What Not to Think About

We have taken to watching “What Not To Wear” on Friday nights, another reason for Contraria to be anonymous. Each week Stacy and Clinton find some woman of slovenly dress with some more or less offbeat justification for slovenly. A few days in New York later, with a $5000 credit card spent under the tutelage of Stacy and Clinton, with a new hairstyle and make-up the formerly dowdy, hippie, or teenybopper as the case may be emerges as a sophisticate. New wardrobe, new personality, new outlook. Fashion alchemy. Fashion therapy. Fashion as religion, a 60 minute salvation.

My own fashion is not so much “what not to wear” as “what not to think about”. Seven or eight years ago I stopped wearing a suit to the office. Now there’s a family of dress pants from Land’s End and a gaggle of dress shirts with little polo guys. My little polo guy period. A couple of Brooks shirts have sneaked in, perhaps foretelling the end of the little polo guy. The thing is, it’s good enough, and I don’t have to think about it.

I believe there is a huge premium on things we don’t have to think about, in addition to what to wear, or what not to wear. There are two routes to my office, and more or less every day for the last 25 years I have gone one way and come back the other. If ever there was a reason I have forgotten it. I don’t go out on Friday nights, except for baseball games or nuclear war. I go to the gym on Wednesday and Sunday. Many are the things which do not absorb thought.

Now comes the problem of the shaving cream. For an unknown period, and that phrase in my experience usually means 15-20 years, I have used Crabtree & Evelyn Almond shaving cream with a little brush. Brushes come and go, and every couple of years I have to go get another little jar. Who knows how long it lasts, but this year, “It was discontinued last year” came in a particularly unsympathetic tenor. Those words moved the shaving cream from the What Not to Think About column to the Problem column. Who needs shaving cream in the Problem column when it clearly belongs under What Not to Think About? Should I go to EBay and find the discontinued model or just pick out something else? I have picked out something else which is currently a small daily annoyance, but I believe it will recede in time to What Not to Think About, until one day I hear again, “It was discontinued last year”.