CSotD: We don’t get it
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Rhymes With Orange gets some of its best laughs by pointing out the obvious.
I don't know if this has any connection to our hunter/gatherer roots, in which men were cast into a hostile, competitive world where the nail that stands up gets the hammer, or whether it's simply perceptual.
When I was a kid, my mother would regularly send me back upstairs because my socks didn't match: One was black, one was navy. If I held them together and really looked, I could see that they were different, but they looked pretty much the same otherwise and what I learned, growing up, was that other people cared and apparently could tell navy from black without having to focus on it.
Today, I can tell navy from black in most light and, more important, I can tell if two socks match without having to examine them too closely. And I don't want to go out in mismatched socks, but the answer to that is, as suggested in the cartoon, to not purchase a lot of close-but-no socks.
Navy, gray, black, brown, that's all. Well, lots of white, but that's like a different clothing item. God knows there are enough ways to let your guard down without foolish color choices being one of them.
I learned something about this in biology class, as it happens. We had a young, handsome teacher with a girlfriend some 350 miles away in Gotham, and sometimes he would come to class Monday and the girls (we being all about 14 at the time) would ask him if he'd been to NYC that weekend and then giggle.
Turns out they were keying in on his bright red socks. And they were right so often that his socks became a focus of entertainment, an unconscious confessional. Once he got hip to their method, of course, it spoiled the experiment or at least flipped it, since he had realized he could manipulate their giggles by his choice of socks.
It was several years before I started having that kind of Mondays, but, by then, I knew better than to wear red socks unless I wanted to talk about it.
And, like most of my friends, by the time I had something to talk about, I had outgrown the compulsion to talk about it. (But let's save that topic for another day.)
Anyway, there was a brief flare-up of male peacockery in the late 60s and early 70s that served only to show that, however well we can distinguish between navy and black, that's about as well as we draw the line between adding a dash of color and going full costume-freak.
Apparently, dear ladies, you have two choices:
1. Navy blazer/brown tweed or
2. Nehru jacket/leisure suit, both in powder blue
(There are two notable exceptions: Hunters wear blaze orange to avoid being mistaken for deer, and I think golfers have a similar strategy to avoid being hit by errant tee shots. These purely functional clothing choices would be ghastly in any other context.)
Fact is, we don't get it.
Today's Blondie is a joke, of course, because men really can understand that your wallet is kept hidden and doesn't have to match.
We just don't understand purses. Brown. Black. Navy. Done.
Apparently not.
It's hard not to come to a very simple strategy: If you don't buy a pink purse, you won't need to buy pink shoes. And vice-versa, I would add.
All of which would brand us as insensitive, unadventurous and boring, if we didn't also have a pretty good idea that this is going on in your world:
Sandra Bell Lundy has been riffing on this for the past several days, and it's good to see that there is some inner conflict, and yet …
… and yet it all seems from here like the little boy hitting himself in the head with the hammer because it feels so good when he stops.
Before we go to our moment of zen, this commercial message: Hilary Price's annual open studio is next weekend. If you are anywhere within reach of Western Massachusetts, you should go.
She gives out Halloween candy.
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