My Merchant Marine was over again last night. Delightful lad. Breath of fresh air. 28 years old, tall, dark, and very handsome, beautiful smile always at the ready, great laugh, says "please" and "thank you," never an unkind word out of that gorgeous mouth, and is a total cuddlewhore, just like me. He was like, "my weakness is I love to be held." I'm like, wanna start a support group?

Before he dropped in, I dropped by McIntyre & Moore, and couldn't find anything. Isn't that funny? I guess I wasn't in the mood, and I found the 50% off of rows and rows of books a little daunting for a workday. I was a little cranky, and I was feeling peckish. Maslow's hierarchy kicked in, I guess.

I actually popped in to see if they had any Spinoza — something I'd recently read mentioned his thoughts on the sadness of sex — but they didn't. They may have had some books about Spinoza, specializing as they do in academic titles, which tend to be books about other books, but like I said, it was all more than I wanted to deal with on an empty stomach.

I had dropped off some jeans at Eleni's of New York a couple doors down, and stopped by on my way home to see if they'd been sewn up. When I get a pair of jeans to fit the way I like 'em, I won't give them up without a fight. This pair is one of my favorites. ...


Batman, who is also a cuddlewhore as it turns out, was kneading them as we sat watching Make Me a Supermodel together a couple weeks ago, and the frayed threads had turned into a hole after a couple of washes. I think jeans look fine worn and frayed, but I don't like mine torn and holey.

And you know, that's what grandmothers were invented for anyway. For when you lose a button on your favorite dress shirt, or have a hole in your jeans you need patched. Unfortunately, I have no living grandparents, and am not on sewing terms with anyone else's. We do have a sewing machine here at the Seven Hills Orphanage, but sewing machines scare me.

And I think it's important to support my local seamstresses whenever possible. And I like old Eleni. I always take my holey sweaters and jeans and whatnot to her. She comes off as kind of gruff at first, but it's that Old World touch (less of a touch than a thwack, actually, but whatever). Truth is, I don't imagine she'll be there in another ten years, with things changing on the square like they are, but you never know. She's tenacious.

You can see from the picture that Eleni's patchwork is coarse, but that's as it should be. She has the right idea. With jeans, you don't have to be discreet and hide your repair work. It's like scar tissue. I've heard she does a beautiful job on high-end stuff, too. But all the patchwork I have her do is on my old, well-loved, worn-out threads. Love-worn, you might call them.

I have a closet full of clothes but all I wear are, like, three t-shirts, a hoodie, and a pair of jeans over and over and over. The problem is, you never know when you buy something if it'll fit so right it'll become a second skin. Some clothes just sort of grow on you, others never feel quite right. Maybe there's a tag that itches the back of your neck, or it keeps coming untucked, or it always feels like you've got it on backwards or inside-out.

I do have a problem dressing up because of this. First of all, I don't have a lot of high-end items in my wardrobe, and what "work clothes" I have I so seldom wear that when I do it makes me feel like I'm wearing somebody else's. This causes all sorts of distress during, say, job interviews. Because I feel like an impostor trying to pass for someone who really wants the job. It feels like an ill-fitting costume on a bad actor, basically.

Years ago I had a gig briefing the South Korean Ambassador to Hungary a couple times a week. His Excellency Mr. Han, lovely man, would give me a stack of newspapers it was my task to read through and extract what information I thought was useful for him and brief him on it over green tea in his well-appointed chambers every Monday and Wednesday morning at eleven.

Our conversations were often expansive, always stimulating, and while I enjoyed them immensely, he was definitely in the driver's seat. If ever I brought something to his attention that he thought was frivolous, he would wave his hand as if brushing a speck off his shoulder and say "no interest, no interest," and I would move onto the next item.

Shortly before he was to leave his post, we went out for sushi (there were no good Korean restaurants in Budapest, according to His Excellency, but there were a couple of decent sushi bars), and just as we were about to leave, he mentioned an opportunity at the Embassy he thought I would be perfect for, wrote down the name of the Mr. Lee (there were two) I should contact, and tipped me off about the maximum salary, which would have been more than adequate for my meager needs.

He told me that when Mr. Lee asked me how much I wanted I shouldn’t come right out and say it stridently, but I should pretend to consider the question first, and then ask for it humbly. He also practically made me swear not to mention him at all, as it might bias Mr. Lee’s decision. Then in the back seat of the limo, on the way home, he touched my hand quite tenderly. We were talking about the job, and about how he would leave his post in February.

As you might imagine, I thought I had it in the bag. But there was still the interview to get through. And not only was I poorly qualified, but I was not particularly well-dressed as a general rule, either. And if you can't be the best qualified, you can at the very least be the best-dressed. A blazer was enough for my twice-weekly briefings, since they were almost social calls, but I would have to wear a suit for my meeting with Mr. Lee.

I had a black suit from Marks & Sparks I'd bought for a funeral a year or so before. You're not thinking about how uncomfortable those suits are when you're at somebody's funeral, but when you're at a job interview what else is there to think about? I wasn't about to go out and buy another suit for an interview for a job I wasn't qualified for in the first place. So Marks & Sparks it was...


You could tell the suit was off-the-rack. It was a nice suit for what it was, but it was what it was. Which, again, was fine for a funeral, and might even have worked out for a job interview for a job for which I was qualified. But Mr. Lee was no slouch. A man of about my age in the diplomatic corps, and very smartly dressed, indeed, one look at me and he knew instantly what he was dealing with.

And I knew when I looked at him, too.  He wasn't wearing a jacket, and, if I remember well, even had his sleeves rolled up. But he was wearing a beautiful, crisp fitted shirt. And he looked perfectly comfortable in it, in that mysterious way people who never look quite comfortable always look comfortable being uncomfortable. He looked as perfect in his perfectly tied tie as a murderer on the gallows looks in his noose. Mr. Lee belonged in starched shirts with stiff collars and cuffs.

Now, if you can be comfortable in those kinds of clothes, you've been fully socialized. That is the end to which all civilization tends.  Towards the effortless performance of the most painstakingly detailed tasks. Towards absolute comfort in the absurdly uncomfortable. Unless and until you can be comfortable in starched collars, you're still an animal: you might as well be wearing a dog poncho or saddle bags or a cowbell around your neck.

It was all wrong. My ill-fitting funeral suit. My unstarched collar. My tie with its silly idiosyncratic knot might as well have been a length of rope to tie me to a post like a goat. My socks had holes in them. Mr. Lee couldn’t see the holes, of course, but I'd wager he knew they were there. And I could feel them there, and they made me feel all the more like an impostor because my shoes were concealing them.

Needless to say, I did not get the job.

I've since scrupulously avoided situations where the starch content of my shirt would be a source of shame for me. When I throw on my stitched-up jeans and my old t-shirt and hoodie I don't have anything to prove. I'm the same animal I am out of them, only a little less naked.