My Musings

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Tuesday, November 12, 2002

My Poofy Coat

It is always disheartening when people choose to greet you not by saying “hi” or “hello” or even “get the hell away from me, buttface” but by simply laughing in your general direction and then carrying on with whatever they were doing before. Such was my morning.

The second Tuesday of every month is a Late Day, for which school starts an hour earlier and the periods are all seven minutes shorter, with the exception of lunch, which mysteriously becomes five minutes longer. I frankly see no point in Late Days, but I’m not about to complain about their existence. On Late Days my parents, who normally give me a ride to school, leave before I wake up, which is nice, because it lets me take a nice morning walk to school after getting an extra refreshing night’s sleep. I like walking. I’m sure many of you have heard me quip that walking is the only exercise I get. So I was in a good mood today—which, you will note, was the second Tuesday of November.

I was traversing the back route to the school, which runs through a gap between two houses that leads to the parking lot, when I crossed paths with Julie and her little sister, Randi (Randy? Randie? Randey? Randeigh? Rwahnnedhyiee? I have no idea how it’s spelled), who were coming from another direction. Julie sits next to me in homeroom and Randy, a freshman, sits next to me in study hall, because their last name, Edelman, comes right behind mine in the alphabet. Dvorkin, Edelman—you’d think that out of a school of 800 people there’d be someone in between, but I guess I was just cursed with bad luck. No, seriously, I like Julie, and Randie seems okay, though Julie and I got off to a bad start in Mr. Showman’s 7th grade Technology class when we sat opposite each other while doing architectural drawings and she and Laura Wienblatt constantly made of fun of me and laughed at me, much as Julie did today, actually, now that I think about it, because as soon as she saw me she began chuckling hysterically and immediately whispered something to Randey, who took a look at me herself and then started her own bout of uncontrollable giggling. At that point they both briskly turned away and resumed their stroll towards the school. “What!” I whined as I tried to catch up with them but couldn’t because of the new construction fence that was recently imposed upon the already cramped and inadequate parking lot. Julie glanced back at me. “Oh, nothing!” she sang. “It’s just that you look really, really funny wearing your hood and gloves and everything when it’s really not that cold out.” “No, I, well,” I responded cooly just as Chris came striding up to us. We were almost at the school by now. “Yeah, Boris, are you THAT cold?” Chris asked, his taunt made ever more biting by the fact that he himself was wearing only a tee shirt. At that point I tried to explain but failed.

I’ll explain it better now. What Julie was laughing at was my poofy winter coat. She is by no means the sole or even the harshest critic of this coat, which has been the target of more than its fair share of ridicule. This should come as no surprise because for some reason people have always enjoyed making fun of my clothing (for more info on this, see the “Marching Band Uniforms” entry below). It’s big, black, and bulges to the point where I look like an amateur sumo wrestler when I wear it. It has a black hood with a black clasp in front of my mouth and its pockets contain black gloves, and I use all of these features. The hood alone makes me look funny, and I look funnier still when I clasp the hood shut around my face and zip my coat up all the way and put my gloves on and wear my sunglasses—not the regular kind of sunglasses that make you look cool, but the dorky clip-on kind that attach to your glasses and make you look like a dork. This coat turns me into a hulking, blob-like mass of poofiness that renders me completely unrecognizable to anyone who knows me, unless of course they happen to know about the black winter coat I own that turns me into a hulking, blob-like mass of poofiness, in which case they could easily spot me from an airplane.

Indeed, the way I wear this coat makes it look as though I’m about to prepare for an expedition to Antarctica. First we have the hood. I like hoods. If I’m wearing a coat that has a hood, I feel wrong not using it. I can’t explain this. I also feel like a part of me is missing if the coat I’m wearing doesn’t have a hood at all. I can’t explain that, either. In any case, I will generally wear a hood unless it’s really hot or itchy or not there. As for the clasp, it depends. Sometimes I wear it on a whim; sometimes I don’t. If it’s snowy and cold out, though, you’ll probably see me using it. The sunglasses, now, I wear because I’m a wimp. My eyes are bad and I’m afraid of making them even worse, and I hate it more than anything else when the sun glints off of stuff and flashes into my eyes. I also hate squinting, so if it’s remotely bright outside I’ll whip out the clip and sunglass myself. Another thing I like about the sunglasses is the illusion they give me that other people can’t see my eyes. Of course the cheap-o clips are nothing like the mirrored shades I wish I could wear, and people can plainly see my eyes behind them. But I somehow forget this when I wear the sunglasses and act as though people don’t know where my eyes are, which makes me feel like I can look wherever I want with impunity. On a side note, I can be a real moron.

The gloves, now, I don’t like. What I like is to warm my hands in the coat’s pockets. However, I keep the gloves in these pockets, and when I put my hands in there, the gloves take up a lot of space and it’s just not the same. If I wear the gloves, which are very stuffy and scraggly, then my hands don’t fit into the pockets very well and it’s not the same, then, either. It’d be nice to leave the gloves at home, but sometimes I need them, like when I’m carrying something and can’t stick one or both of my hands in my pockets, or when I’m walking around at night while entertaining weird fantasies in which my hands have turned into lethal knives. Yes. See, I really like mittens. They let you rub your fingers together for warmth. Gloves, on the other hand, isolate your fingers and gradually freeze them, almost doing more harm than good. So what I like to do is pull my fingers out of the finger slots of the gloves, making a fist inside my gloves. This makes the glove fingers empty and flabby. When I dangle my arms and walk past street lamps at night, the shadow of the gloves looks to me like there are knives attached to my arms. That’s when it all comes together. The light from the street lamp casts a shadow, and the poofiness of the coat, combined with the weird gloves, transforms my ordinary shadow into a towering, muscular brute with knives for hands. As I continue to walk past the light my shadow gets bigger and bigger, the monster shadow grows and grows, and right before it disappears, the towering giant stands at the peak of his height, his arm-knives several feet long, his snarling, bestial face turned into a perpetual scowl, ever ready to jump into the thick of battle and start slashing everybody to bits, ignoring the enemy attacks that fall limp at the powerful, poofy muscles.

If I was a better writer I could explain this better, but hopefully you’re getting some glimpse here of the fact that I’m pretty messed up and you should probably stay away from me. I also hope you’re seeing that I’m a pretty insecure person, and the coat, in its own special way, makes me feel secure and protected. It also keeps me warm in the winter when I’m too stubborn and stupid to wear a sweatshirt just like every other normal human being alive. So the next time you see a black, poofy blob with astoundingly geeky sunglasses staggering towards you, start laughing, because you might as well, and there’s nothing I can do about it. But don’t----

Uh, hold on a second, folks…I’ll get back to finishing the essay as soon as I solve this little problem…uhhhhh…hmm…yeah. I just realized that there is absolutely no point to this blog entry. Originally it was going to be a pathetic plea to you guys to stop laughing at me for wearing my poofy coat because I have supreme reasons for doing so, but then I realized that it IS really funny and stupid, so, um…well, hrm. What a predicament. Ho, hum, I guess it’s not the end of the world—I’ve written pointless blog entries before. Talk about taking the wind out of your sails, though! Rats. I should really plan these things better.

.: posted by Boris 11:04 PM

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