Weekly Input #2: Sartorial Soliloquy

You may be asking, “Hey, Ian, you can’t really call it a “weekly input” if you haven’t posted one for over two weeks, can you?”

Well, actually, I can! It turns out that no one is actually policing these things on the internet. In fact, I could say almost anything I want here with hardly any repercussions. Watch:

The colour orange doesn’t exist.

Whales are fish.

Chocolate cake is the most nutritional breakfast you can have.

See? Nobody cares.

Now that I’ve dealt with any petty quarrels you have about my labeling, let’s move on to what I really wanted to talk about today: socks.

At this point, you may be confused about why anyone would have strong opinions about socks. Well, if it’s so unusual, then why have so many people throughout my life felt the need to voice their opinions about mine? I’ve fielded countless inane questions along the lines of, “Why are your socks different colours?” “Why do you wear your socks so high?” “Why are you wearing that sock on your head?”

All of these queries have added up to me spending a considerable chunk of my life defending my podiatric sartorial leanings, and I think it’s about time I got a turn to respond.

So let’s be clear here: I’m not the strange one here for having a salient opinion on the subject, and your persisting perception of my oddness is more than likely just a symptom of your own lack of self-awareness.

My main concern is why people seem to have such an obsession with whether or not socks match. Last I checked, socks aren’t even usually sold in pairs; they come in sets. So even the veery notion that there is a “correct” sock to wear alongside any other is deceptive. Socks don’t have soulmates.

Now, the prevalence of this deception is most applicable when approaching the classic “missing sock” problem of doing laundry. The internalized need to match every pair of socks makes the issue considerably more apparent and frustrating. For my part, I have always been a proponent of simplicity, and there are two methods I’ve found that nullify this issue, or at least mitigate its propensity for irritation. The first is to just not care about whether or not your socks match. Continue about your life as usual, and the problem will probably solve itself over time.

Plus, for those of you who delight in the exhibition of novelty footwear, removing the artificial limitations of our culturally imposed need for stylistic conformity effectively doubles the opportunity for self-expression.

The second method of combating missing-sock syndrome is one that I discovered rather unintentionally. The solution here is to simply have all of your socks be the same colour and type, so you couldn’t mismatch them if you wanted to. This is the strategy I currently employ, though not by choice. People just wouldn’t stop giving me socks. (During recent endeavours to streamline my wardrobe, I became aware that I own exactly 68 pairs of identical black socks. In case you were wondering, that is too many.)

At this point, you might be thinking, “Fine, but mismatched socks still make you look asymmetrical.” Well, your face is asymmetrical.

Look it up. It’s science.

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