the id, the ego, & the single misfiring brain cell

with no fashion sense

I realized this when I got to school and actually encountered a homeless person, who treated me like a kindred soul. He was dressed more appropriately than was I, but his outfit seemed to match, kinda.

I usually make an effort to meet or exceed society's lowest expectations regarding personal appearance, but I admit I sometimes fail, nonetheless. Today was one of those days.

See...I'm in Broomfield, so I'm limited to the clothing I happen to have with me. When I drove up here Sunday night, the weather was warm enough for shorts and teeshirts and sandals, and the forecast suggested this would be true all week. I forgot to bring jeans and any warmer (long sleeved) shirts, but figured it wouldn't matter.

Uh-huh. Well.

Yesterday, I had an admirable amount of homework to do, so I was up much of the night working on it (and not finishing). This morn, I woke to the realization that I needed to get to school, get some coffee, finish my homework, and print it out. I went upstairs to discover--snow. About 3 inches of the heavy, sticky, slushy stuff, to be exact. So for two reasons--the time crunch and the weather--I couldn't take my bike to school.

I have biking attire.

What I don't have, in any presentable combination, is normal clothing. I cobbled together an ensemble which included baggy blue (corduroy-ish) shorts, a long-sleeved gray teeshirt I found buried in my baggage, a neon green bicycling jacket, dark grey wool socks, and Birkenstocks.

Hotttt, huh?

Before you judge, understand also that I don't bother to shave more than once a week, so I'm sporting some rather handsome drumstick stubble, too. In addition, I carry a discarded light blue backpack that zips properly most of the time. It has a stick figure of a bird drawn on it with a ballpoint pen, and the shoulder straps won't stay tight.

So as I drove up CO 36 in the morning slush like something possessed,* I thanked my lucky stars that it's Maymester,** and I would more than likely be able to walk across campus without meeting a single person.

* I had a "study guide" to do for a play I hadn't read it its entirety, for a 9am class. Thus, I hit the floor running at 6am.

** One of those specialty semesters designed to give profs some extra cash and students a comparatively "easy" credit at the expense of sleep and sanity. Boulder's Maymester goes from 10 to 29 May--I think. We meet every weekday from 9am to 12:15 (in theory). Homework, as you might imagine, is onerous.

I was right about being able to walk across campus undetected. I got to the library only to learn that it didn't open until 7:30 and my student ID wouldn't let me in because they disable such abilities during Maymester. Oh nice.

So I went to the University Memorial Center. It didn't open until 7am. Ugh.

This is where I met the homeless dude. He was waiting for it to open, too, of course. I told him it was warm in the next building; he said he could wait for the UMC to open. He smiled appreciatively at me, exposing his rotting teeth.

By the time I got into the UMC and settled down with a cuppajoe, I had considerably less time to finish my study guide questions than I'd planned. I began to compromise other time-wasting activities between then and class, such as going to my student locker in the library and slipping into a pair of jeans so as to avoid being more of a spectacle in class than usual.

The way I see it, you can hop off the fashion train fairly early in your career,* and not long after that, you can pretty much lose fashion consciousness and get away with it. Surely I'm at that point by now.

* Earlier if you're military. Wearing uniforms for just everything for years gives you a good excuse to lose all sense of color coordination.

As it turns out, I was able to cobble together some answers, print my results, and change before class this time--which means I was forced to resort to my usual tactics to disrupt class.

d