A Memo to Men

You know how people always look at you just a teensy bit nicer when you're dressed up? When you clean up nice and wear a button-down Oxford shirt and nice, well-tailored slacks? People may compliment you and point out, with a note of surprise, that you look good when you don't look like hell all the time?

Let me impart some wisdom:
All men look good in an Oxford shirt. All of them. At formal occasions, when fully buttoned with a tie, men will look good. In informal occasions, with sleeves rolled up and the collar unbuttoned, men will look good.

The Oxford shirt is specifically designed to flatter a man's distinct lack of curves. It shows off the angular shoulders and straight hips with ease and elegance. I am convinced that that shirt is one of the greatest product designs of all time. Whoever designed it is some sort of Grecian sculptor reborn, etching the post-war man from blocks of marble in a Platonic Ideal ecstasy.

This is not to say that it doesn't look excellent on women, too. The angular tailoring of the Oxford shirt emphasizes the places where a woman's curves distort the angles and all my CAHS education is screaming at me to giggle "curvilinear lines!!" Thanks, Mr. Feeser.

My point is simply to clarify what perhaps you were never told before:
Wearing an Oxford shirt makes you look your best. When you flatter your shapes with the eloquent confidence of the greatest innovation in men's fashion, those who are turned on by the shape of men will act like total and complete idiots in your wake. It can only improve your hopes of a best-case scenario on a Saturday night, whatever that outcome may be. Waffle house? Yes, please.

When I talk to myself, I speak in thinly-veiled metaphor.

This is a flashback. Sometimes I've already said what I wanted to say. Sometimes, I said it years ago, in another time in another place, responding to the same question. This time, however, I'm really just talking to myself.

I was going to post Lawrence Ferlinghetti's poem "What Could She Say to the Fantastic Foolybear?", but it's obviously not mine, and this is my blog. Think of his work as the question, posed, not by anyone but myself. Below is my response to the question, written in 2001. Please remember that I was seventeen when I wrote this response. Despite it's faults, the poem is as true now as it was then.

----

Usagi's Lingerie

i haven't changed
in the least
i haven't though I have
everyone's different now
they all feel betrayed
and alone
i did not leave them alone
i left myself
for myself
i left my fears
and my excuses
for myself
i haven't changed
have i?
i'm still the me
you love
i'm still the me
with the mismatched
socks and the
pigtails
i'm still me
just a part of me
you didn't know
came out for all to see
and it scandalized the masses
i didn't betray you
you just didn't know me
as well as you thought you did