On Favorites and [not] replacing them…

I was a real smart-aleck attention whore of a kid growing up. I had to be center stage and would often sabotage and hijack the person that had the floor at the time (many many apologies). If it wasn’t my never ending run of bad jokes (I owned and studied over 38 joke books at the time) it was my t-shirts that did the job best. They spoke for me, and not in a I’m only wearing black until they invent something darker kind of way. More of a In Dog Year’s I’m Dead (actual t-shirt I owned) kind of way. A lighter, fun, comic way of breaking the ice and making my shirt the topic (a social subtlety that would take years to appreciate).

So I’d have a few shirts I’d wear all the time for attention from new acquaintances or as a calling card or brand for those in on the joke by then. These shirts were my favorites. They were comfortable and fun and helped define me, a loud obnoxious attention grabbing skinny short pasty kid with no filter or off switch, at a time I badly needed defining. But they also taught me my first lesson on favorites - the more you loved and wore a shirt, the sooner it deteriorated, crumbled, and was taken away from you.

I saw quickly that my favorite shirts soon became my favorite unwearable shirts. And I realize now, at 24, that this is a tired should-be-retired cliche of the beautiful things get broken variety, but as an (more) annoying youngster, it was a revelation. That’s a cruel trip, at any age, to realize that some of the things you enjoy most are destroyed and taken away from you simply because you enjoy them too much. Think too hard on that and your head (and heart) start to ache.

So, somewhere along the way I realized that yes, a fun new outfit or bag or poster (etc.) is nice and should be enjoyed, but at the end of it’s life cycle - it’s just a shirt. This doesn’t mean I shouldn’t take good care of it and love it, but that I need to realize in the grand scheme of things, I can’t care that much. We lose objects, we destroy clothes (grass stains anyone?), and we break things - I’ve found it a much better use of my time and energies to care about people, because they can love you back.