I'm a sucker for symmetry, always have been. I'm not sure why. Give me Deco over Nouveau any day. It pops up in my life all over the place: in my own graphic design work, in the way I remove self-adhesive stamps from those sheets you get at the post office, and in the little mini-events I create from the numbers on my odometer.
There are two things I celebrate on my odometer, big milestone numbers and palindromes. Usually, I somehow manage to constantly set myself up for disappointment by looking forward to big numbers only to then miss their occurrence. For instance, yesterday on my drive home from work, my car rolled over to 150,000 miles. Pretty cool, except that I forgot to look until it had already passed and read "150,002." That annoys me. That's an ugly number.
But today, on the way into work, I got to enjoy the little mini-celebration that came with 150051.
The biggest odometer disappointment I've had was when I had calculated where I'd have to set my tripometer so that, between the odometer and the tripometer, the car would read "123456 789.0" (I say "calculated" like it involved rocket science. I certainly didn't keep me up at nights). Anyway, everything was going fine until my freakin' tripometer broke. Now, as a monument to my neurotic need for the car to show me every number at once on its -ometers, my tripometer is stuck at 19.9 miles like the freakin' Hill Valley clock after getting struck by lightning.
One of the few places in life where symmetry means nothing to me is in matching socks.
To me, there's a hierarchy of sock matching that goes as follows (in order of Most Important to Match to Least Important to Match):
1. Texture
2. Elasticity
3. Length
4. Color
My feet don't know the difference between a red sock and a green sock. Hell, with my color blindness, I barely know the difference. But they sure as shit know the difference between a wool sock and dress sock. Or the difference between a sock that won't stay up compared to one that grips my leg so tight it rips out leg hair.
Anyway, this Sockarchy list is something I've mumbled incoherently to Amanda for years. It seemed like the right kind of post to finally put it down for all posterity.
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3 comments:
Wow, I really didn't appreciate that. It scared the crap out of me. =(
I think you know what I'm talking about.
Yeah, apparently I didn't bother to look all the way through the eye test thing. I didn't know that it spazzes at you when I put it up there. I simply saw that it was a test and pop it into the code.
Now I come to find out that it's freaking people out. I consider it an added bonus. : )
But then, I'm an evil yerk like that.
I wholeheartedly support your sock philosophy. I, too, match in that same hierarchy. I have found, though, that even when texture, elasticity, length, and color can't be matched your feet STILL don't know the difference after an hour... it just takes committment to the cause to pull off wearing a dress sock and a wool sock. But if you're in desperate sock times, you'll do desperate sock things. ;)
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