Casual Friday

I wear a suit almost every day. I don’t mind. It’s just part of the deal. I actually have a bunch of suits because I worked at a men's fashion magazine for 6 years and I used to get a deal on suits, so I figure, what the hell, I got em, why not wear em. Second, a suit is a good weight control monitor. If your jeans start to get tight because you spend your nights eating pretzels and ice cream and Samoas and watching baseball, well, no big deal, you go buy another pair of jeans. I have about 50 pairs of jeans in a variety of waste sizes, from “damn, you look fine today sir” all the way up to “maybe we could use your fat ass to plug up that oil leak in the gulf”. But when your suits start to get tight, that’s serious. I can’t just run out and buy a new suit every time I gain 10 pounds, so I don’t mind the suits because they keep me from going off the deep end. So I wear a suit every day. Every day except Friday, because as old fashioned and lame as it sounds, I believe in casual Fridays. It’s more of a personal rule, because I work in publishing and the publishing world could give a shit about suits and Fridays. In publishing, you show up at 10, work until they turn off the AC in the building, and shaving and socks are optional. I could wear spongebob pajama bottoms (yes, I own those) and wife beaters to work and most people wouldn’t notice. I choose to wear a suit. But not on Fridays.

And as you can see in this picture, I am wearing a suit, and as you can also see from the time stamp of this post, it is Friday. You may also have noticed that I'm sporting my eff-you beard today, which is my silent yet powerful protest against the man. And the reason Im wearing a suit on a Friday, and sporting my eff-you beard is that some upper management yahoo whose pay grade is way above mine decided to schedule a get-to-know-you dinner tonight, on a Friday. A summer Friday. So on a Friday when 99 percent of the people in the office are going to leave around 2:30 in the afternoon, I will be sitting at my desk with my thumb up my ass in a suit waiting to have dinner. It also means that on a day that I usually enjoy riding to work with my feet up ( an admitted dick move) in my khaki pants, black converse chucks and an untucked dress shirt that I’ve already worn 3 times in the past 2 weeks, I instead have to sit up straight in my effing suit and be respectable. But that’s not the best part. You want to know the best part? The best part is we’re having dinner at the train station. So while I’m sitting there in my suit on a steamy effing New York Summer Friday night eating a dinner I really don’t give a shit about, I get to watch everyone else go home for the weekend. Somewhere, someone is laughing about this. Maybe it’s you. Have a good weekend everyone...