Attend the Spine!!

I have had, for weeks, the songs from They Might Be Giants--The Spine stuck in my head. It is an incredible album and I am therefore recommending it, but BEWARE: the songs will fill your head like Phineas Gage commiserating on exceeding the recommended daily dosage of Iron intake--and leave you marked as considerably.

XXL

My wife is obsessive about my trying clothing on. She will not let me be so much as a tea shirt in her presence without going into the dressing room to make sure it fits. If the world is still drawn to the old question about the difference between men and women then this is it.

In light of a new system, all that may change, but probably not. You see, my wife isn't paranoid or anything. Women's sizes are meaningless; they correspond to nothing outside the universe of the store. Perhaps that's why our image rich culture has fixated on the wafe women--she after all is tiny no matter where she is, and thus need only pick clothes that are likewise diminutive in size, but the normal sized women cannot find a universal measurement on the label of her clothing that all but says, "yes, I will fit you."

For men, this is the opposite. If it says large, then it will fit just as well as all other large sized shirts. It isn't that our clothing sizes are not playing to our egos--no one, for instance, could fit into a medium and small is out of the question. We are all, at least, large men. But there the confusion stops. Large is large is large is large.

The women's clothing line, unfortunately, has managed to get under women's skin--into their dome, as it were--so that they are convinced that this is the only way things could be. The idea of a standardized sizing system is akin to some utopian society where everyone is able to fulfill their dreams and live in a perfect equality of happiness. It's that ridiculous.

For men, if the thing doesn't fit, the man behind the counter had better have a damn good explanation for making me come back down to the fucking mall. It is fear of getting physically assaulted that keeps men's clothing standardized. And besides, if I buy a large and it doesn't fit. I think of it as a cheap knock off from some third world country where they don't understand the size of well nourished men. Seriously. Men, out there, what would you think if you bought a shirt that was the same size of all your other shirts and it just didn't fit? Would you buy that brand of shirt again?

I don't know if any of this suggests a course of action for the women of the world out there. I don't expect to see brawls I guess, and you're all too aware that the mismanagement of size isn't because your garments are made in a Guatemalan sweat shop but designed as such in New York and Paris. Maybe instead this is a cautionary tale for men--if those clerks ever try to screw with the size of our clothing, yell until you're blue in the face.

All White? All Wright!

I'm a little down. I was really hoping my building on ebay would go for more than ten dollars. It represented a sizable ammount of work. Oh well...

Here's a weird one for you. The other day, I was driving through the Wendy's drive through and listening to Native Son and I realized that the man handing me the food was African American and so I turned off this classic of African American literature for fear that the N word would come up and the man behind the counter would take offense at my celebrating his culture.

Ahem...

Also, I think that Native Son should be retitled The Worst First Day On The Job Ever. He works for about eight hours and then molests, kills, and beheads his bosses daughter. Man, that sucks. That's like this one time I was digging a ditch while working for a temp agency and the guys who I was working with were trying to figure out if the floor of the ditch was level and they had this piece of equipment that decided if the thing was level and it was like, you know, reeeeeaaaaal precise, and I kicked it by accident just a little bit and it ruined their whole calculations for the day....so, I cut off their heads and shoved them in a furnace.

I guess what I'm saying is that I can really relate to Richard Wright's novel Native Son....

In that same vein, I can't tell if Richard Wright is really really bad as an author or if he's Kafka-esque. Let me tell you why I'm torn. Okay, he sucks. That's plain. The whole damn thing is just absolutely unbelievable, and he uses the word "hate" about every other sentence. Plus, I love the bit about how he really had raped the white girl because he had raped every white girl he'd ever seen, in his heart. Really endearing.

But then there's this scene where all the newspaper reporters are sitting down in the basement with the boiler, and the smoke starts belching out of the thing, and I'm thinking, 'why the hell are they in the fucking basement.' The only answers are, a--Richard Wright isn't exactly on top of the game, or b--it's like those torturers in the broom closet in The Trial. I think I may be onto something, but I'm not really sure what.

Also, I've decided to do my dissertation on red badges in 19th century. Obviously, I'll be looking at The Scarlet Letter, The Red Badge of Courage, and numerous other stories involving red badges.