Color Of The Day

They say Einstein had in his closet a row of seven identical suits. Every day, he would simply select the next suit on the rack. Therefore, he wasted no mental energy figuring out what to wear and could focus all his cranial capacity on his intellectual pursuit of the day from the moment his eyes cracked open in the morning.

I am a universe away from an Einstein in every conceivable way, but I instituted a similar process last office job I had. I lined up my pants, mostly khakis for that job, in a row and inserted between them the shirts that went with those pants. So, same deal – every morning I just grabbed the next pair of pants, spent up to ten seconds selecting a shirt, and I was ready to face the day. A day in which someone would constructively criticize the boring wardrobe I seemed to have.

The art thing had me working from home long before the pandemic made everyone work from home, but even then I’d leave the house for coffee or lunch with friends, groceries and errands, or just family obligations. Same deal in my leisure wardrobe – I just laid everything out in a line and chose the next one in sequence. Easy peasy.

With ‘shelter-at-home’, though … what the hell difference does it make?! One wears the same pair of gym shorts or sweats for days – there aren’t that many of them in the drawer anyway. Grab the most comfortable T-shirt and just stick with it, no pun intended, until it gets soup or something on it, then take it off long enough to wash it. What’s the point of a wardrobe system?

Question, though – if one’s work is creative, is the necessity of a creative wardrobe decision first thing in the morning an annoying distraction or a constructive warm-up?

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​Yesterday I had reason to meet briefly with a friend, a gallery director who has been, if not a mentor, certainly a facilitator of my work the past few years. What our brief conversation revealed to me is that, after hardly talking with a soul for three months, I hardly remember how to have a conversation anymore. I’m an introverted old cuss anyway, and I certainly wasn’t living as a social butterfly, but c’mon, man!