Not every day recently, but many days, I make coffee early in the morning, do some work, make another coffee, take twenty minutes to read, and by that point the sun is rising, it’s time to get dressed, make eggs, then inevitably I find myself in the bathroom, above the sink, brushing my teeth, and I think, Something needs to change.
For months I’ve sensed I need a new look. Three weeks ago, randomly watching YouTube, I come upon a guy who looks kinda like me. He’s a little older but same shape, same complexion, similar hair and beard. He just looks cooler, he projects a self-ease, and I like the way the clothes he wears hang on him, even if the clothes aren’t exactly what I’d choose.
There’s a maxim that one’s personal style, the manner in which you feel most like yourself, for many people derives from a moment when they felt their most confident, just their hottest. For me, seeing how I still wear certain types of clothing that I wore in my late teens – long-sleeve T-shirts, Nike ACG sneakers – this is definitely not the case. But style is funny. A projection of aspirations, belonging, status among a set. How rarely is it actually about us as individuals, but around whom and where and when we live. Of course, as regards the material world, change is ceaseless. In my mind it mostly happens very slowly, then extremely fast. I often think of the diary of a Welsh farmer I read last year. The man eats the same things every day. For dinner, it’s fish, baked beans, and “one big onion” (that phrase haunts me). His lunch is a pear, an orange and four sandwiches. “But I allow myself a bit more variety; I’ll sometimes have soup if it’s cold.”
We’re nothing alike, and yet my heart pulls, when I read this from the same account:
A lot of people, locals and birdwatchers, come here wanting to hear the cuckoo, but they don’t stop long enough; sometimes they don’t even leave their cars. This makes me feel so sad that I actually cry a bit; it pains me that others don’t get to enjoy it. I urge people to get out of their cars and walk up the road to hear the birdsong.
What am I responding to in the mirror? Awareness of aging. Also, a certain tedium. Maybe because I’m in the midst of a work project, nine-to-five, that’s begun to feel rote. Then there’s yearning for a clean slate, vapors of lockdown, maybe deeper anxieties, dissatisfactions rummaging around that can’t be addressed as easily as my beard. Here’s a sentence I read on Thursday and underlined: A button today is more or less identical to a button in the fifteenth century. I really thought about that for a moment; it kinda bummed me out. I thought, if I look at pictures, am I really so different from the me who wore those silly clothes, that silly haircut, twenty years ago?
But I love a new look. So, two weeks ago, I do something I’ve never done: I show a couple pictures of the guy I found on YouTube to my barber. He’s instantly excited; I don’t think he’s had so much fun cutting my hair since we met. (I texted him on the way to his shop from my car: “We might try something a little new.” He wrote back: “Kyrgios?!” No, but hilarious.)
Do I look so different afterward? Not really. But I feel more alert, I feel better about myself; I just like the way I look more than I did last week. I see a friend a few hours later. He asks if something is different – did I change something? I show him the photos and explain the whole thing. “He does look like you, I can see that.” He gives me my phone back, takes a step away and scans me vertically, squinting his eyes. “Honestly I don’t see a major difference. I feel like you’re just a little hotter.”
Reader, I kissed him. No tongue.
In tomorrow’s supplement for supporters
An invitation to Learned League for anyone interested, and a new online word game for people who liked Words With Friends
A great (new) memoir, a great (old) Schubert record, a new favorite band
Good reads and watches from the week, including some 19th-century lesbian vampire lit
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What the what
“Meditations in an Emergency” is published Saturdays by writer Rosecrans Baldwin, a weekly micro-essay about something he finds beautiful, with a longer piece once a month for paying subscribers, written in the woods.
Also for paying subscribers, a Sunday supplement, three weeks a month, with three-plus ideas of things to love, no paid placements 💀
Rosecrans is the author most recently of Everything Now: Lessons From the City-State of Los Angeles, winner of the 2022 California Book Award, now available in paperback from Bookshop, Amazon, or (preferably) your local store. Other books include The Last Kid Left and Paris, I Love You but You’re Bringing Me Down. His debut novel, You Lost Me There, was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice.
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