With a tin hat for overseas

[austin_dern]

One little chore to be finished before I move out west has been to get a decent suit, something I could wear to a job interview or to get married. I had a pretty nice one, got for my sister's wedding, but that was also one I got several months before starting my massive weight-loss program. I imagine it's possible to tailor something down for the dropping of a hundred pounds, but, there's no way that makes any sense. So I went to the Freehold Raceway Mall, to see if there was a suitable shop around --- there would be; I'd got that suit at Nordstrom's, and a blazer I used for an interview at Macy's --- and whether we could find something I looked decent in. My mother was there, of course, so that I'd have someone who understands how clothes work there to tell me when I was doing something wrong.

Lord & Taylor didn't have any suits we saw that looked particularly appealing (although some looked like they'd be all right), so we started working up the mall and oh, there's the Joseph A Bank shop right next to it. Why not stop in and see if there's anything? I told the clerk that I was looking for a suit presentable for job interviews, which really is the design goal here: I may be wearing it to marry in, but odds are the majority of its uses are going to be for this more general purpose. However, it did produce some confusion later when the clerk asked about how something looked and my mother mentioned the color that the bride will be wearing. Maybe it would've been less confusing the explain the whole thing right away, but it seemed like ``I'm looking for something for a job interview'' is the expected sort of answer to what kind I'm looking for; ``I'm looking for a suit for an informal wedding, that I can also use for normal wear'' would have started us off confused.

There wasn't anything in a single suit that would fit me, of course, but I'm comfortable with mixed pieces. We also quickly determined that pleated pants are not a good look on me, as they make me look like one of those silent movie stars trying to rip off the Little Tramp. But we found a couple pieces that fit together in remarkably short order. All the better, the store was holding a buy-one-get-two-free suits sale. This would enormously over-supply me on suits, but, they could process it as though an online order (which they had to to get pants in the correct size for me anyway) and so just take two-thirds off the price. The suit still costs more than the rest of my wardrobe, but it's not as enormously more expensive than it could have been.

Remarkably, all this took under an hour to buy. I'm not noted for making fast decisions, but I suppose at some point I figured that I don't actually need to have the absolutely perfect suit, just, one in which I look good enough. Meeting a threshold is a much simpler problem than optimizing, after all. And so now I just need to get it fitted.

Trivia: The ``Wolf Trap'', designed originally around 1958-60 by Wolf Vishniac, was a device for remotely detecting microorganisms, based a growth chamber, an acidity detector, and a light sensor detecting differences in the culture medium. While it was omitted from the Viking Program, Vishniac used it to find life in remote, believed-sterile Antarctic valleys before he slipped and fell to his death in Antarctica's Asgard Mountains. Source: On Mars: Exploration Of The Red Planet 1958 - 1978, Edward Clinton Ezell, Linda Neuman Ezell. NASA SP-4212.

Currently Reading: Changing Channels: America In TV Guide, Glenn C Altschuler, David I Grossvogel.

PS: Why A Line Doesn't Have An Equation ... it's for the sort of reasons you'd expect to as the carefully-worded alibi Slylock Fox debunks, actually, although I remember it turning up for real as one of the resolutions to a disappointing Asimov Black Widowers story.

Comments

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

My currents suit's about 10 years old, and also was for job-searching principally; it's seen most of its use at weddings, funerals, and Anthrocon Board Meetings, of which the latter outnumbers the first two combined. I've also got a sport coat around that was a questionable purchase for the 2006 Preakness[*1], as well as a suit jacket of my grandfather's that's now a better fit, though the pants were still far too skinny to justify taking that, too.

Now you've just got to get the appropriate tie...

[*1] The 'recommended dress code' turned out to be followed by almost no one; it was too warm to wear it but for entering and leaving; and it's kind of ugly and I don't know why I picked that particular sport coat out. Perhaps out of price and desperation.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Actually, I have a tie also. We got a shirt and a tie at the same time, which seemed wise to me as it let my mother approve things. We also managed to send a photo of the tie to bunny_hugger, which was more complicated an endeavor than it should have been (well, we were going through my mother's phone) but let her at least acknowledge the selection. I was having trouble describing the pattern (``paisley'').

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

Ahh, that sounds like a wise plan for co-ordination.

[bunny-hugger.livejournal.com]

I can't say I actually have a terribly good idea what it looks like because I think the colors that came through were not at all true. I described it back to Austin and we clearly didn't think it was the same color. (Also, I think they'd already bought it by the time this happened? But I might be wrong.) It honestly doesn't matter much to me as long as you wear a non-embarrassing tie.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

You saw it as a deeper red than it actually appears. I suspect the color balance was off. But the principle is a good idea.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

It's a good enough idea, although we ended up out of synch because we didn't think to make sure we'd both be available at the same time.