Saturday, February 12, 2005 AD An Office Conversation L: Oh look! Your socks match your sweater! Me: Yes, they are prone to do that. L: Wow. My socks aren't even prone to match each other.
How about you? Do you go for the coordinated look? Or the first pair of socks in the drawer? How 'bout with jewelry, scarves, etc.? I've been known to stop and make a pair of earrings to go with an outfit rather than put on something that doesn't match.
Oh, and I almost hate to admit it, but my sweater is lavender and my socks are lilac, so they don't really match. But there's an expanse of black slacks in between, so the difference isn't noticeable. I never, however, wear two purples in close proximity unless they are the same hue or shades or tints of the same hue. That would be for me like lack of parallelism in a bulleted list or a picture hanging crookedly on the wall.
It's funny though -- this isn't a standard I require in others. I don't cringe when someone else doesn't follow my style. I can't imagine Samantha, for instance, having such a fetish for matchingness, but I love the style she has, and I wouldn't want her to be like me in this.
Lack of parallelism, however, I cannot abide. I made the mistake earlier this evening of opening a 77-page file of indexes...77 pages of bulleted lists. I'm not sure whether to curse or bless the person who sent it (and I'm not sure whether he'll curse or bless me when I send it back) because while creating order and pattern consistency is a lot of fun, it is time-consuming, and this document was sent to me for reference, not for editing. I did make myself stop at about page 20.
That reminds me of the button incident (forgive me if I've told this one before). My dear mother had made me a black blouse and set me the task of picking out buttons from a tin about eight inches in diameter and four inches deep -- hundreds of black buttons, a hundred year's worth of black buttons from her mother and probably her grandmother before her. I quickly decided that all of the buttons on the blouse should be different. And that the rest of the black buttons should be sorted so that those with matches were matched. Not satisfied, I also sorted all the white buttons. And the colored buttons, too, into smaller containers according to hues. There weren't as many white and colored as there were black, but there were still a lot. Well, my poor mother about lost her mind watching me do this. It seemed to her like a maddeningly dull way to spend the last day of my vacation. I, on the other hand, was enjoying myself immensely.
If only I could make myself have such a passion for orderliness in general, I could become the world's greatest housekeeper! Posted by Valerie (Kyriosity) at 2/12/2005 05:00:00 AM
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