A Thousand Words That Cannot Be Uttered in Public

Imagine that there are exactly one point six feet of space between you and your untimely demise at the hand of a steep cliff perched high atop jagged rocks battered by the foreboding seas below. You step gingerly along the way so as not to disturb any of the pebbles that might be the lynch pin holding together the teetering mass of earth beneath your feet. So far so good…now if you can just make it around this corner, you’ll have a wide plateau safely underfoot and you can relax and enjoy the view while you go to town on the ham and cheese sandwich warmed over in your backpack by a combination of sweat and sun. But just as you round the bend, you discover something blocking your way. Actually it’s two somethings. And it turns out that both somethings are wearing inappropriately tight pants cropped halfway down the shin. Both somethings are also sporting a healthy roll of flab under their inappropriately tight t-shirts and are held together by an inappropriate fanny pack strapped around their middle regions (and apologies for the redundancy…I know there is no such thing as an appropriate fanny pack…no need to write me letters). Then the most appalling cut of all, one something is holding a giant black camera in one hand and gesticulating vaguely with his other in order to get the second something to move just a hair to the right, that’s it, right there, perfect…don’t move. In fact, no one can move because this bizarre charade has taken up the entire path and an inch more to the right would have sent something number two to meet his maker.

For those who do not yet get the…ahem…picture, I’ll spell it out for you. I am fed up with tourists blocking crowded public streets to try to get a snapshot of their friend with the whole of the Manhattan skyline in the background. Invariably, one person will sidle up next to an important landmark. The other person, lacking opposable thumbs or a camera with a lens that can zoom both in and out will have to walk approximately one football field away to capture the breathtaking scene. The rest of us, who are just trying to make it to the Starbucks before we deck the next Greenpeace “intern” pestering us on the sidewalk, have to stand back a respectful distance while Ansel Adams consults with the art director in between frames. All of this effort wasted on a photo that is not worth anyone’s time, and more importantly, not worth my time. The same reason why people hate sitting through slideshows of your trip to the Everglades is the same reason why I have started to march right through these absurdly elaborate photo ops. The pictures are always terrible, no one cares, and I want some coffee.



Now we’ve cast the “somethings” in our little drama as European, but to be fair, this malady is not isolated to Europe. Indeed it has spread across the globe faster than either the Bubonic plague or a Coldplay-induced coma. We now see evidence of snap-happy, obtrusive shutterbugs everywhere from the northern (and southern, eastern, and western) regions of Japan to the icy tundra of Minnesota (at least this is what researchers have been able to gather from the t-shirts worn by subjects who appear to be suffering from the classic symptoms). This all begs a very crucial question. If we have learned anything from the indigenous peoples of Papua New Guinea, it’s that taking a picture of someone is a surefire way to steal his or hear soul and lock it away for eternity inside one’s camera. Why then do so many people persist in obstructing traffic to get the perfect shot of their jackass friend doing the YMCA in front of the Taj Mahal? What is it that turns amateur photographers into professional wastes of space?

Which brings us to Ashton Kutcher. I blame him for much of this epidemic. In particular, I blame the stunning features which make him so mischievously appealing in those Nikon commercials despite not having showered in several days (I’ll assume this is just to avoid awkward encounters in the hallway with his sixteen year old step-daughter and not due the fact that he could not find his way out of a wet paper bag unless Demi pinned instructions to his jacket). If he’s going to continue to peddle the fantasy that his particular camera takes off ten pounds of ugly, he better add a user agreement to avoid liability when I send the camera off the cliff right after something number two, just to make sure we capture the full impact.

I S*it You Not

Picture it, I’m at the sink in the restroom, getting my anti-swine-flu precautions on when I hear, “So I don’t know if you got my text message or not, but like Jen has VIP tickets to the Vince Gill concert tonight.” I think to myself, “I love Vince Gill but I don’t have any idea who you are or who Jen is for that matter and frankly, I have no idea where your voice is even coming from.” And thank goodness I did not say it out loud because before I could respond some unheard person beat me to the punch and next I hear, “ok awesome, we can get some beer and meet there at like 5.” And then it hits me. The disembodied voice is coming from the bathroom stall! And the voiceless respondent is on said pooper’s cell phone!

I never in my wildest imagination thought we’d have to address this but the [ahem…subject matter of this post] seems to finally have hit the fan. And while I am all for multi-tasking, we have officially reached the limit, as I will demonstrate with a little hypothetical. You are chatting with your friend on the phone making plans to get burgers after work. In fact, you can picture in your brain the juicy looking slab of ground chuck with just a hint Dijon mustard and grilled onion bunting peeking out the sides. Your mouth starts to water as you choose a time and location for this get together and make the presumptuous decision in your head to order fries AND onion rings for the table. Suddenly a worm hole opens up allowing you to defy the laws of the time-space continuum and actually see your friend as he is talking to you making plans to get hamburgers. Your cell phone drops to the ground and smashes into as many little pieces as the shards of your immortal soul when you discover that your burger buddy is taking care of business while he’s taking care of business. You are thinking of tonight’s tasty nouveau American and he is still working on getting rid of last night’s ill advised Mexican. This latest etiquette abomination has now cost you your love of hamburgers, cell phones, and the auto-flush feature on the American Standard, all in one…uh…sitting.

Of course we hold culprits of such offenses to human decency to account for their actions, but there is another co-conspirator that merits mention, and elimination. I’m going to place the blame squarely on the Real World and its misbegotten step child Big Brother. TMI does not even begin to describe the gaping hole in the floodgates of the participants’ shame. Watching people sitting around at a slumber party playing truth or dare seems harmless enough, just some engaging young people swapping jokes and stories and the occasional venereal disease. But cameras in the bathrooms? I can imagine few things more repulsive than calculating the amount of soap it will require our protagonists to wash off last night’s bad decisions.

At least the television version of the problem we’re discussing affords us the small comfort of clinging to the fourth wall. We can keep a safe distance on the other side of the glass and pretend that it’s all pretend, it’s all a fiction concocted to entertain us, it could never happen in our own existence. That is why it is absolutely soul crushing when we discover individuals like the one profiled above in person. He reminds us of the depths to which our species has sunk and we begin to question whether his life is really worth living. The answer dear-hearts is that in the real “real world”…it’s not. So for the future, I’d suggest hanging up the phone when you cross the forbidden threshold or else the disease you pick up from that toilet seat will be the least of your worries.

The Emperor's New T-Shirt

There is something of a delicious (read: appalling) irony of New York calling itself the fashion capital of the world. The latest trend apparently is to not wear any clothes. At least this is what I gather from the fact that no one seems to put on actual clothes anymore. The streets are filled with half-dressed do-nothings wearing wholly insufficient amounts of shirt. On a good day you can spot at least a baker’s dozen of these individuals sporting only a v neck undershirt and a keffia.

If we were inclined to give our sartorial offenders the benefit of the doubt, we might presume that they are such busy and productive people that they simply do not have time to put on clothes in the morning. If they’re not out of the house in fewer than the 30 seconds it would have taken to put on an actual shirt, the nuclear launch codes will fall into the hands of the terrorists. And of course by nuclear launch codes I mean excessively tight pants, and by terrorists, I mean people who wake up before the breakfast menu items are no longer available at McDonalds.

An alternative explanation is that New Yorkers are so post-fashion that no actual clothes could possibly capture their trail-blazing sense of style. The internal monologue goes something like this: “Wearing clothes is so April of 2009. Wouldn’t it be edgy slash borderline indecent exposure if I just walked around in my underwear? Yes, yes it would. I’m gonna do it, here I go, out the door, wearing nothing by my crocs and the wife beater I fell asleep in last night. [Shields his eyes as he walks outside into the 2 pm sunlight]. Hey, it’s working! People are really intrigued. I am so fashion forward that I’m giving these jokers whiplash.”

But the most likely explanation of all, sad to say, is that our friends on the metaphorical and physical island are mindless snobs who would wear anything “on trend” as long as it’s overpriced. See e.g. American Apparel. A metaphor about bridges and lemmings comes to mind, but I’ll leave that for you fully clothed readers to figure out.

Of course this forum is something of a how-to on manners and etiquette, our lack of a proper title notwithstanding, so those of you who have been following along may wonder how this discussion relates to the theme. The fundamental problem is simple: we do not want people walking around in their underwear because they are generally flabby, sweaty, and altogether disgusting. We know this is true and before you release your indignant guffaw, think back to the last time someone asked you to pose for a Mr. or Ms. can’t-pay-for-my-education calendar and then let’s move on. The more complicated issue then is the insufficient clothing worn by people who we might prefer to see with even less clothing. Walking around showing off the fruits of your exercise bulimia is an affront to all job-holding, red-meat eating Americans trying to get through the day without a constant reminder of the crippling self-consciousness. I’m sorry if your daddy didn’t love you as a child and if you want to shake your moneymaker in the privacy of a dark bar or hipster coffeehouse, that’s your business. But for heaven’s sake put some clothes on when you go out in daylight.

Fail Blazer

Ladies, I’m giving you the week off. There is an epidemic going on in this country that has been affecting only the male of the species so I would suggest that you quarantine yourselves while we purge the population of those that have been infected. It would probably be a good idea to tuck the kiddies into bed while you’re at it because this installment is going to be a bit “adult.”

Now gentlemen, I give you…your comeuppance. It seems that throughout your formative years, you were so busy learning how to spit and to calculate the elapsed time since the last airing of Sports Center that you never learned how to dress yourselves. Time and again I walk past an otherwise neat and earnest young go-getter only to shrink back in horror when I observe the sartorial atrocities he has committed. We are going to catalogue them from most to least egregious but you should note that these offenses are different only in degree (and yes, I am aware that, technically, there are no degrees of egregiousness, but I could do without the back talk). They all share the common characteristic of announcing to the world that you were raised by wolves.

Just the other day I almost bounced a young man from an interview I was not even conducting because I saw him marching toward his inquisition wearing a blazer and slacks of the same color. Those of you thinking to yourselves, “Wow, that sounds like a pretty snappy combo,” are beyond salvation and should consider occupations that require you to use no discretion whatsoever; perhaps a garbage man, or a senator. The problem is that by trying to make a “suit” out of “not a suit,” you project an image of being a lazy slob who will cut corners and cannot be bothered to observe even the most elementary of social graces. A prospective employer or client might wonder, if you are willing to patch this little ensemble together, what sort of duct taped, jerry-rigged mass of techno scrap you are going to produce for them with the money you were supposed to use to install a new network server. “Oh don’t worry sir, Linux works just like Windows only cheaper…of course it shuts down periodically and without warning but if you just hold the ‘ctrl’ key at all times, that seems to do the trick.”

The blazer bonanza is perhaps the gateway offense to the next issue on our agenda…vents and tags. Something on the Y chromosome must make the menfolk terrified of threads because it seems you cannot bear to cut anything that is sewn to the clothes you buy. I shudder to reflect on the countless cases of a vented jacket or overcoat still bearing the telltale “x” stitch holding the back in place like a glaring scarlet letter as an eternal reminder of your sin against good manners…eternal, that is, until you remove it. For those of you having trouble following this discussion, I will put it in terms that you can understand: the string holding the flappy thing together on your new suit is meant to be CUT OFF! The same goes for the label on the sleeve to remind you which has-been designer happened to have their shipment of merchandise on sale the day you went to TJMaxx. No one cares that your ill fitting duds were hand-crafted by Alfredo Linguine in Florence, China so just bag the tag and we can all move one with our lives.



However what I absolutely cannot understand is whether you have just been oblivious to the buttons under your short collar or were confused about their function. Normally, when you see a button and a button hole, instinct should take over and impel you toward social self preservation. But we must have found the missing link because I continue to see gents out and about without a care in the world and their collars flapping in the breeze. This is not the natural order of things. A truly well crafted collar will be stiff and have a slot for a small piece of metal or plastic to keep it straight and neat. Naturally, though, this is too advanced a concept for you so the good folks at the shirt manufacturers have simplified things. No need to keep track of extra components. The buttons are right there for your use, every time, right were they should be…directly under the holes into which you are supposed to push them (TWSS…but there’s no time, but she did, but there’s no time).

As per usual, I will not leave you without a solution. First of all, you should stop being such a tightwad. Get a little extravagant and make a trip to Filene’s Basement for a proper suit. It may cost you a little more than your usual $15 blue light special, but I promise you it is worth a couple of weeks of downgrading to Red Stripe from your usual PBR. Secondly, stop being such a lazy so-and-so. I know you have the manual dexterity of mentally challenged walrus but they even make special scissors for people like you now so there’s really no excuse. As for the shirt situation, just take one day and walk around your house gathering your shirts up off of the floor, or the back of the chair, or under the kitchen sink and button the collars while you’re watching PTI. Whatever you do, though, do NOT miss the third re-run of Sports Center. It always, ALWAYS has new information than it had the two times before.