An-Tie-Matter

I hate ties.

    Socks absorb sweat and make a buffer between the shoe material and your (stinky) feet. Underpants protect your rear from rubbing on polyester all day. Cufflinks keep your sleeves together. Hats can protect from wind, dust, sun and rain. Shoes, gloves.....every part of my wardrobe is earning its keep in the workplace of my body. Then we have the guy just there for the ride. The shameless leech who refuses to put in work, hides when the boss is around and takes your food out of the fridge right before lunch. The necktie. 

    Deemed so important in years gone by that there are (albeit satirical) books published about the correct way to fasten them, men have always been judged as soon as they walk out the door wearing a shirt without a tie. I think we can agree that no man in the business world dares leave his bedroom without one of these strangulation facilitators hung around his neck. Even men in such position of power as director of the BBC can't escape judgment. I have done research over the years, and at no point have I found a reason for wearing a necktie outside of "fashion". 

   Well I like practicality, and as such have fought for years against having to wear those things. There are ways to look formal without wearing ties. Suits like these collect dust by the wayside, and I fail to see why.

"Well, Dominic," the GQ gentlemen sneer, "it just looks better. Clearly your fashion sense is nonexistent."

So why is a tie fashionable? Why have we come so far, from having women wearing corsets and metal banded skirts, men wearing white powdered wigs and starched collars so stiff they could kill, to our modern fashions, yet maintain that wrapping cloth around your neck is the only way to appear professional?

"Well, Dominic," the clerk at Men's Wearhouse says wearily, rolling his eyes at me for the fourth time, "it's a way for a man - OR woman - to express their individuality."

   I'm going to have to disagree. You can make that case for body art and piercings. Even barbed wire tattoos around the bicep say something about you. Sites like Suicide Girls celebrate body art, and I'm sure many piercing sites exist where you can go through and not see two people exactly the same. When I look at a picture like this:

I cannot help but see how.......similar all the guys look. I see an amorphous mass of dark hues and cloth around the neck. Is this what the adult world is? Looking alike? Conforming to have a shot at a job? Thankfully, not everyone thinks so. Instead of using Google to look for ties, I looked at what Google thinks of ties. Seems a divisive issue at best. In a letter to the Financial Times which you can't read unless you subscribe, which is why I can't link it here..........Google's privacy chief spoke out against ties. In the quotes I saw, he seemed to think the same ways I do, even saying that ties constrict the flow of blood to the brain.

   Obviously he's trying to be funny, but in the moments of seriousness you can see the points he raises for regular t shirts vs suit and tie in the corporate world. I'm with him.

   This final article discusses clip on ties. I have gone this route a few times. Skimming through the article I kept finding objectionable material. He mentions cops and security personnel wearing clip ons to avoid being strangled. Common sense over fashion, I nodded and continued. Then I got to THIS:

 Similarly, people in factory environments who wear ties are also advised to wear clip-ons – in the unfortunate event that the tie gets caught in a piece of machinery, it will simply clip off, rather than pulling its owner into the machine as well. (Then again, why people in factories would wear ties I have no idea.)

So what are you saying, sir or maam? People in factories don't have to wear ties because what....only professionals wear ties? So factory workers aren't? What, working in a factory takes you off the list of people who can "express themselves as individuals" in such a way? Get out of my internet browser with that.

I hate ties. If you made it to the end of this you no doubt get that. I do not ask that if you like ties you change your mind. I simply ask that you seriously ask yourself why you like them, and if it was ever your choice.

Vigilante Injustice

By now, the entire world has heard about the bombings in Boston. I'm not going to use the bombers' names because that kind of martyrdom via social media is not what this blog is about. Neither am I going to get into an in depth discussion of the people saying Syria, Israel etc have blasts every day. What I am going to talk about....is Batman. Stay with me.
   Everyone knows who Batman is, his tragic past and his shadowy brand of justice. Everyone loves the idea of this masked badass going out at night and wrecking evildoers. Everyone snickers when the Gotham police refer to him as a vigilante and outlaw, because hey, he's the hero! Laws don't apply to the good guy! They are for the other pitiable mortals out of the panel. So when Boston runners were caught in the blast and the FBI was hungry for clues and CNN was very clearly not a good source of accurate info , the Internet decided to turn to the one source of information it should have doubted immediately. It turned to itself. Thousands of people on social networking sites like Reddit and 4chan donned their alter egos of "justice" and started scanning photos of the race and monitoring police scanners (which, honestly, I'm kind of surprised is legal). What happened as a result? Sunil Tripathi.
 
A young Indian male, dark skinned, missing since March. One reddit user made the logic leap, and immediately the wolf pack started howling. His name was never said on the scanner, and I have looked for files of the scanner mp3 files which you can listen to for yourself. It's not there. Yet, one person said the name, and in the spirit of "social media is better than policework" this man's name was posted thousands of times in relation to this tragedy. Hours later, the true names would come out, but in the meantime, the torches were lit, and thousands looking for someone to blame had their target. He was slandered to no end, vengeance was sworn. Even after the fact, people refused to apologize. Pulled this from a reddit thread discussing the whole fiasco:

   Even here in this thread I have still seen people today claiming the missing guy is involved - and in one shocking instance, blamed for disappearing. Specifically - kposh said -

"no one owes anyone an apology to this kid he disappeared that makes him real suspicious looking"

So what is left? Where IS this man? No one knows. His family has to deal with his month long disappearance and the fact that he was the most wanted man in the country for a while because of incorrect data offered up by the Internet Justice League. In addition to this, there was a second name being floated around. Mike Mulugeta. How did our brave heroes come up with this name? On scanner at 2:14 AM an official said, "Last name Mulugeta, (spelled out), M as in Mike, Mulugeta." Clearly a small clarification in spelling is a name indication. No one knew what this name was in reference to....a suspect? A house owner in the neighborhood? Some guy with Red Sox tickets? If his name had started with D police might have been told to look for Dog Dulugeta. These are the jumps in logic made latenight online. 

   

With the situation now resolved, no one cares to look back on what the net did or didn't do to contribute to this case, but it showed a staggering lack of professionalism and proved a couple of things to me. One, the public is a bad place to source info from at night. Two, people don't care about who gets run over in the stampede to be right and get a pat on the head. Being first with information is seldom being right.

Meanwhile Sunil's family is still looking for him. Don't try to find him. Last time we didn't let the qualified people do their job, he was identified as a murderer. Just let him be.

First Lap

Well, we made it.
   A year ago, I was sleeping on a hospital couch, wondering what life would have in store. My son had just been born, and after initial worries about low heart rate, they let him into the room with us. I worried extensively about his nose. He has what I suppose would be called a button nose, but days after birth, it was pressed into his face such that he was struggling to breathe every minute. I sat there in the early afternoon and watched his face, thinking that anything could happen at this point. He made it past that.
    When he refused to go to bed, and I realised as I sat on the couch at 4:45 am with him that I was living every cliche joke about parenthood that I had ever heard, I wondered how this was going to work. I am not super dependent on sleep, but I need at least four hours to soldier through the average day. So how was I going to manage this guy waking up every two hours? It took us a long time but we figured out that the secret was counter intuitive. The milk he screamed for after dark made him urinate, which filled his diaper and made him uncomfortable, which woke him up. So we weaned him off of that, and he started sleeping from 8 pm to 6 am. Another hurdle down.
    I realised that I had made it past some invisible hurdle every morning, as I looked down at him, he would look back at me and smile his toothless smile. Some cosmic karma accountant had checked my books over and decided that everything I had done in life qualified me for one more day with this guy. This little man who figured out how to take off his dirty diaper and threw it across the room, who scared the cats every time they came into the room, who still occasionally decides that sleep is for the weak and raises hell at 230 am. He is not easy to deal with sometimes, and I often remembered my old pledges to never have a son and have the karma of my younger self to deal with. Yet, he earns his place in my soul daily. His insistence on saying 'Da Da' even when asked to say mama is amusing and heartwarming. The moments when he would stop crying and start crying when I sang songs to him add up. I find myself constantly thinking of things I can teach him in the future, principles, games, sports, languages. Right now, he resembles a lot to me, but most of all, he is the embodiment of limitless potential, and I find it fascinating. Sure, he's barely twenty pounds and has a grand total of three teeth showing, but I'm looking down the road at the horizon.
   So, every day I think of what could have happened to him, and I count it as a victory. Obviously and hopefully we have a long way to go, and I plan to be running right next to him the entire way. Happy Birthday, Damian Matthew. Welcome to lap two.