The Starry Night

One of the things I have always loved about my farm is walking down the road on one of those crisp clear nights and looking up at the stars.  The corn is this black silence that blocks out the world like cathedral walls and the night sky spews the Milky Way overhead. 

Then I went to Togo.  Now the night sky here is boring.  Well, less interesting than it used to be.

The stars here seem bland.  More familiar, because I can pick out the constellations in their "normal" places, but bland.  Stars hang low in the rural west African sky.  Drops of liquid crystal on a black satin fabric.  Some glint yellow, others blue, or brown.  Some are big, bold. and bright.  The other stars around them seem to cower away.  Some twinkle.  Others glare.  The Milky Way is a phenomenon rather than a suggestion; a glowing swath arcing across the sky.  There is one star that always reminded me of D's eyes.  They have the same azure tint.  I was curious, so I looked it up in a star book one night.  It is Sirius.  It usually hangs just over the top of Mount Bassar.

The Togo night sky is entertaining to watch.  I used to sit out in a chair when I first got to Nampoch and stare up for hours.  This was before I got my nook.  Anyway, one night I saw this object sail across the sky from one horizon to the other.  Perfectly straight line.  I have no idea what it was.  Maybe a satellite or the International Space Station.  I looked for it for the next 2+ years, never found it again until maybe a month before I COSed.  Then I timed it and realized it always passed overhead about 19h45 every night.  That took a bit of the mystery out of it, but it was still fun to watch.

Then there were shooting stars.  One of the first ones I saw was in Kouka.  Well I was in Kouka.  I was buying dinner one evening before catching a zed home when something caught my eye.  My thought process went something like this "holy shit! fireworks! oooo - oh wait, this is Togo.  And that is a meteor." 

The second shooting star I saw was memorable because it was almost the harbinger of my death.  Kader and I were motoing to Kara one night on our way back from a meeting up north.  We were going up through the mountain pass between Niamtougou and Kante, up and around a curve.  I was star gazing and spacing out because my iPod had died.  I saw a massive shooting star and looked down to say something to Kader about it when he jerked the moto over to avoid another moto coming flying toward us around the curve.  In our lane.  With no headlight.  We were going maybe 40 kph at the time, the other guy was doing an easy 60.  Kader was furious.  I still have no idea how he managed to see the other moto on the dark road and swerve in time.  But he did. 

Sometimes here, when the moon is full I walk down the road and I can see my shadow on the road, or on the corn.  In Togo sometimes the moon was so bright you can walk without much need for a flashlight.  If you are really adventurous and think you can spot a viper in your path with your cat-like vision.  In Harmattan the moon looks dusty brown, or blood red.  Occasionally I would watch the moon rise over evening thunderstorms.  Watching lightening and thunderheads glowing like alien spaceships in the moonlight is really cool. 

One of the most surreal moments I had in Togo was in 2011.  I was at a funeral dance in Kpolabol.  We stayed late and the moon rose over the dancers.  Huge and full.  It shown through the branches of a skeletal tree as dust from the dance drifted over it like a dusty shroud.   Then kids got a kick out of watching me try to take a picture of it. 

5656 Miles Away

It is 0219 and there is a hole in my chest that mirrors the darkness coming in my window.

I am laying in bed.  I was hungry before I went to bed, so I had a snack from the refrigerator.  The fan in my window is blowing cool night air and white noise across my back.  There are no bugs in my room. My body is clean of parasites and prophylaxis.  I just brushed my teeth with running water.  The bathroom is about 14 steps away.  This computer links me to the world with a couple of mouse clicks.  Earlier I skyped with D.  It always cheers me up to see her face. My cat just brought me a toy to play with.  This is my reality here. 5656 miles away, in Nampoch, this is reality for no one.

I am living better than most of the rest of world and better than like 90%+ of humanity has lived.  Ever. 

In Togo right now it is early morning.  Dawn has passed about 45 minutes ago.  The sun is burning away the last of the night mist.  Ada is probably sweeping the compound or heating water for showering.  Tefoni is sitting under the neem tree trying to wake up.  Petite is walking around talking to people, or on his way to farm. Same people, different lives.   

 Tonight we drove 40 miles to eat sushi.  Then we picked my parents up from the airport.  They woke up this morning in Paris.  It is 4198 miles between Paris and Ladoga.  God only knows where the sushi came from. Do you realize how crazy that is?

I just realized that here dust is soft fluffy grey stuff.  In Togo dust is redgreybrown grit that walks in your house and flips you off as it sits down and spits on your floor. 

I can skype on my new iphone.  That is cool.

The other day I went to go cut down a dead tree in my parents' yard.  I dug the chainsaw out of the shed and went out there.  Then I realized I could feel the breeze over my toes.  I dont have the balls to use a chainsaw in flipflops like Togolese. 

Life here is so easy and convenient that many of problems that people have are just disruptions of that ease rather than anything real. 

Nampoch is 9 degrees above the equator, Ladoga  is 39.  That explains a few things I guess. 

It hasnt rained here for maybe 10 days.  I did not think anything of this until someone mentioned it tonight. 

A Post of Milestones

Tonight I will take my last doxycycline pill.  Tomorrow will be the first day since September 17ish 2010 that I haven't taken one.  Its kind of weird.  Hopefully all the malaria has been booted out of my system.

Another milestone--  this blog, dear readers, passed 10,000 page views last week sometime.  Thanks to you all for taking the time to peruse my sometimes lucid ramblings about my life in Togo, and beyond.

Monday I caved and bought a new iPhone 5 from the Apple store near D's house.  I got a kit for it the other day, so, once again, I am connected.  Its funny, getting a phone here feels like when we got phones for the first time in Togo.  Then it was like "oh my god i am connected to people again."  Here it is like "oh my god I can talk to other RPVCs (and the student loan place) again."

Anyway, since I have read about 50 such comparisons in the past 3 weeks (the galaxy 4? ugh) I decided to compare my iPhone with my Nokia that was in my pocket when I flew out of Lome. 

~Screen: iPhone- color, touchscreen, 4 inches.  Nokia- sort of color, not touchscreen, maybe 1/2 inch. Advantage- iPhone
~Memory: iPhone- 16 gigabytes.  Nokia- some?  Advantage- iPhone
~Camera:  iPhone- yes. Nokia- no.  Advantage- tie (due to apathy.  except when my little sister took a pic of herself screaming and made it my background this afternoon.  now my iPhone looks possessed. so slight iPhone advantage) 
~Battery life: iPhone- 7 hours. Nokia- 7 days.  Advantage- Nokia
~Apps:  iPhone- thousands once you figure out how to install them.  Nokia- none, except solitare.  Which saved my sanity.  Advantage- Nokia
~Texting: iPhone- gorgeous touchscreen and cool clicky noise.  Nokia-  t9.  I miss t9 so much!  (it completes the word for you.  I could write a book using t9 with one thumb riding on a moto).  Advantage- Nokia
~Phonebook:  iPhone- all contacts are blah blah blah it took me half an hour.  Nokia- its in French. Advantage- tie
~Flashlight: iPhone- download app, push buttons= awkward  Nokia-2 clicks= flashlight that is just the right size to put in your mouth, or tuck under your jaw when you're trying to take a piss at 3 am or make dinner or look for snakes/bugs/mice/scorpions/your glasses/malaria meds.  Advantage- Nokia
~Size:  iPhone- feels like I have a have an armored thigh when its in my pocket.  Nokia- feels comforting.  Advantage- Nokia
~Facebook/email:  iPhone- yes. Nokia- no.  Advantage- I can't decide

~overall winner: Nokia

~In summary, I feel less naked when I go outside now with a phone in my pocket.  Ok, the flashlight was the deal breaker.  I could not fully accept my iPhone as a useful part of my life until I figured out how to make it a flashlight.  I felt naked without one.  I feel weird with email and Facebook at my fingertips all day.  Plus, my sister had to show me how to use my iPhone.  What the hell is iMessage? or Facetime? My Nokia was just so little and useful.  So it goes.

I've developed this problem here in the US.  I get carsick easily.  I NEVER got carsick in Togo.  Even crammed in a van with 20 other people or stuck in the back of a crowded bus.  But here, ugh.  I think it has to do with the lack of airflow or something.  Stuffiness gets to me now.  I am not used to it.  When I took the Megabus from Detroit to Chicago I had to buy dramamine cause I felt like crap.  Then I spent the rest of the trip drooling on my self.

It has been so cold here.  Seriously.  Anything below 70 sends me looking for a hoodie

My cats have gotten reacquainted with me again.  One comes and sleeps with me when I go to bed.  The other one sleeps with me in the morning. 

An elderly gentleman called me up the other day, said he saw the article about me in the local paper a couple weeks ago, and asked if he could buy me lunch.  I said sure, cause I never turn down free food, and so we met up today.  He was a PVC in Ghana- 1962-64.  He was a teacher in Kumasi.  He was sort of surprised when I was like "oh yeah, I was just there."  But it was neat talking to him.  He had a hard time wrapping his mind around cell phones.  Peace Corps has really changed in the last 50 years.  RPVCs have this weird mentality, or mindset, that Ive had a hard time figuring it out.  Like the little bit of the world in which she happens to find herself at that precise moment is sitting in the palm of her hand for her to marvel at or ignore. 

My sister and I really connected this afternoon over spider stories from 2 continents.  I think that my Night of the Camel Spiders won though. 

With D in the D

I have realized that I do not know how to talk to people here anymore.  I may have mentioned this before, but now I know why.  I am not used to talking to someone who is a complete stranger.  In Togo, I met few strangers.  A fellow PCV isn't a stranger, even if you have never met her before.  You have a lot in common before you open your mouth to say hi, you can make all kinds of assumptions and be pretty close to right on most of them.  Since I am obviously not west African, Togolese made all kinds of assumptions about me, and were usually fairly right.  Unless they thought I was French.  The point being that there were all sorts of bases for conversation and small talk.  Stuff like "how is your health? and your family? and the work? where are you from? what is the weather like there? do you have children?" etc.  Even the most formulaic conversations, of which west Africans have many because they are polite,  impart a lot of information and let you get a sense of the person you are talking to, even if its in passing.  Here though, I cant even order a coffee without feeling completely at a loss for what to say.  "Do I ask how he is? Do I make some comment about something even though he will think I am freakin' weird?" etc. I know that societal norms here dictate that it is not necessary for me to ask "how's it going" to the waitress. But dammit, what am I suppose to say?   There is this empty silence embracing many of my casual interactions here that leaves my mouth hanging open in a void.  I went from a society of polite, albeit formulaic, social interactions to a society of strangers where I am an individual entity ricocheting through a formless galaxy.   

Another thing that is weird about being back in the US is that I can hold my girlfriend's hand in public.  West Africans arent very big on public displays of affection.  Which I can definitely empathize with.  Last week D and I were going to Kroger's and I grabbed her hand.  Then we both realized we were holding hands for an extended period of time in public.  For probably the first time ever.  It was weird, but in a good way. 

There are more huge, abandoned buildings in Detroit than there are huge, occupied buildings in Lome I think.

Yes, ok, fine universe, a smart phone would make my life, in this hyper-connected yet totally atomized social reality that is the US, much easier.  Especially when one is trying to meet up with one's friend and one does not have a phone, despite that fact that this planned rendezvous was set up entirely on Facebook without an exchange of actual phone numbers that would have made it possible for one's girlfriend to use her flip, non-smart, phone to call the friend in the event of a car breakdown, which actually happened. 

On the other hand, D's parents' car is now like a Togolese vehicle, whether there is a key in the ignition is totally superfluous to the car's function.

Habits that I developed in Togo that I still do here: I still wash my feet before bed.  Religiously.  I do the two handed wave even though this causes many peoples' eyes to cross.  I do not pass things or give things to people with my left hand.  Doing so makes me internally cringe.

This might just be me, but why the hell is there a professional football team in the US called the "Redskins"?  Seriously?  What is this, the 1870s or some shitty John Wayne movie?  Use that term in any other setting and you would (rightly) be called a racist idiot, but because it is the name of an NFL team it is somehow ok?

Automatic lawn watering systems are evil.  Non-automatic ones are only slightly less evil.  Dumping potable water on the ground, which is all watering your yard does, is obscene.

On the other hand, watching live, if only pre-season, football for the first time in 3 years was amazing.

Getting recultured

I am writing this on the bus from Chicago to Detroit.  Because I can.  The difference between this and my last bus ride is the difference one finds between worlds.  Just thinking about my last bus ride triggers my incipient claustrophobia and makes me want to climb walls.

Chicago is awesome. As always.  D and I spent about 5 hours yesterday getting our culture on in the Art Institute of Chicago.  There I learned that I need to reacquire the ability to stand patiently in line . . . instead of walking up and taking whatever I am after . . . and shoving my way through people to do it. This tends to make Americans uncomfortable.

I like looking at art, especially after not seeing much of it for three years.  D and I's tastes are pretty similar, although she has less of a tolerance for modern and abstract art than I do, so that is helpful.  We spent a lot of time looking at Impressionism and early modern European/American art.  It is nice to go to an art museum with a lovely lady on one's arm- when the pictures get boring, you can look at her instead. 

Monet blows my mind.  I get lost in his colors. But the one piece of art that I can think of that provokes an emotional response in me besides "wow, thats pretty cool" is Van Gogh's "Portrait of the Artist, 1887."  It looks like his face is popping out of the canvas and is about to take a shot of absinthe while lashing me with a tortured stare. 

There were some French tourists in the museum.  I heard one girl ask her mom why there were so many French artworks in an American museum. Not really, but I would have asked that if I were her.

I dont care what anyone says, I love the public transport in Chicago.  Cars in cities are so over-rated.

 My great-aunt died last Tuesday.  She is permanently 92.  My mom and I went to see her on Monday.  She seemed sleepy, but she read an article about me in the newspaper.  Then we left to let her rest.

The funeral was Saturday morning.  I appreciated the solemnity of the occasion, and the emphasis on "celebrating" my great-aunt's life, but celebration does not happen in a somber church where silence is golden and everyone is dressed in black and sadness.  The funeral home guys in charge of the ceremonies were professional and courteous.  And resembled porceline dolls treating the occasion like a glass snowflake in which a sneeze would shatter the occasion a million jagged shards of emotional trauma.  The whole ceremony had a theatrical feel to it in which ritual mourning was more important than any sort of spontaneous expressions of joy.  As in we were expected to feel a certain way, and the service was engineered to produce that feeling.  The result was a fragile performance of mourning that seemed more designed for the casual funeral attendees than for us, the family.  A true celebration is supposed to joyous, not necessarily happy.  Grief certainly has a place in a celebration that is joyous, much like you cannot have light without dark. This point of view has probably been influenced by all the funerals I attended in Togo, where partying in memory of the departed was the order of the day.  And in which the departed was still thought to be hanging around. 

I was one of the pallbearers.  I had this urge to suggest we do like the Konkumba do and put the coffin on our heads and go dancing around the block with it.  With beer.   But I did not want to shock the funeral guys. The best part about my great-aunt's funeral is that she had requested the "Hallelujah Chorus" to be played when the coffin was taken out.  That's more like how it should be.

Since my great-aunt was buried in my mom's ancestral cemetery, my dad and I dug the grave Friday morning. D came and helped supervise.   She and my dad shouted directions as I ran the backhoe.  I have now helped dig grave on 2 continents.

I wore actual shoes for the funeral. For the first time since January, 2011.  I was pleasantly surprised to find that my suit still fit. 

The only Bible verse I want read at my funeral is Genesis 6:4 because the world is a strange and wonderful place. 

D and I went out to dinner with my friend Laura and her boyfriend Eric the other night.  It was good to see them.  3 years seems like a long time, but, with some people, it doesnt seem like any time has passed at all.  We had amazing chinese food too.

I still do not have a phone. This is the longest I have gone without owning a cell phone since I first got one when I was like 18.  I want a new iphone, but I want to buy one that is unlocked so that I can use it overseas.  Unfortunately, new, unlocked iphones are super expensive without the discount you get when you sign an annual contract.  I do not want to do this because, when I joined Peace Corps, I had to pay a bunch of cancellation charges.  All this stuff with cell phone contracts and locked phones is bullshit.  I feel like I have to chose between a bunch of noxious squid who are trying to lure me into reach of their toxic tentacles in order to suck out bits of my soul.  I miss Togo where I can buy a phone and a sim card in like 5 minutes and start talking.  I guess maybe I am spoiled, but I don't feel like tying myself to some corporation again.

All the new styles here are kind of amazing.  In Chicago I saw a lot of new car models that I did not recognize.  New phones.  Different clothing lengths and combinations.  I was puzzling over a guy's clothes on the L when D pointed out to me that we were in Boystown.  I took a picture for a woman at the AIC with her phone and the picture looked as good as my camera could do.  Crazy.

Going Quietly Crazy

This is my first blog post from my new computer.  It is a 13-inch Macbook pro.   Very pretty.  The screen is enormous compared to my netbook.  I get lost looking at it sometimes. 

Yesterday I took my meds for for schistosomiasis.  Apparently the side effects include feeling you were shat out of a large dinosaur.  That is a day of my life I am not getting back.  I had a list of things I was going to do.  Instead I ate cookies and ice cream, played video games, and tried not to move.  I had a weird sensation in my mouth that made everything taste like it was made out of cardboard, hence the diet of cookies.  Not that I need an excuse for that.  I went outside in the evening to go for a stroll around the estate.  The estate started spinning so I went back inside and read comic books.  At least I don't have blood flukes anymore.

One of the hard things about crossing cultures is that one gets lost in reality.  Or rather, the fabric of reality suddenly blooms so kaleidoscopic that it seems some existential veil is shredding.  I had this problem a lot in Togo; I have blogged about it frequently.  A fetish ceremony, a funeral, a moto ride, a conversation at a tchapka stand, any point where I was doing or seeing something so beyond the pale of my American cultural experience as to render it almost impossible to describe to you my gentle audience.  The same happens here.  Like watching a crop dusting plane buzzing mere meters over corn fields and dodging trees is an experience that most Togolese could hardly begin to imagine.  Nor is walking into a supermarket where the produce of the world is literally at your fingertips, and conveniently packaged in barrels of crude oil.  It is not so much the experience itself that renders the world suddenly strange, but rather the intimate knowledge that somewhere, on this same earth, there are people who can only begin to imagine what you are experiencing. I have a foot on both the near and far shores.

Drinking fountains are amazing.  You have no idea.  Water everywhere that is 99% likely to not make you spend the next 2 days shitting yourself is a miracle.  Why drinking fountains are right next to vending machines selling bottled water, I have no idea. 

It has been cloudy and rainy here for two days.  And cold, but that is beside the point.  I felt myself going quietly crazy yesterday when I thought about doing my laundry and I could not figure out why.  Then I realized that its because there was no sun to dry my clothes.  Then this morning I woke up, looked outside, and felt sad.  Now I have come to realize that I am like a little flower, I need a bit sunshine to make me bloom.   Thanks Africa.

I have been congratulating myself on how well I am re-adjusting to life in the US.  Then I realized that I rarely leave my parents' farm.

I love my new computer, but something about it was making me quietly crazy.  Then I changed the clock to 24 hour time and felt much better.

Yes, I spend a lot of time here going quietly crazy.  Or maybe its just a constant state of being.

Stuff has this weird way of working out.  My great aunt died yesterday.  She was 92.  In my original returning-from-the-Peace-Corps plans I would have been in the process of leaving Togo right now, and getting back to the States on Aug 2.  This way I got to see her twice before she died. 
 I finally did it.  I went grocery shopping with my mom in a supermarket.  I walked in and parts of my brain excused themselves and crawled under the bed.  I do not know which part freaked me out more, the produce section or the meat section.   I mean, the sheer quantity of options that the average American has for feeding herself is beyond baffling.   Crisp lettuce dripping water, ready-to-eat fruit oozing its syrupy guts all over the insides of plastic containers,  sterile looking egg plant glowering from a shelf, amputated king crab legs waving dismally from a bed of ice, yards of coolers stuffed with meat products at least 2 degrees separated from their animals of origin, etc. While my mom shopped I amused myself by looking at the "country of origin" stickers on things.  Pineapple from Chile (not as good as Togo), green beans from Mexico, a plethora of stuff from Guatemala, apples and things from Canada. My mom grabbed mangoes and avocados at the same time.  I felt my eyes crossing.  Neither of these are in season anymore in Togo. 

As fond as I am of refrigeration, you guys do it way to much.  Most fruit tastes better, and is meant to be eaten, at normal temperatures.

My sister ate a mango this morning from the above mentioned shopping expedition.  I tried a bit.  And was depressed. 

Another thing that has been screwing with my head is getting a cell phone.  I currently do not have one.  This is a source of amazement to most people here.  I have the choice between paying a lot for a phone, or paying a lot for an annual contract.  Both of these options can bite me. I want a smartphone, but only because I want a map app. Life here is complicated when one is not part of the system.

I took a phone message yesterday for my dad.  I wrote half of it in french before I realized what I was doing.

For most blog posts I write, I have a working title in mind as I write.  For this post, however, there seems to be a common thread that connects many of my vignettes. Hence the title. 

Finally, much ado about clothes

It is 71 degrees here.  I am cold. 

I saw a status on Facebook a couple of days ago from someone I know who just got back to the States from living in Jerusalem.  It said something to the effect of "people in the US look naked and the produce is huge."

Yesterday I went to the mall with my two lovely little sisters to buy myself some clothes.  Shopping was painful for a variety of reasons.  One of these reasons was, of course, ongoing cultural shock.  One facet of which I am about to write about.

I, dear reader, have been thinking about this post for a couple of years.  I have been hesitant to post it, but now feels like a good time.   On a base level, this post is about boobs.  On a more intellectual level, it is about clothing, standards of dress, and how these are different here than in Togo.

I remember the first time I saw a topless woman in Togo.  It was, I think, September 2010.  We were returning to Gbatope from a training session in Tsevie.  There was a middle-aged woman standing on a streak corner dressed in a skirt and streaks of white voodoo paint.  Her boobs reached to her belly button. For one surreal moment I thought I was in one of those issues of National Geographic from the 1970s that introduces Americans to "exotic" or "tribal" peoples from around the world by showing pictures of their women in various stages of undress. "Boobs! look how different these people are! their women are topless!" Ugh.  Women in southern Togo, or in bigger towns, usually don't go topless.  Then I went to village.

I might have blogged about Togolese dress before, I can't remember. So my apologies if you have read some of this before.  In Nampoch, which is by no means indicative of the rest of Togo since clothing customs tend to change between ethnic groups/regions, peoples' approach to clothes seems to be somewhat lackadaisical, at least at first.  Kids of both sexes are mostly naked, normally, until they are about 3 or 4. Then they gradually graduate to pants, or underwear to us.  Then about age 10 or so they start wearing shirts.  Of course they all have "nice" clothes that they wear when they go to the marche, or when there is a funeral or something.  But, on a daily basis, pre-teen kids dont wear a whole lot.  Once the girls hit puberty, sometimes later depending on the village, they start wearing shirts pretty much constantly.  Adha, for example, always wears shirts during the day.  At night, she may or may not.  When women give birth, however, they are free to do whatever they want.  Ntido was fairly careful about wearing shirts around me until she had Alix, then she didnt care anymore.  I could not count, in a given day, how many times I saw a well-dressed woman breast feeding a baby in a car, in the marche, along the road, where ever. Just "boom" boob and happy, usually, kid.  This, I think, is a much healthier, not to mention smarter, more natural, and less puritanical, approach to breast feeding than here.  But I digress.

Anyway, thus, I grew accustom to seeing my host mom's  boobs all day. Every day.  If she was going out, she would dress up.  If she was hanging out at home, topless.  The same with most of my neighbors.  I would be sitting on my porch reading a book, without a shirt, and some woman would come over in a skirt.  No problem. I would go visit Kodjo and his wife would be hanging out in a skirt.  This is not to say that people in Nampoch are somehow immodest.  Quit the opposite.  Women, and men, may spend most of their leisure time topless, but they always wear pants/skirts. And they Always dress well when they go out.

Compared to this, Americans, in public at least, generally look like they are naked. 

If my host mom goes to the marche, or anywhere, she dresses up.  She puts on her best clothes.  She gets her purse and wears her shoes.  She might pull out a boob to feed her child, but that is natural and not immodest. Togolese certainly see it that way.  Here, I still do a double-take when my sister goes to work wearing short shorts.  Or when I am in the mall and I see some guy with his shirt ripped down the sides to his waist.  Petit would wear a shirt like that to the field, never in public.  Togolese women wear shorts like that as underwear. 

I think the discontinuity, for me at least, rests in the fact Togolese care a lot more about their appearance in public than Americans do, yet are more relaxed about the human body in general.  It is the opposite here.  "Casual" dress has become a point of pride bordering on a quasi- "right" in which "comfort" equals strategically placed "less."  It is, at least to me, a lot simpler to take the Togolese approach- to dress well, to have pride in what you are wearing, and, by doing so, respecting both yourself and people around you.  But that is just me.   

In the same vein, shopping sucks.  I have not had to worry about matching.  Or styles. Or fashion.  Or what guys my age wear now for 3 years.  Styles have passed me by.  And what the hell is with all the tshirts having some kind of advertising on them now?  I want to wear a shirt, not be some bullshit billboard for some cooperation.  I miss being in Togo where I can throw clothes on and be "well dressed" as long as what I am wearing is clean and in good repair.  The really funny thing is that all these fashions now will be there in a couple of years.  Tommy jeans look really good after a season in the fields.