Pot Meet Kettle

You know you’re getting older when you begin to question something in our culture and your inner voice uses terms like: these kids, back in my day, and mark of integrity. Then you feel a little better when you realize there’s still a part of you that is one “those kids.” Then you feel a little worse when you realize you were right in the first place. Finally you wonder whether the original argument has any merit whatsoever.

The issue that started this tragic logic lies in our culture of self promotion. We like to sell ourselves. In the last few years we’ve seen this notion taken to the extreme in the form of…t-shirts. Every day you walk down the street and see new t-shirts that tell us what that person wants us to believe. Instead of an “I’m With Stupid” shirt, you’re likely to see a “Stupid” shirt or another “great” slogan like:
“Don’t You Wish Your Girlfriend Was Hot Like Me”
“Sexy Bitch”
“My Other Shirt Is On Your Bedroom Floor”
“Pimp”
“Couch Potato 4 Life”

Now this is not a completely new phenomenon. We’ve always had personal names or nicknames on the back of sports jerseys and the occasional holiday shirts such as “Kiss Me I’m Irish.” You can argue whether these were annoying but they were isolated, only brought out for special occasion. The shirts today are being used to attract and reject people. These shirts scream stay away or come on up and ask me about my shirt. I should know, every couple of weeks you can find me wearing a shirt that says, “Self Loathing Pop Culture Fanatic.”

Yes, I’m also a self loathing self promoter. It’s been a great conversation starter and the web address on the back has actually provided some new readers. (By the way, I can’t wait until the summer when I won’t have to find excuses to take off my jacket and reveal the web address on the back of the shirt. I mean besides the, “it’s hot in here” line and the ability to spontaneously break into dance, that’s about all the excuses I got.) In the end though, my shirt falls in with the others I was just railing against. It screams, “I’m a pseudo intellectual that can discuss global politics one minute and recite the names of the cast members of the first 10 seasons of The Real World the next.”

Of course being the over thinker that I am I started to take the next step and think about people selling themselves and I realized it’s not a generational thing it’s a human thing. We’ve always used clothing and accessories to define us in other people’s eyes, from the Native Americans using different types of skins and dyes amongst tribes to the hippies in the 60’s. So you see this is nothing new just another step in the evolution of humanity.

To wrap it up, in one post I’ve managed to go from ripping on teens for poor clothing choices to championing them as the next step in humanity’s growth. I think I might need a shirt that says “Self Loathing Blogger.”