Indispensable, Informal Tracksuits

I had nearly forgotten how uncomfortable normal clothes are, and especially formal attire. I'm not exactly a sartorial specialist, but I know how to tie a Windsor and other nonsense. This weekend reminded me of this, as I went to my friends' wedding and wrestled with all sorts of buttons and lengths of fabric that inexplicably have become a staple of male formal clothes.

If anything, MS has turned me into a perpetually casual person, not to say that I was ever uncomfortable for very long. My last day job, which I was forced to remember, was for a market research company. Don DeLillo would have a field day writing about the absolute sterility and fake casualness of that office. Everyone I knew who worked there, beside myself and my friend Cristina, who helped me get the job (talk about unexpected quicksand), walked around, I'm convinced, with a stick up his ass. I don't mean that as a cute joke or a funny exaggerated fantasy. I honestly think that 99% of the people who worked there had a branch of some sort firmly wedged up their anus. Either that, or they simply had lobotomies, and only walked around with the same blank expression glued to their face.

And the lighting--the horror... I think many of my former coworkers, particularly the managers, used DeLillo's description of what you think about while peeing--"the dusty hum of who you are"--and applied it to eight hours of their day. Actually, it was probably more than that. I've told this story to many people, but it never gets old: once, I knew I'd to leave early for an appointment with my neurologist, so planned to show up early for work. Normally, I'd show up at least fifteen minutes late, as Peter would say in Office Space, which became all too real for me, and which I know is a cliche in reference to work (but is one I escaped, one of the little silver linings of MS). Then I'd count down the minutes until lunch, which also became almost nonexistent for me once Cristina left. I must say, I felt like the unknowing victim of a con or pyramid scheme at that point. The problem was, though, that I sold no knives, figuratively speaking. In the future, I'll get literal about this as well, since I sat through 20 hours of mind-numbing, or -dulling, "training," only to quit on my first official day once I realized that I could not hock fucking knives at exorbitant prices. But I digress...

At the market research place, I tilted the scale of the business-casual dynamic toward the latter half of that oxymoronic phrase. Eventually I'd just show up in warm-up pants and sneakers. I figured that if I would have to leave for some appointment like physical therapy, I might as well make it easy for myself and eschew the business bent entirely. It's not like I had any "clients" to speak of, thankfully. (I didn't do this every day, obviously, so don't think I actually espoused that Office Space nihilism constantly. Most days I wore an Oxford and pants with fucking pleats.) So I'd show up in the uniform of a couch potato, or, ironically, someone headed to the gym.

When I got fired from that job (another long, hilarious story for another day), gradually made my wardrobe as homogenous as that of a Heaven's Gate member or a Communist dictator. I also like to think of myself as ahead of my time, and not in a fantastical way, like the cosmos-bound (only not) eager suiciders of Heaven's Gate.

Think of all the movies that take place in the future. Everyone wears a silver jumpsuit, or at least a shiny onesy of some sort. My closet could save any wardrobe of one of those movies if, say, a fire destroyed all of the clothes on the set.

I think now I have like six complete tracksuits. I also have plain black Adidas pants that come in handy if I am too lazy even to pick out a reasonable t-shirt beside a plain white one. Or a plain black one. I went through a Hamlet phase in college, and a little beyond, where I would only wear black t-shirts and black jeans. No other colors. Cheerful, I know.

Yet another reason to look forward to autumn: the cooler air will make me throw on the track jackets, so t-shirts will truly become irrelevant. Plus, humidity will cease to be an issue.

And, of course, the whole stem cell trial thing.

R