Save the World, Look Like Hell

A lot of people really turn it out when it comes to party clothes - If I'm going to a bar (a place to drink with friends, not a swank cocktail hour), I'm a jeans and t-shirt fag. Witty, off-colour tshirts, sure, but t-shirt nonetheless. Perhaps it's because I have to dress in corporate stooge-wear every day - This is a constant struggle, as I have to find the balance between "business procasual" and trying to breathe life into the doldrums of grey cubicle land with some choice-coloured Italian fabrics or a highly textured belt and shoe combination.

Some of my best fashion exercises are completely wasted because I am unable to take a decent self-portrait while at work. Why?

I'll tell you why.

Fucking flourescent lighting.

It's a simple enough concept - when electrons get really excited, the shift in orbital can release energy in the form of a light photon. Sometimes, this happens by making things hot (sort of like incandenscent bulbs or this guy) - In flourescent tubes, there's some poison (mercury), some inert gas (like a slowly savoured Santa Fe burrito), some phosphor (like old urine in the Wesbury bathroom), and the electrode shit. When you flip the switch, electrons do this massive Conga line from one end of the tube to the other, getting some buttplay from mercury as they rub up against it - Much like you or I would be excited, these atoms get all frisky, escalating through energy levels - Once the, uh, action, is over, a light photon shoots off. You'd think this would be the money shot we're looking for, but nay, these photons are far too sophisitcated for you to see - they're ultraviolet (not at all like that Milla Jovovich disaster).

So these happy light photons whack off (heh) the phosphor in the tube -which in turn changes energy and emits some fucking odious light.

And this is where I get mad. I would never go to a bar where a bartender does not know how to make a proper Manhattan and order said improperly-made Manhattan over and over again - But these lights - these horrible, horrible lights - Every day, millions of us are forced into cuboidal hellzones where these argon/mercy/phosphorus gangbang tubes loom overhead, not just emitting their foul light that washes out skin and makes things even more boring than they already are, but they put them in DROP CEILINGS.

The whole thing is a fucking affront to the very delicacy of my fucking nature.

I walk out of my condo into the morning sunlight, catch my reflection in a car window, and think - yes, you have successfuly integrated the blue understriping of your shirt with the white pebbling of this tie, and the heathering on those pants - It all works, and you are a better person for it.

Then, I get in to my office and look at myself in a mirror, and I feel like I've been hit by a truck - a very, very ugly truck. Everything looks green, my pebble-texture has become a sort of muted flat design reminscent of a row of staples to be loaded in a Swingline, my carefully tanned skin no longer golden but rather sallow, any tinge of red from the night before now suddenly front and center in my eyes.

I ask you, lightbulb manufacturers of the world, what the fuck is wrong with you?

No one wants to feel like you are making us look. So just stop it, ok?

Thanks.