D 5/30/02

Work Diary, 5/30/02

It's disturbing to discover that the barely pubescent, perfectly
polished clerk has a hairy happy trail leading to her nether regions.
But how could one miss it, seeing she considers half-shirts office
attire?

People wear the most appalling things to work. Today alone I've seen
brown stretch pants with a striped orange shirt; the gnarled gray toes
of an old man in shower slippers; the black underwear of a co-worker
peaking out from under her too-short denim skirt?the list goes on and
on.

I dress like a suburbanite who means business when I come to work,
although admittedly I forgot to pack a belt in my gym bag this morning
and subsequently I look incomplete. I've tried poofing my shirt around
my belt line but it makes me look like all of the fat on my body has
settled around my mid-section. Actually, it all has settled there, but
a belt helps.

Shoes are supposed to tell you a lot about a person. If this is true,
I'm not sure I like what I'm learning about my co-workers. I can live
with the weathered brown oxfords and poly-cotton black slacks, and I'm
begrudgingly getting used to platform shoes (which, as I recall from my
childhood in the 70's, were ugly then and are still ugly now). What
does get me are the shoes that are obviously torture to wear: Too high,
pointy, thin heel. That mostly sounds like women's shoes, doesn't it? I
guess it is. A friend of mine in San Francisco is forced to wear
nothing but high heels because her mother, from the time my friend
begin public school, always made her wear something with a heel (she
also told her as a teenager that she was ugly without makeup?ain't moms
grand?). Anyway, my friends' Achilles tendon was so shortened by this
creepy fact that any flat shoe causes her foot pain. Ridiculous.

Once, out of sheer boredom, another friend of mine used lined notebook
paper to design a women's shoe that was a cross between a running shoe
and a high heel. The design was a response to all the poor women who
dressed nicely for work, but couldn't make that last sprint for the bus
in dress shoes. Well, lo and behold, just a few years later, my
designing friend sent me a newspaper ad with that same crossbred shoe
in it. Someone else had come up with the idea and marketed the damn
thing.

I'll say it now as I said it then: The co-mingling of different shoes
goes against God.