2/29/08
I visited New Season's Market today (hardly a mere market anymore---the name is akin to saying "Circuit City Record Store") and I happened upon a fetching dreadlocked lass in the granola aisle (truth is stranger than fiction.) I prefer to avoid judging people by the clothes they wear (knowing my own wardrobe's inability to fully define me) but this woman looked like she had been dressed by a Hollywood casting agent who had been tasked with outfitting a character who would be listed in the credits as "dreadlocked woman in granola aisle": Several layers of colorful earth-tone skirts, a cotton sweater cruelly clothesline-stretched to its fibrous limits, sandals with socks and a soundtrack of bangles accompanying each move of her slender arms. Soon enough, around the corner came the casting agent's "dreadlocked boyfriend of dreadlocked woman in granola aisle", dressed in equally appropriate regalia for driving the VW bus back to the house where they could check on the progress of the kale and soybeans growing in the fertilizer-free garden bed.
I'm not picking on hippies, I'm simply amused at how often I see couples festooned in matching identities in public, the concept of "opposites attract" common in Disney tales but rarely seen in the real world. One never goes to New Season's and sees the dingy, colorless man whose outfit was purchased at the Cuban Revolution Surplus Store debating Ben & Jerry's flavors with a bleach-blond woman in a lemon-yellow business suit; the crisp young man sporting the military crew-cut and the carefully knotted tie isn't discussing dinner options with the spiky-haired punk rocker whose ears and mouth will never again pass noiselessly through an airport checkpoint. Birds of a feather and so on.
When I was in college, this obvious manifestation of natural selection frustrated me to no end. There was a woman in several of my English classes name Pamela (whom my funny and/but jealous ex-girlfriend delighted in referring to dismissively as "Pammy") whose essence set my heart ablaze (okay, maybe the epicenter of the fire wasn't my heart), but she surrounded herself with boys who seemed to shop from the same thrift-store-chic catalog that she did, a catalog to which, my blue jeans and buttondowns assured, I had no subscription. Parental types might hear that and say, "why would you want to be with a woman who made her decisions based on such shallow information" (a logic I might have embraced had I not been exposed to the stunning friction of Pammy and her snug cotton trousers three days a week), but such reasoning never assuaged my ache: As far as I could see, everyone was that shallow, they simply waded in different pools.
As I watched the junior-varsity Rastafarians at the grocery store today, I thought again about how shallow we remain. Metalheads congregate with other metalheads, corporate climbers gravitate to other corporate climbers, and to one degree or another, we all inadvertently filter out a percentage of the population because we think that a person's appearance is an accurate advertisement for their soul. (Which, to be realistic, is a marketing method often pursued and frequently true.) Some will argue that our outward appearances are a projection of our inner selves, and thus a man in a three-piece suit is unlikely to succumb to the allure of a hemp-adorned hippie because they would not share a common point of view, but there is so much presumption in such assessments: Maybe the man works for the family bottled dressing distribution business, but his heart lies in developing an efficient method of hydroponic farming; maybe the woman's sister makes natural fiber clothing and she's doing her sibling duty of business promotion despite a daily craving for dyed cotton; there are so many maybes in these equations, yet we designate the majority of those maybes to be nos because our immediate appraisal rules out the possibility of them being yeses.
Will humans ever evolve to where we see everyone and anyone as possessing an equal chance of offering us something of value, or is this simplistic visual sorting simply hard-wired into the DNA? Or is such an evolution necessary, or even desirable? Heck, I can talk about being not prejudging people, but when I met my wife she wore a wardrobe that exhibited no outward clique affiliations, which meant, ironically, that she looked liked one of my kind: Were we independents in a world of declared-party citizens, or, to invert a phrase from Jimi Hendrix, were we waving our non-freak flags high and recognized each other by the very minimalism of those banners?
I prefer to think we were independents, but whatever the case, I'm glad that two decades ago I never found that catalog to which Pammy subscribed: Had I invested in those outfits, I might never have met my wife. And had I transformed for Pammy, I might have attempted similar transformations for the crushes who came after her---and let's face it, I'd look silly in either dreadlocks or a nose ring.
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