Clothes make the man

I wore a t-shirt and jeans today. Yes, the fact that I’m mentioning it does mean that it’s newsworthy, or at least out of the ordinary. Before my mission, I think I wore normal clothes (i.e., t-shirts and jeans), but even now my memory is blurring and I can’t be sure. What I do know is that after my mission, I’ve grown an irrepressible taste for “dressing up” (meaning dress pants and button-up shirts, ala business attire). Every day. Even Saturdays. Yes, I’m weird. :) (At least for my age group.) But I’ve found that my clothing has become part of who I am, an inextricable part of my character. I’m almost a different person when I wear other types of clothes. Okay, perhaps not really that different (c’mon, I’ve got to try to make these blog posts dramatic to keep readership up ;)), but there’s enough of a change that I much prefer my now-normal clothes. Perhaps it’s the writerly image they conjure up in my mind, or perhaps it has to do with scholars and professors and librarians. Whatever it is, I probably won’t be wearing a t-shirt and jeans again for another year or two. Maybe ten. :)

[…] A while ago my dress pants (which I happen to wear pretty much every day — meaning the various pairs, not the same pair, of course, but I can’t very well say “my dress pantses,” now, can I? ) started splitting at the seams on the side at the pocket level, creating a little hole which looked in on the innards of the pocket. Nothing too serious, but it just doesn’t do to have holes in one’s pants, so last week I bought a little sewing kit at the Twilight Zone in the bookstore. I even got a book from the library on the basics of sewing, but unfortunately it was by Singer and so it almost entirely focused on sewing machines. And the rest was about patterns and other “advanced” stuff that had nothing to do with the problem at hand, namely stitching the hole up. Luckily I had some vague childhood memory of sewing, enough to know how to thread the needle and go in and out and snip the ends and tie them together. And it seems to have worked. ~fingers crossed~ Even if it comes apart, I suppose I can keep stitching them back together for another couple of weeks. (And eventually I ought to learn how to do it the right way. ) […]

[…] And for those of you who are wondering what on earth I’m talking about, see my Clothes make the man post from a year and a half ago. And then weep for the old Ben who has been buried in the loose detritus of the past. […]