Today I bought a couple of shirts purely out of spite.
People who get my quasi-weekly emails (and if you want to, just give me your email address in the comments) might remember me mentioning how much I hate the shirts that exist here in Wanzhou. They’re all pastel crap with big stripes and are just ugly.
This past Saturday I was talking with one of my students and he mentioned that they’d had some class meetings to do teacher evaluation kinds of things. He told me that all people said about me was that I should get some new clothes.
To be fair, I don’t have a huge wardrobe here. I have three teaching shirts that I cycle through each week. So yeah, they’ve seen those three shirts a lot. But come on! Evaluating your teacher based on his shirt? That’s low. So I decided to start wearing a blazer and jeans (I kid!).
How this comes down to my delicious spite shirts is that I bought two shirts today, finally finding ones with non-awful colours (although the blue on one of them is pretty pale) AND I WILL NEVER WEAR THEM TO CLASS. Hahaha!
I’ll mention I bought new shirts to build up their anticipation. “A Justin in other shirts exists” they will murmur electrically, but they won’t get to see him. When students come over I will quickly change out of them. I’ll wear other shirts on top of them until I am outside the school gates. Once in a while I’ll be wearing one the spite shirts downtown and a student will see me and the legend will grow, until they are begging to see these mythical shirts that haven’t burned into their retinas.
Of course the other reason for me not to buy any more Chinese shirts is that they don’t fit.
You know, when we were in j-skool I kind of thought the whole “blazers and jeans” thing was really just a joke, like the one about all university professors having crazy hair.
But I went to a launch party for a new CanWest commuter daily with Tait and Moxley this week, and they were everywhere. Their co-worker? Blazer and jeans. The editors of the Post? Blazers and jeans. All the cool kids working at the commuter rag were doing the ironic blazers and jeans thing with distressed jeans and untucked shirts, silently congratulating themselves on how hip they were. I was horrified. It was like being in some kind of journalism Twilight Zone, except with free drinks.
Jian Ghomeshi of the CBC didn’t fall prey to the sickness. He paired his jeans with a vintage (looking?) leather jacket. It was a little blazer-looking though.