Fashion vs. fit

A friend of mine recently posted a note (sorry, not publicly accessible) asking people what they thought about fashion.  She's quite the fashionista... and sadly, I am not.  Here, for your reading pleasure, is the comment I wrote in response to her note:

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Sorry, but I pretty much think negatively of "fashion."  I see the stuff people wear on catwalks, for instance, and I want to laugh or gag or both.  I see what "fashionable" people wear, particularly ones who push the envelope, and I think... gah, if my friend/family-member wore something like that, I'd hide in embarrassment.

Now in contrast, there's the concept of fit, which I think is very important (and is something I darn well should be paying better attention to).  Often times, I see what would otherwise be very attractive folks, for instance, wearing clothes that either accentuate a body flaw or failing to wear clothes that accentuate their body strengths.

As a personal example:  I'm pretty short for a guy, so I should apparently not be wearing flashy belts or horizontally striped shirts or other stuff that separate the visual vertical flow of my body, causing me to look shorter.  On a related note, hats and haircuts and glasses and such really ought to be selected according to fit rather than according to the latest fashion to account for differently shaped faces and so on.

These fit considerations, IMHO, are enduring, whereas fashion (or at least my perception of it) is less based in aethetical science and more based upon, ZOMG, [insert name of horrendously overrated actor] is wearing [article of clothing or accessory], so I MUST wear that!!!!!!!!1

In fact, if anything, I find that a slavish attention to fashion results in far too many people looking really awful whereas if these same folks instead focused on better fitting clothing (a custom tailored suit, for instance), they'd look 100x better.

My idea for saving the U.S. Postal Service: Address for life

As I've written previously, I'm in the process of moving from one townhome to another in the city of Mountain View, CA.  What a massive pain!  Transferring all utility bills to my soon-to-be-ex-roommate, starting or getting transferred utilities at my new place, and of course, all the physical moving!

But there's one other thing I'm majorly dreading:  change of address notifications!

Sure, you can do a Change of Address form online with the USPS for a $1 fee, delightfully ensuring that all your junk mail follows you to your new location.  But this doesn't relieve you of the oh-so-fun duty of notifying (online or otherwise) your banks, credit card companies, health/car/other insurance companies, student loan and other lenders, DMV, your work, magazines, e-commerce firms (amazon.com, ebay...) etc. etc. etc.  By my latest estimate, this means I have over 50 separate companies to notify, and I'm sure I'm missing some.  Assuming it takes about 5 minutes per address change (and that's probably conservative), that's over four wasted hours.

It's a lot easier in the online world (for geeks)

Those of us who are geeky enough to have our own domain name online can get addresses like [myfirstname]@[mylastname].net.  Not only do these look spiffy (and mean we can actually have our first name as our username -- a practically impossible feat in web mail!), but they also offer super-easy forwarding!

For instance, I currently have my domain address instantly forward mail to my @gmail address.  Then, if by chance a cooler webmail comes along, I can instantly redirect all my subsequent incoming mail to that new webmail service.  Or I can even have my mail forwarded to two different services at once, also with fewer than two minutes of work.

About the "gay" and "fun" people I've met

When ordering over the phone from a dance shoe store, at the end of a long friendly conversation with the owner...

     ME:  Well, hey, thanks!  You've been super-helpful.
     HER:  You're welcome!  And by the way, I'm gay.
     [awkward pause, not that there's anything wrong with that]
     HER: ... Er, my name is Gaye, G-A-Y-E.

Today, after dinner, I spotted a gaggle of interns and figured it was high time I actually broke from my recently-anti-social self and said hi.

     ME:  I didn't catch your name...
     HER:  Oh, I'm fun!
     [brief confused and amused pause]
     HER ... See? [shows name badge:  P-H-U-N]

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For the record, Gaye did come across as quite gay (as in happy), and Phun does seem quite fun.  The geek in me ponders causality.

Where is the artistic passion? Thoughts on passion in society

On my blog post yesterday, my friend Righini had commented in part:

[...] i notice how much love you put in everything you do from writings to music, and i'm amazed and my heart feels warmed! What's your secret root? Where do you take all this strength?

I started to write a really, really long reply in the comments, and then realized... hmm, perhaps I should just make this into a post, so here I am! :-)

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I truly believe that everyone has enormous passion inside, but this too often gets stifled due to fear, ignorance, lack of inspiration and role models, and lastly, distraction ("SQUIRREL!" :p). Some examples:


Fear of being different
Drawing from Hollywood (eeep!)... on "Glee" there's an athlete who had tons of music in his soul, but was afraid to let it out for fears of being ostracized by peers.

There's a reason in the U.S. that kids playing instruments in band are (usually derisively) called "Band Geeks" or "Choir Fags."  Maybe now it's more cool to be in choir or band, but back when I was in high school, it generally wasn't.  I think kids often repress the expressive depths of their passion (in all forms) because they're afraid of being different, and -- in the case of guys -- quite possibly afraid of being perceived as feminine or even gay.

Some new AdamMusic (and some highlights from music past)

I've been quite-rightly bugged by some of my friends to play more piano. So yesterday, I stayed at work late (actually 'til nearly 2am!) and banged out some stuff on the now slightly-out-of-tune-but-still-serviceable grand piano in one of the lobbies, filmed with my slightly-old-and-suboptimal-video-recording camera, and documented in this run-on-but-still-comprehensible sentence.

The first bit is from a mini-medley I improv'd based upon songs from the musical "In The Heights," which I had the great pleasure of seeing in San Francisco a few weeks ago. 

[ If you're curious and/or bored you are welcome to check out my slightly-alternate take ]

Note that -- as with all my medleys -- this doesn't contain an exact replica of the melodies, which I could make... but it's more fun to stretch them a bit :).  And you'll probably catch that I was particularly taken with the song Alabanza from the musical, so -- unlike in one of my typical medleys -- my riffing on this one tune takes up about 80% of the medley.