January 24th, 2007

I had a -er- friend in university who played the oboe. We met each other in synchronous moments of weakness, and the thing that makes it really truly sordid is that I had somewhat immature visions of making her my muse as I composed ever greater pieces of music for solo oboe and ensemble. It was to be a musical and romantic relationship that would find its way into the annals of musical history alongside JS Bach's siring of 20 (10 surviving) children; Tchaikovsky's life-long unrequited love for his ... ahem ... well, for his nephew; and maybe even a notch or two above that BDSM masterpiece, Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring".

But the -er- friendship only lasted about 3 months, and I never actually got around to writing any pieces for solo oboe. It spanned pretty much the entire extent of a music composition class where I had to write for string quartet, so all my writing energies went into that (I got a B, meh).

But I learned something important: Oboe players are always the anal retentive players ... they lay out little trays of reeds that they made themselves in their basement laboratories, and they keep little screwdriver and spanner sets ready in case they need to perform surgery on their finely-tuned (pun fully intended) little black instruments of deadly sonority. (I mean, there is a reason that the "bell" of the oboe looks like an onion: It visually suggests the same flavour that it produces aurally.)

And in a similar vein, have you noticed how software User Experience gurus are the best-dressed of the software world? Oh sure, I can hear your cries of contradiction that cite the middle-managing Marketeers and their painfully sharp overcoats, blouses decrying good taste, skirts of just the right professional length, pants with creases so straight that engineers regularly come over to use them as straightedges ... but the UE crowd aren't just finely dressed, they have a powerful and keen fashion sense that is both progressive and somehow "cool" but also persuasively accessible at the same time. Marketeers are the trailing-foot-of-the-mainstream well-dressed, but UE are the cutting edge—the genial arrow to the future of style, grace, and élan.

I mean, just look at them sometime:

Overcoats that suggest hip-ness without looking strange. Matching scarves. Shirts with good lines and nicely-complementary pants (fashionably ruffled without looking wrinkled or worn). And those shoes! Oh my goodness! Keen shoe sense is, perhaps, the single greatest hallmark of UE gurus everywhere. The rest of them may stray into casual (though always finely fashionable) territory, but the shoes are nothing but rich life-giving fashion-sense goodness, though always business-like and professional.

I mention this entirely out of admiration and not a small amount of envy: Fashion sense mostly eludes me ... at least, I have to devote a lot of brain-power to making correct fashion decisions. I may not walk around looking like the social reject kid in high school who never seemed to get that he looked like he'd been plucked from a landfill site, but I definitely am on the antecedent of the bell curve for well-dressed-ness.

This vexes my wife who is definitely above the swell of the bell curve. Why, people come up to her and tell her how well-dressed she looks. And my sister Jennifer admires her fashion sense (and Jen is no slouch herself).

So when I go out looking typically "Western Canadian" (i.e., come as ... uh, whatever) I am perhaps dimly aware of my un-hipness and my laissez faire attitude about which pants with which of the dreadful shirts I refuse to let my wife throw out. It's really a fashion limbo for me: Not great, not terrible ... not heaven, not hell.

[Sigh] No struggle, no joy.

I am the oboe of fashion sense.

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Epilogue

I saw my ex -er- friend's name in the newspaper a while back: She is now the director of some community choir and she was calling for singers. I was a little tempted to go down and volunteer my voice and time, but realised we'd never get the magic back. Perhaps she would cringe at my choice of shirt colours ...

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