SHIFTING THE PARADIGM

My apartment mate seeks to change the world, one step at a time. The world, she believes, has gone wrong and needs correction. My apartment mate is a bright Cantonese American woman with spectacles, strongminded (which is good), not into the Hello Kitty phenomenon (which is better), with two university degrees (which is best). The step that immediately needs correcting, in her mind, is mine.

Specifically, TWO steps. She is home today, it being Chinese New Year and she has a cold. Consequently she is in the teevee room also, at her own computer listening to an Agatha Christie story and scoping out shopping sites for men's shoes. She strongly believes that my having one working pair and two clabbered old sets of clompers that are at the end of their useful life, plus loafers for decent dress occasions, is wrong.

She does not understand the male concept of footwear. Women standardly feel that anything less than half a dozen or so pairs is insufficient. One must have choices, because after all shoes must match the mood or something, and people always look at a person's footwear first and judge the individual accordingly. One of my friends always wears Converse Allstars, another wears those leather Berkeleyite sandals unless it's beastly cold. Many men are perfectly happy with just one pair for regular, one or two other sets for whatever.
We wear the dogs until they fall apart.

A few years ago she worried that unless I dressed like a civilized person I should remain a bachelor, and would never stand any chance luring a sweet young thing into my arms as had once occurred. I should mention that a very long time ago she and I had been romantically involved, and at present we are not. Perhaps she feels that manifesting another amorous achievement will mean that I have successfully moved on.

She does not understand the male of the species.
Which is quite evident.

Shoes have very little to do with it. They are not important. When a man has a sufficiency of briar pipes and decent tobacco to smoke in them, plus a regular prospect of tea, all is right with the world. That's why we fought the Nazis.



In a short while I shall head over to Chinatown to see if my Wednesday lunch place is open today. With two pipes in my coat pocket and a pouch of tobacco. A quiet smoke after lunch, then shopping, lottery ticket, old fart transit card upgrade, and tea. And afterwards another smoke. A very stable midweek routine which mentally prepares me for dealing with the venomous and pustulant rightwing bastards in Marin on my workdays.




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