Thursday, February 21, 2008

Fashion Demystified: It’s All in the Neck Hole

Last Wednesday was another Bike Coalition volunteer night, and on Friday, I saw Equilibrium, with Christian Bale, who really is extremely handsome in every single movie he’s in, unlike, it pains me to say, Daniel Day-Lewis, who has the bad habit of disappearing very convincingly into his roles. He may not be aware that this is causing him to be only intermittently fabulous-looking.

As mentioned, KQED had accepted a Perspectives submission from me, and I was waiting for the last remnants of my flu to go away before I went to record it. There’s a link to it at right, but not here; nothing disfigures a pleasing expanse of text as does a link.

The night before recording, a massive amount of wood smoke rolled into my apartment (not generated by anyone in this building, of course) and since then I’ve been coughing horribly again. I have asthma, though it doesn’t give me severe problems, and I think that’s why it takes so long for coughs to go away.

The recording went fine, but later that day I went into Walgreens to look at something which happened to be near the laundry products; the laundry products smelled ghastly and set off a violent bout of coughing, causing snot and tears to run down my face copiously.

Last Saturday I went to a class at Spirit Rock taught by Eugene Cash on Whole Body Breathing. At the concentration retreat I go to each year, about the only instruction is to attend to the sensations of the breath at the nostrils. It does produce a concentrated state, but it also can produce a headache, probably due to a subtle effort to enhance the breath to make it more exciting, or at least more noticeable. Such headaches are not unknown in this type of practice.

So Eugene’s class was on feeling the breath in the whole body, and not just at this or that particular point. I got out of it exactly what I’d hoped.

That night, Tom and I saw A Room with a View, featuring Daniel Day-Lewis at the nadir of attractiveness, plus a remarkable amount of male frontal nudity. The sets were charming. Helena Bonham Carter was extremely young and had a dismaying amount of hair.

After Tom and I saw The Crucible, I went back and paused on a few frames where DDL looked especially comely (did they think up the words “comely” and “homely” at the same time?), until Tom said, “Do the two of you want to be alone?” Not long after, he picked up his chair and went home. He has to bring his own chair when he watches a DVD here, but he claims he’s comfortable, and says he prefers coming here because the iMac is bigger than his TV.

Last Sunday I made Dad’s very quick two-bean vegan chili and then Tom and I drove, in a rented car, because the train schedule was not favorable, to Sacramento for Chris’s 30th birthday party. Eva and Paul shared memories of his birth which made our mascara run, literally or figuratively. It was a lovely gathering. Chris is approximately the world’s best person.

Today Sir Dave sent me the link to a YouTube video of a 9/11 demonstration we attended more or less together that, unmistakably, features me at three different moments. Yep: there’s that dorky hat, and those baggy green pants, the exact same pants I was wearing when I received Sir Dave’s email today and am wearing right now, or some mighty like them.

It’s easy for this to happen, because I have three pairs of baggy green pants, and eight navy t-shirts, because I wear a navy t-shirt nearly every day, because, think about it: you can wash the car in it, or with it, if you have a car, and if you got invited to the White House for dinner, you’d look just right in a navy t-shirt.

I think I’m going to take the obvious next step and make five more pairs of green pants and wear green pants and a navy t-shirt every single day, because that really is the best thing to wear.

The pants are entirely under my control, but the t-shirts can be tricky. Sometimes Eddie Bauer has good ones and sometimes not; ditto Lands’ End. The ones I have now are Eddie Bauer (men’s XXL; I like a draping effect, and if I have to go to XXXL to get it, I will), but I just recently ordered some brand new Eddie Bauer navy t-shirts and they are too big!

By the time I’d fully comprehended this, I’d washed all of them, but since I’d spent a fair amount of money, I called them and they said to send the t-shirts back anyway. That was nice of them.

I have ordered a single navy t-shirt from Lands’ End, though the last time I got a t-shirt from Lands’ End, it was too big—you know, the neck hole was too big and so forth—so I have my fingers crossed.

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