For whatever reason, the car in the right hand lane neglected to check his blind spot and started to merge into my car just as I was right next to him. 

Remembering that two objects cannot occupy the same time and space, I decided to avoid being a high school physics equation. I hit the brakes, but too hard and inadvertently became a different physics equation because objects in motion tend to stay in motion.  The back of my car started fishtailing all over the hwy. I corrected (overcorrected) and corrected again. It couldn't have lasted more than a few seconds, but I managed to subdue my car and avoid injury. I neither hit the shoulder or hit another car. 

When it was all said and done, I was more shaken up than anything, not so much road rage, or even road annoyance, but more road oh-my-god-did-I-really-almost-die-there. The rest of my drive was uneventful, but I can definitely see why someone would keep a crossbow in the front seat with them. 

The Kiln and Kin are Cold

Language is not a perfect puzzle piece to fit neatly into the jigsaw of someone else's head, but a cracked pottery fragment held in place by glue and spit, the seal by no means seamless. But it's that very imprecision where air and water leak through that allow for language to be playful, to be fun, to be misunderstood. Through these many imperfect fits, I can create humor, juxtapose the sacred and profane, and create evocative imagery in the minds and hearts of others.

Perhaps I think too much of myself, but I also happen to think the world of words.

Yet for as much as I admire language, it fails me. For me, words evaporate when I try to express feelings or emotions. I feel perhaps more than some and perhaps less than others, but my ability to shape these feelings into words is not always successful.

I suppose this is a long and meandering way to introduce the fact that I've been thinking about my brother a lot. People keep asking me how I'm doing in the wake of his death. They don't say that of course. They just ask how I am and give a meaningful look. More often than not I shrug my shoulders. It's not that I don't want to have the conversation, nor do I want people to stop asking, but I don't have an answer beyond body language most of the time.

There are a lot of things I could say about my brother. I could talk about the person he was. I could talk about the memories I have. I could talk about the way he's frozen in time to me. I could talk about his death. I could talk about the fact that I don't have the faith or belief in an afterlife. I could talk about the finality of things and how cold that is.

I think I've gotten caught up in a contradiction. I know that language is imperfect, that expressing emotions and feelings will never be a precise science, metered out in grams and liters. I know that language is a cracked vessel, but I want my words to be a flawless vase. And rather than fire up the kiln and produce any words, the hearth lies cold.

This is who I am for the most part, words left unsaid, with feelings rarely given form. I know the lesson. I can see the moral, but I open the mouth to speak and find only the coldness of clay.

Well, that was Awkward

For the most part, I function well in social settings, but there’s still a large part of my brain dedicated to making things more awkward than they need to be. Anytime I’m caught off guard, the awkward portion of my frontal lobe signals to release awkward hormones into my bloodstream and they cause me to do stupid things like speak or not speak, whichever would be more socially crippling. Or, better yet, I’ll just say, “Awkward,” without any further explanation.

Brain, we’ve been doing this for 27 years. If you’ll excuse the pun, let’s be a team and keep our best interests in mind. You don’t force me to do anything stupid, and I promise to listen to some classical music and drink some pomegranate juice. By God, I can and will stab you with a q-tip if you cross me. Don’t tell me that I’ll just perforate an eardrum because I ALREADY KNOW THAT!

I guess the only real way I can threaten my brain with any lasting violence would involve alcohol or a traumatic brain injury. My goal is to reduce the amount of awkward moments in my life and neither of those conditions seem conducive for helping my cause in the long run.

I only bring this subject up because tonight at Easter dinner  I managed to say something incredibly awkward and nothing needed to be said at the moment. I could have simply let the comment go and pretended that nothing happened. NOPE. Mouth opens, and before I knew it, I had scrolled through the rolodex of awkward reactions and loaded the best one into the system. I wonder if my life is a sitcom where I simply have perfect comedic timing for an unseen studio audience. An unseen studio audience who also happens to hate me or enjoys seeing the protagonist bumble his way through life. If this is true, I am owed so many royalties.

I think the problem is that not a lot of things do catch me offguard, but when something does, it can really stagger me. I am not going to explain how I was awkward tonight, at least not on the internets. If you’re curious, I will tell you in person and you can laugh at me or if you’re nice, commiserate. Either are acceptable at this point.

About The Previous Posts

I probably should have explained the previous posts. Basically, it's a continuation from Twitter. If someone favorited my 3000th tweet, I took a few minutes to write a few musings about them... even if that person was someone's dog.

In other news, I've decided to try and get some of my writing published on online blogs and websites. What doesn't get accepted (probably a lot) will eventually make it's way here. I'll also keep writing things here of course, but anything that looks more polished was probably a rejected piece. That'll happen too.

Anne

Cont. from Twitter:

It's taken me a while to write this because there isn't a whole lot I can write that you don't already know, and the last thing I want to do is rehash old news. So perhaps this is new, perhaps it isn't. I don't know about you, but one of the things that I assume is that we're going to be friends for a while. I'm not saying we should make matching friendship bracelets at summer camp and swear to stay in touch once school starts. I don't think our friendship needs that type of reinforcement. We've remained friends despite changes in proximity, relationship status, and employment. Sure there are lulls from time to time, but the lulls (not lols) have never been an indicator of a new normal.

So, I guess I more or less assume that you're going to be around in my life for the foreseeable future, making corny jokes, calling me on my bullshit, and in general just being a good friend. I can't say that about every person who enters my life. (Even my parole office Barry had to leave after five years.) While I value the friendships I have and I do my best to maintain them, circumstance doesn't always make it possible to stay in touch. Like tectonic plates or the third Fast and Furious movie, people drift.

I've always felt as if I've known you for a long time, and I guess what I haven't consciously realized is that feeling stretches both into the past and into the future.