(no subject)

"Red and Cat", Logitech Quickcam 4000, Boston, 2005

I was doing a fashion self-shoot for an entry of how I managed to select a red fabric for one of my custom shirts, that turned out to be the exact same red as a cashmere sweater I already own, when someone saw me sitting on a couch wearing a sweater and inferred it obviously must be petting and kneading time. I swear both of these just wander into every cam frame they see.

You can see the shirt color in the cuffs I am wearing nonchalantly like the kids do these days, prominently sticking out from under the sweater, like the shirt tails front and back. These are French cuffs which I have properly folded over, but not put cuff links in. I look like Fay Neiman-Marcus Guy Trying To Be a 20 Year Old. I love it, of course, it reminds me of those days when Joan Crawford could seriously suggest in her autobiography / life manual that women should buy extra yards of fabric of their favorite blouse so as to ask their seamstress to use it as a lining for a suit, creating a terrifically (over-)coordinated outfit. Oh wait, no, that era never existed except in Hollywood movies. Doing that was always either impractical or expensive, in both cases probably outrageously so.

Yet, as much pleasure as this accident gives me I have a hard time posting about it. I'll tell you why in a second.

First, I still think the best home-makeover show I have seen is Trailer Fabulous on MTV. The stylist on it is completely insane, but knows his material well: nothing about a trailer or its contents is sacred, valuable, or necessary, so he knows it can all be cut out, moved, removed, repainted, burnt, decorated, have walls put in, have walls taken out, put doors, trap doors, revolving doors in or out, and attach whole sheds by cutting a hole in an outside wall, as long as your crew and budget are big enough, in a weekend. The results are always amazing and far more creative than when people try to make dreams come true in inflexible costly McMansions that don't start out in the utter drabness brought on by the  lack of funds, spirit, and imagination that trailers seem to be in. The friend who turned me on to this mentioned in his entry that his life was just like that show, well, except for the make-over and the fabulous part. Scary, he said. Scary indeed, to me, when I saw my first honest depiction ever of a trailer park, which was on that show.

What is salient to this entry about this, besides that I miss the show, is that he has never made me feel overprivileged, never a single drop of real or mock resentment. I am over-sensitive to picking up that vibe, and I learned that very early on. It is a very familiar vibe, or joke, or set of sentences. It has always been the first warning, when I was a kid, that I had been noticed, sized up, and the other children were about to turn against me. He knows me, he knows my life, he knows how much it differs from his, yet he never made me feel that way. Even pinkfish did with some jokes once. I consider it natural for people to do so, in some way or another, when I mention certain facts about how I grew up, like that I didn't know how to make my own bed until I was 9, or polish shoes until I was 11, because it was always done for me.

Growing up in Medellin, blond kids were always a) very obvious b) children of foreign workers from another country and thus c) relatively well-off. We lived in specific sections of town, we went to the specific country clubs to hang out and swim and play tennis, we had maids and gardeners and chauffeurs because that is what was part of the lifestyle of the foreign executive or engineer. It's not like, at 5 years old, I could reject that, or even knew that some people though one should. The local children were often very good at expressing this resentment at first sight, to the point that, even as a native Spanish speaker, I figured gringo was another word for blond. Seriously.

As a child I didn't understand the animosity from being a stranger, especially since I particularly didn't feel like one. Things just were. When I was nine and we moved back to the Netherlands, it didn't stop. Either I stupidly enough told things about my previous experiences and lifestyle -- rather extravagant by European standards, but hey, we were living in a developing country already -- or my accent, by accident, sounded too manicured, my vocabulary too large from voracious reading, to not identify me as a rich kid, even though I actually wasn't. (Ja, ik had, en heb nog, die R. Een Englese R die gehoord wordt als een Gooise R.Misschien omdat ik al zo vroeg Engels sprak. ''k Heb er nooit gewoond, kende er niemand, maar ik klonk bekakt. En ze hebben het mij allemaal flink laten weten.) And they let me know they didn't appreciate my slumming. I didn't realize I was.

Thing is, by some real standards, in the US I am very privileged. I ended up with a 4-year college education and no debts at all. I am healthy and have always had good health care. I grew up eating good wholesome food. My parents were great models of how to have a healthy long-term stable relationship. My father showed me how to hold down a job, what to do perform well, get noticed, stay modest, get along, get the job done, and realize the most important praise you can get is that they let you come back the next day to do it again. Buckle up, stay sane. My first job here paid little -- by engineering standards. By real standards the fact that I never needed a roommate living in a small studio in a major urban market from day 1 says enough, and things have only gotten better. Much better. People, I am homo engineer who never got outsourced or made redundant and had good performance reviews.I remember bitty discussing Tuesdays afternoons at Diesel and me whining I wanted to have nice Tuesdays afternoons with my friends too and she pulling me down to earth by reminding me I got a better salary than she did for going to Diesel. True.

Maybe it is because crises writes the best entries, but in two years of surveying my friends list it seems that having a foundation of sanity is a privilege. And with sanity I mean having learned how to stack one tiny achievement on the other and build on, and build more, on that. To have been shown that although there will be setbacks, that you have to take every step yourself, and avoid the stupidest pitfalls. The downside is that you learn not to chase dreams. You learn not to take big risks, because every day is a small risk of losing what you built. You don't go study, say, English Lit, just because you like it, there's gotta be a pay-off in secure sights. Yes I went into Comp Sci because I liked it, but also because there were jobs and money in it. I took steps and I built and I studied hard and long on what would get me a job and I got my jobs and I showed up every day and I didn't consider myself the best and I tried to do good every time and I got better and I got reviewed and now I am ending this decade of work as a Senior Research Engineer.

One who doesn't go nuts but actually can buy a discount cashmere sweater on December 27th in a New York City Macy's in between a sea of grabbing hands. One that can do some web comparisons and research to find a good roving tailor with a workshop in Shanghai to make a hotel appointment with for 3 suits and 3 shirts. One that seems to gravitate to a certain shade of red. One that is aware how very blessed he is in so many ways. One who did work hard for what he got, but knows many of his friends worked just as hard and did not get there. One who often doubts whether he seems too casual by ignoring, or too ostentatious by not ignoring some of the things he spends money on, so the end result is that he often does not mention anything at all.

And one who right now after writing all this thinks you should just all suck it up and ignore me from now on if me having a tailored suit and going off to beach holidays once a year bothers you. Otherwise, you can live vicariously through me, ok? And I swear that, if I have another session with this guy, I'll ask if the next suit can have the lining made from the same fabric as a shirt I am ordering.