If there's a problem with disaability and the Web, it's at the intersection of me and fashion.
No longer truly able to satisfy my retail therapeutic needs by browsing for hours, I've turned to the Web as a logical plug for my leaky neediness. Despite what optimistic user experience experts may say, and regardless of the opinions of interface experts, online shopping is to my mind an empty experience. See, click, get. Price checking can be frustrating, just as much as it is in real time, and the heuristics are nude of gratification; sure, tell me the shoes are leather but we both know there's gradations of tanned cowhide, feelable, and visceral--even in those awful lights--that is not available upon pressing enter.
In my medically disabled life, I have no real need of fashion. I could drop the pretense and go sweatpants and really no one would bat an eye or say anyting to me about it. There are functional issues to address here and talking about the Ensure stains on my grey cotton pull ons doesn't rank as one of them. The blessing of low expectation is how utterly unnecessary it is to lift the feet in order to cross the bar.
I've tried to operate in opposition to that lowness, though, with the thought that any commitment I could make to not looking like a victim would contribute to not being treated as one. Whether that has succeeded or not, I know that I feel better in a polo shirt and unstained jeans and I look more myself--or as I think of myself.
Therefore, I make a habit of cruising Hautelook and Gilt.com on a very regular basis. I receive Gap and Old Navy emails because I have succumbed to their online sales. I'm known at Macys.com and surely marked as a shoe drooler. There is a mythical country called express.com and I've been there.
Need so often has very little to do with this--though earlier in the year I had a spate of ordering pants that would actually fit me. Particularly with shoes, need is truly not part of the game. DSW is not the site I must go to for my drugs, it is my drug of choice.
Today as I'm preparing to go to a lecture on Nehru, and his governance of India in the 40's and 50's, I'm fighting to not buy a 44.97$ pair of penny loafers with a lug sole on Hautelook. That price! That practical sole! I cannot expect to do better, I will not live forever, why not?
I've been espousing the whole carpe diem thing to Charles lately, particularly in regards to traveling, to his reactions to his own weight which he thinks is too high. I am not a good person to talk to about subjects like this--I can wordlessly point to my mouth and make the point adequately that I would literally die with happiness to be overweight at this point; I can arch my regrown eyebrows over a quibble of how much a hotel room in Manhattan will cost versus one much further from the action in Park Slope Brooklyn (answer: no).
Taken to its logical extreme, it would seem I'm advocating for ordering those penny loafers and getting that hotel room and damn the torpedoes. I'm really not, though; my advocacy is still laced with the fact that the diem being seized will be the bill to be paid tomorrow. Whatever fantasy or haze I operate in I'm still aware that I live now on a fixed income, none too big, and Charles makes a salary which being paid by Indiana University renders at the low end of like professional opportunities nationwide. This is Indiana, we don't pay for squat!
Still, seizure is the rule one wishes to engage. The loafer, the oxford, the sneakers--materialism as marker; I'm still here and I'm still trying to be relevant. I'm still trying to look good; I don't intend to leave. The hotel room to frame the experience as worthy, one's time as important, the idea of placing oneself in space that others recognize and covet--even if only for a few days--is often enough worth one hundred dollars more per night.
I am recently on an upward trajectory. Aside from the emancipation of surgery 2, the cancer doctor is happy with how I'm doing, I'm gaining weight, my hair was cut, I'm itchy to do. There is less need for me to bend forward as I'm reclining on the bed to grab at a vision of 300$ Timberlands: I have way less to prove now.
In fact, I have almost nothing that requires proving. The results of tests I run on myself almost daily are all coming up better; acuity, stability and desire seem strong. The equilibrium I'm poised to maintain isn't remission but continuance, and the ability to fight implied not in shoes or pullovers, but in the control of the self down to the cellular level.
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You might wonder--did I make it to the lecture? Indeed I did, and yes, it was well worth it.
Sir Christopher Bayly spoke of the Nehru era in India as an almost mystical topic--this was a fascinating investigation of politcal philosophy through ideological biography applied to some of the closest advisors and participants in the era's government. To ask if India was Socialist or if India was Communitarian reveals less in answering than it does of the person asking--the inevitably bi-polar worldview of Western society during the Cold War is of difficult application to South Asia at this time (and it still is).
I tend to think in too singular a fashion about history, and I deflect too much of the type of emotional/social reactions which occurred within former colonies which struggled for or were thrust into independence in the post World War II Era. I don't apply the lessons which can be simply learned by a glancing familiarity with the biography of Tagore, for example, to see how Western socio-political theories played out across India, its thought leaders in the early Twentieth Century, and those who led it post 1947, and vastly more important, post-Partition.
Was Nehru a Democrat, a Socialist, a Communitarian or a Liberal? The answer is yes.
Not least of the day, I got to see some old friends, noted many of the people who I used to see at India Studies talks are still at India Studies talks. I like that sort of continuity right now, I needed very much to see it. I've needed to know that life has been going on, and going well, without it. That revolving a different sun, my old life's locus is still there, healthy, and waiting for it should I be able to jump back in.
I hope to do just that. The Dhar India Studies weekly lecture series will start up again in the Autumn. Free, fantastically interesting, open to the public, open even to people like me.
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