Wednesday, February 22, 2012

Couples Wearing Each Other's Clothes


My best friend just made me aware of the following photographs by sincerelyhana.com showcasing gender performance in the sartorial confines of quotidianity. The photographs proved distracting as I navigate fatigue. As I was perusing the site, I got to thinking of a sort-of-similar exercise in my own life.

The exercise was most curious as it went beyond fabric choice, situational layering, and gender performance. The semiotics of fashion is something I've long concerned myself with as I've always deemed presentation to be much more than just unsubstantiated form. The first time I was asked to give up an item of clothing for the purpose of swapping was in my first long-term relationship. Apparently, it was some sort of a rite of passage. I was asked for a t-shirt so that the other party could wear it when being away for a week.
I found the request strange.

As much as I'm keen on tropes, my brain is a tad too enamored with literalness. I'm attached to the words' literal meaning. This propensity is what made me excel in academic pursuits. It's mostly a challenge when dealing with people who don't view words as a melange of primary, secondary, and tertiary meanings, but I'm getting off topic.

I suppose, it's hard to shake linguistic conditioning and having grown up with lexical diversity, getting attached to primary meanings meant clearer communication and easier living.

The question was: "Can I take one of your shirts with me?"
My answer was something akin to, "Oh, do you need to get a new one for the trip? We can go and buy you one." Instantaneously, I went through my inventory of shirts and I started thinking which shirt the other party had in mind. "Which one was goes went well with your travel pants and shoes?"

"What do you mean?"
"I mean, which color?"
"Why does that matter?"
"Well, you want it to go with your other stuff, ja?"
"The color doesn't matter. Just any shirt will do."

I remember finding the request most bizarre at that point. And, just like I tend to do with topics I'm not fully satisfied with and/or finished with, I got to work.

I missed the point of the request. The request came from a place of intimacy and olfactory closeness. I saw it as one of travelling need. I was fretting about it. "Well, I can give you this, or that, or the other one. I mean, I like green. You don't care for green. I like form-fitting, you'll have a hard time with that. Unless you wear it as an undergarment type thing and then you wear a shirt of your own that fits on top of it. Should we go shopping? Let's go shopping and we'll find something like the one I have but in your size. Then we can be twins."

"Just pick one, really. The one you have on will do, actually."

At that point I distinctly remember thinking, "but I wear this Tuesdays. It's my comfort Tuesday shirt. I write in this. Why would you want this one?! What would I be wearing on Tuesday then?"

I actually, left my office in the middle of the day, went to a department store, and actually bought the exact same favorite shirt of mine but in another size. I was proud of myself for having found it. Eureka! But then when I got home, my beaming vanished when my shirt was met with: "you got me a new one?! [Grunt] It's fine really. I meant one of your own. You know, a used one."
I was still dense.
I still didn't get it. "Should I have gone to a vintage store, you know, I don't like the smell in places like that but we can go and see if we can find a second-hand shirt that looks like mine." As soon as I said it, we both started laughing as I became aware of my having completely missed the point of the exercise. In an effort to appear more of a caring person, I said, "how about this? How about you pick one of mine and I'll pick one of yours. You don't have anything green, do you?"

My literal self still found it bizarre that we had to swap shirts. My figurative self found the exercise interesting, however. And there we went. We swapped shirts and lied to each other. We did what was expected of a shirt-swapping couple. We lied about what a good fit the other's shirt was and how it went well with our respective complexions. And yada, yada, yada.

You can see the rest of the couples' switcheroo project here.

The Power of Habit - A Review


As I was processing some difficult news this morning, my eye noticed the cover of the latest book I've been reading, Charles Duhigg's The Power of Habit.

The power of habit leads us to movement, progress, success, health even when facing unfortunate developments. Duhigg discusses the case of a woman who goes to a lab and over the course of two years manages to radically transform her life. She has not only successfully quit smoking, but also managed to run a marathon, and move up at work. It turns out, according to her neurologists, that her success was linked to a change in the patterns inside her brain.

The author postulates that the power of habit is so grand that without it, we would be lost. Much of good can be accomplished with relative ease due to it. While reading from it I got to thinking of my chess tutor when I was eleven. I had a hard time staying put, in a chair, and I always sought the easy way out. The easy check mate. "Muscle memory, Brikena, muscle memory. It needs to get exercised. While sitting down. Don't move your right leg. Don't tap on the table. Don't chew gum. Focus....." he used to say to me. I didn't like it when he'd say it as I'd rather check mate the other party quickly (or get check mated by it quickly) and run outside to my friends for a game of whatever.

It's amazing how we can get good at so me many things by relying on habits that at times appear to be clothed in antithesis. Consider bike riding and chess. The reason why I mention the former is because Duhrigg makes mention of it in his book as well and my experience is congruent with his explanation. He mentions bike riding as an example of practicing the "art of not thinking."

Biking like swimming are things I learned by myself. The same applied to chess in the beginning but once I displayed some understanding, I was given a tutor. I would watch my Dad and brother play and I'd mimetically get to a point of understanding. That's how I got to see how limited but dangerous the queen could be and how impulsive and manipulatable the knight is. But I digress.

When it came to swimming, it happened in the Adriatic. It was afternoon. I had a red bathing suit on. I had been in the water for hours and my lip was purple. My mom kept wanting me to come out of the water but I said "no!" "I need to learn this now!" I needed to do a frog style underwater. I just had to keep practicing. And so, after swallowing who knows how much salty water, I became, to quote Mom, fish-like. To this time, diving and swimming frog style under water is one of the most relaxing experiences in life. You learn it by doing. By not thinking, by simply allowing the body to enter in a dialog of understanding with water. The same applies to bike riding. I have a hard time with visual memory. I do, however, remember vividly when I first got to ride an adult's bike and swim long distances in the sea.

I loved riding bikes when I was a child. And I loved chess. I had two camps of friends. The popular ones who leaned more towards visibility and public games and the really smart but painfully shy group would come to my parents' guest quarters and practice the various theoretical chess openings. The chess nerds, or as my brother used to call them, the Kasparovs. Kena, dinner time. Are the Kasparovs gone yet? The art of thinking came in handy with the Kasparovs. And its sort of opposite is what I espoused when frolicking in the sun with the bike riders and swimmers.

The art of thinking and the art of non thinking are required in both activities. When it came to chess, I had to learn the hierarchy of strategy and how to better fight the opponent. When to attack the tower, or make the queen move so that the king would finally get nervous and eventually start moving nervously till he'd get check mated.

When it came to riding bikes or teaching my friends how to ride them, the advice was simple, and funnily in sync with Duhigg's premise: do, don't think. Duhigg makes the point that learning how to do different activities is going to require different modus operandi. For instance, the skills required to learning how to ride a bike are not easily explicable to the conscious mind. Chess is a bit of a different story.

Duhigg says that our conscious mind is not nearly fast enough or accurate enough to handle even what seems like a relatively simple task such as hitting a golf ball–which is why superior athletes must learn to practice “the art of not thinking,” in order to succeed.

In sum, The Power of Habit is a good read. It might make you revisit your past and the times when you first learned how to do things you're currently good at.