An American Slob

Four Years Ago

It was Sunday morning and my arms and legs were slumped about the sofa as I stared at the flat screen TV in my living room.  Under the belly-portion of my wifebeater tank, inches above the mesh shorts I wore to bed every night but never washed, I heard a grumbling from my belly - something about when was I going to learn to eat dinner before I went out for a Saturday night on the suds with my buddies.  It was a message from my slowly-expanding, 25 year old tummy to remind me that it (my stomach) was not solely responsible for my bellyache and that maybe, just maybe, those seven longnecks I guzzled last night on an empty stomach should share some of the responsibility for this fuzzy feeling. 

Football wouldn’t start for another hour and pizza or some fries would have been significant treatment for my particular brand of illness, but darned if I was going to de-starfish my limbs from this sofa to make or order any food myself because why should I have to do anything?! Sure I could have called delivery, but my iPhone was probably somewhere all the way over in my bedroom and it was Sunday and I felt pretty sure the Bible said something about not working today.

To distract myself from the shitstorm of misery life was heaping upon me just then, I reached for the Sunday paper and ink pen on my coffee table.  I reckoned I’d do the Sudoku and then draw a penis or two on otherwise harmless characters in the Sunday Funnies.  This would distract me, I hoped, from the mountain of hunger and discomfort I felt until the Kansas City Chiefs could take the field and divert my attention from my own suffering to theirs.  Feeling uninspired by the boxes inside boxes inside boxes, I skipped the Sudoku and decided I’d just get right down to business donning Doonesbury with a whopper when I realized that the ink pen in my hand, the only one in the house for that matter, was dry.  Oh man are you serious? This can’t be happening.  I lapped away at the ballpoint - futilely hoping that my saliva might restore the Bic back to life.  How could I have only one pen in the house and it didn’t work?    

My belly hurt, there was no football on, and I was hungry.  In spite of it being Sunday there was no sign of manna from heaven and to top it all off my pen was now rebelling.  I knew somewhere in the world someone must be having problems almost as demoralizing as mine but it was hard to imagine who.  In a last ditch effort to salvage a day that seems to be getting away from me already; I pitched the worthless pen at the wall.  Dammit! I told the wall when it rejected my offering.  How can life be so awful even on the weekends?  Somehow I managed to slump even deeper into the sofa. I’d gone through 6 of the 7 steps in the grieving process now, and it was time for step number 7. Acceptance.  I needed to accept the inevitable fact that if I were going to arouse a picture of Doonesbury or get a pizza and avoid starvation, I would have to get off my couch today.

I could have summoned my inner workingman and journeyed to my bedroom in search of clothing alternatives to my current Eminem-inspired ensemble, maybe some jeans and tennis shoes, but that was serious work and I was determined to keep this Sabbath holy, God help me. Bumbling towards my room, I agonized over the mountainous obstacles the modern man must hurdle just to survive in the 21^st century.  Cavemen didn’t have to put on jeans and a tee shirt every time they left the house.  They didn’t have to drive all the way across town every time they wanted a Papa John’s pizza. 

Then I decided Screw It.  I wasn’t going to go change clothes.  I was going-out in exactly the same clothes I had on plus flip flops. The end.  White tanktop, mesh shorts, and floppy sandals.  Why should I have to dress myself up when I was only planning on visiting Walgreens to buy a pen and then Papa Johns to snag a pizza?  It wasn’t a job interview and the only people I’d see were the worthless college dropouts manning the registers. I grabbed my keys. 

I flip-flopped and key-jingled out my front door; angry that I had to leave my house and looking remarkably like the Real Slim Shady in my white tank, musky mesh shorts, and sandals.  None of this struck me as odd at the time because who puts on real clothes just to go out to Walgreens or Papa Johns? 

Well, it turns out everyone else in the world except Americans, really.  But my younger, less traveled self didn’t know that and probably didn’t care.  What I didn’t know at the time was that Americans are the most informally dressed people in the world and that I was one of the sloppiest.  I didn’t know that on every other corner of the globe people refused to leave their homes without doing themselves up a bit first.  And back then it didn’t strike me as odd that me and my countrymates often woke up in our bedtime clothes and went out without changing.  However, that was before my mind had done a little changing of its own. 

Four Years Later

Oh, you’ll see America in a completely different light after being abroad for a year.  Things that used to seem normal will now shock you.  Get ready for Reverse Culture Shock.  Everyone and their gay cousin was going Nostradamus on me predicting how I was going to experience “Reverse Culture Shock” when I got back to America.  When I told people I was heading back stateside for a visit, they started in with their unsolicited prophecies about my trip and how weird everything would be to me. This Reverse Culture Shock concept smacked of a steaming heap of cockamamie, but just the same I told folks "thanks" for their dire warnings and assured them I’d brace myself.  Seriously, though, how much could America possibly change in one year?  Surely not much.  And could I really change so drastically in one year that my old home country would shock me?  No. Way. 

Then I touched down in Dulles airport, Washington DC after a year of traveling abroad and holy fashion-catastrophe, Batman! What had changed, apparently, was my perspective on dressing.  What a disheveled mess the American folks had turned into in my absence.  Either I was experiencing Reverse Culture Shock indeed or a nearby Goodwill store had detonated and left everyone in DC wounded with wildly tasteless and ill-fitting clothing.  I hadn’t even exchanged a fist bump with an American yet and already I felt shocked.  Were Americans always so sloppily dressed or did that all happen while I was away?

Sloppy, unkempt, and without anything even resembling a nod to fashion, grown men gallivanted up and down the airport in gaudy t-shirts that hung limply to their knees or even worse, wrinkled and oversized khakis half hidden by fat bellies that hung loosely over woven leather belts.  I looked down the long terminal and witnessed a live catwalk of anti-models: women slouched into flannel pajama pants and pink baseball caps, men who were either unaware or unashamed of their gangly beards and saggy sweats slunched on top of whatever seating they could find.  Everywhere I turned I saw people who had evidently just now rolled out of bed at, I looked at my watch, 11:00 a.m?!

Apparently nobody had bothered to change clothes during that window of time between their alarms beeping and their rides leaving for the airport.  Were my countrymen and women always so reluctant to change into something more attractive and I just didn’t notice it before, or did the clothes stay the same and my mind changed?  In every other place I’ve visited during the last year, I’ve witnessed people who have accepted the awful but inevitable truth that people will make judgments based on appearances.  United Arab Emirates, Japan, Oman, Qatar, Switzerland, and Holland – everywhere I went people were spruced up, tidy, and dressed well.  In other countries, fashion is something that people have in the same way that Americans have facebook accounts; which is to say you’d be in the minority if you didn’t.

For the rest of the world formality is the norm and for Americans it’s a chore.  Americans skip formality in much the same way that we don’t skip dessert. Foreign men wouldn’t think of leaving home without a collared shirt and if they did wear jeans or a tee out they certainly wouldn’t pair it with flip flops the way I tend to do.  What they would do is press and tailor their jeans and tee with the same precision that I do with my dress clothes and then they'd wax their hair just so, shine up some dress shoes, and stroll out in style.  No mesh shorts.  No wifebeater tanks.  Maybe people wear those things when they’re on their own couches at home, but they’d never leave the house without slicking up first. 

And the fairer sex abroad do up their looks just as vigilantly.  A Japanese, European, or Arab woman, if she were being abducted from her home in the middle of the night, would grab a change of clothes as her abductor yanked her out of her bedroom.  Even if a foreign lady is ugly, she typically gives off the impression that she's hot with her clothes and the way she carries herself.  I hadn’t seen a single pair of scrubs or PJs on a lady for over a year.  In Dulles airport, my initial step off the plane revealed at least three American women wearing pajama bottoms and pony tails tucked into ball caps.  One lady who had evidently just swallowed a Boeing 747 rumbled slowly towards a Starbucks in pink cutoff sweatpants and mustard stained shirt.  I wondered if perhaps a jumbo jet wasn’t such a bad snack when doused in French’s, and then I wondered how I hadn’t noticed this or cared about all this physical appearance business before.

What I saw in that terminal in DC shocked me.  It was the Reverse Culture Shock I’d been warned of;   my fellow Americans looked terrible.  While I hadn’t noticed the change taking place in me, apparently my standards for how-someone-should-look-like-in-public had changed.  I’d come to expect people to look fashionable and well kept, even if they were poor or ugly.  Women were meant to look snappy and beautiful; men were meant to look fashionable and respectable.  At Dulles airport in DC, people looked so ugly that I wondered if even the tide would bother to take them out.

I kept walking the direction of the baggage claim thinking about how disgusting and sloppy Americans looked while marveling at the parade of people who reinforced this observation when I stopped to order a coffee.  When the barista put the coffee on the counter I reached towards my back pocket for my wallet and was surprised to find that my pants did not have a back pocket and that my wallet was actually in my carry-on bag.  Surprisingly, I found that my pants did not have a pocket on them because they were not pants at all but instead mesh shorts, slightly dirty and grossly oversized.  Astonished and suddenly aware of my own appearance, I looked below my hairy knees and there, on American soil for the first time in over a year, were my feet – slipped comfortably into a pair of worn out flip flops. 

I snatched up my coffee and quickly slipped into the bathroom, suddenly humiliated.  Gazing at the reflection on the airport mirror, I saw a guy in dirty mesh shorts and flip flops.  A guy whose shaggy blonde hair had not been cut in three months and whose beard had not been trimmed in weeks.  A guy who looked sloppy and unfashionable.  A guy who looked pretty much the same as he did waiting on his couch for the Kansas City Chiefs game to start four years ago.  What I saw was a guy who had come to expect others to look snazzy and fashionable but who had neglected to turn those standards on himself.  A guy whose mind had changed, but whose clothes had not.  An American slob.