customizing your character
just got home from our monthly meeting at the studio. i always kind of dread it – starting my sunday with an alarm, going somewhere like work. but it inevitably ends up being one of the best parts of my week; i get home having spent two hours stretching, dancing, communing, chatting with people who are starting to feel like friends, and my tasks for the day are done, the rest of my weekend, if only another ten hours or so, unclaimed expanse!
unfortunately, my tasks for today are not done. the past three weeks have been a tangle of appointments, and i was officially coming unraveled this past thursday. (for context, my goal has been to take care of as many medical, etc. appointments as possible in january to cross them off my checklist; this rapid-onset burnout is just the latest in a series of lessons i’ve been learning this month about the urgent need to un-optimize my life.) adding to this that my partner has been sick for nearly a week, the dishes / laundry / recycling have all reached critical mass. my potatoes have sprouted; they taunt me from their basket.
₊˚✧update✧˚₊‧ i started this almost five hours ago as a status and it got away from me; chores got mostly done :)
/
laundry is my nemesis chore. i usually blame the process – so drug out, so many steps, so cyclical – but thinking about it now, it’s more that the places i’ve had to do laundry have historically been inconvenient. at best, the more i consider it.
at my grandmother’s house, where i learned how to stand on a stool and move shirts / slacks / towels from one machine into another, her washer and dryer were in her shed, w a a a y across her dark overgrown backyard – the kind that probably wasn’t all that big but as a kid your eyes do that uncomfortable lens-shift thing that makes it seem to stretch to infinity, especially at night.
in most houses i grew up in and places i’ve rented as an adult, the machines have been outside, at the front of the complex, or haven’t existed at all.
i resent the Culture of Laundry. we have to be clothed all the time; this clothing has to be different according to context and occasion; we are expected to do many things from exercise to cooking that dirty this clothing – and we have to purchase and maintain this clothing, small boxes for our big boxes, and so on.
then our culture treats this as a no-brainer, like it’s weird if you can’t maintain momentum in the deadening monotony of showing up and cleaning up later ad nauseum, presenting and cleansing, dressing and undressing.
and: how incredible that we can drape these bodies, these vessels, in soft, dyed fabrics; that we can cherish these fabrics across time, wash them of what they’ve weathered, what they’ve protected our bodies from.
/
there’s also an element of being disconnected from many of the things i own – especially my clothes, almost none of which was purchased new and almost all of which fits poorly.
i’m only now starting to understand style and fashion as mediums. until recently, they were mostly inconveniences that served to divide me further from my body, not allow me to sink deeper into it. they required scrutiny and judgment of my body and, further, asked me to make claims about myself i wasn’t prepared to make – whether i’m a person who wears sandals, whether i can feel confident in a backless dress.
then i heard someone refer to expressing yourself through your appearance as “customizing your character”; i don’t know why i never thought of style as customization or my appearance as customizable.
/
related is the near-context collapse that happens when you’re a homebody in a relatively small community. that’s an exaggerative term for the phenomenon i’m describing – it isn’t everyone you know in a single context, but enough people across similar contexts on a consistent enough basis that it starts to feel a bit like a high school cafeteria.
the same way this collapse of our network into a limited performance space alters our performance on social media, it alters our my performance irl – including how i dress and experiment with things like style.
consider schrödinger's hat – it’s impossible to know whether you’re a “hat person” until you wear one and see how the people you interact with regularly respond. this is the kind of self-imposed superposition i find myself in about most things, where every choice depends on the audience’s reaction to it.
if you’ll be flexible with the metaphor, there’s a feeling of suspension in time via lack of observation, too.