April 11, 2018. I’m thinkin’ today’s a special day. Maybe Homelessness Awareness Day. I can’t keep special days straight anymore because there are so many of them that don’t show up on the free calendars I get from vendors. (Oddly, Canadian Boxing Day is noted. I’m not sure if that one has something to do with mixed martial arts or UPS. I guess both are important enough to have a note on calendars.) I’ll have to Google it. I’m a Googler. It’s my go-to ready reference because my brain is full and I refuse to replace memories of my kids’ First Communions with irrelevant factoids.
But I’m pretty sure it’s Homelessness Awareness Day by the silent protesters I saw this morning. I met my wife for breakfast before work and saw some “awareness” protesters; a family (two adults and five kids) sitting in the middle of the restaurant clad in their favorite pajamas and coats. (I assume they kept their coats on because they’re modest and were on public display or maybe they were just chilly.)
I just Googled it. Wear Your Pajamas to Work Day is April 16th. So that’s not it. Yeah, that’s a real day… National Wear Your Pajamas to Work Day. That’s where we are as a culture. There’s a nationally recognized day to wear PJ’s to work.
I have two thoughts on that. One, NO ONE wants to see how I sleep. Aside from the embarrassment of all the pointing and giggling, I’d be arrested if I left my house. And two, why is it that we can celebrate National Wear Your Pajamas to Work Day but not “Christmas?” (You know, because the aforementioned Christian holiday is offensive to a fraction of the population but slobs in PJ’s aren’t?)
I just Googled again. Homelessness Awareness Week is November 10th through 18th 2018. So that’s not it either. It is however; Barbershop Quartet Day, International Louie Louie Day, National Bookmobile Day, National Cheese Fondue Day, National Eight-Track Tape Day, School Librarian’s Day, National Pet Day, Submarine Day, and World Parkinson’s Day. (No kidding. All of those but nothing about National Slovenly Day, Roll Out of Bed Day, or any kind of day that would indicate why I saw an entire family in their PJ’s.)
I’m lucky to be married to a woman that not only has a sense of fashion and decorum, but has the ability to roll out of bed and look put together; like Superman emerging from a phone booth in full superhero attire, complete with perfect hair. I’m sure it’s a carryover from a previous life as a musician, playing ‘til bar close and then springing to life a few short hours later to get to her day job as a Catholic school teacher.
But maybe PJ family was in a hurry. They didn’t look like they were in a hurry but maybe they were. It could be that it was just a family thing: Family Pajama Day. My family had “days.” We had swimming days, when I took the kids to the Aquatic Center on Saturday afternoons and then out for dinner. (But we didn’t wear our swimming suits all day to celebrate.) And it’s not just pajamas. It’s a general societal loss of decorum; one apparent outcome of the anything-goes selfie generation.
It used to be that everyone made an effort to look presentable. That was our statement. Not conformity but recognition that we are part of a civilized society that has aspired to rise above squalor and oppression. What set us apart was an effort to look and be better than the rest, both individually and as a nation. Competition. That competitive verve made us strive for excellence by continually raising the bar.
And then we stopped keeping score.
We’ve now moved from a period of gray suits to the Lenin-grayness of walking-dead conformity; hoodies, pants falling down, blue jeans designed torn and or oil-stained, unkempt cave-dweller grooming, and a palette of body mutilations intended to set off our uniqueness, that in reality add to grayness. What was intended as statements of nonconformity and cultural solidarity has mutated into a lemming-like cascade of societal decay. Show me a millennial in torn jeans, ratty unkempt hair, and a face-full of metal piercings and I’ll tell you their name…. “Unemployable.” Because with their social statement comes a type of selfishness that makes training and workforce assimilation cumbersome, if not impossible.
I don’t know what it will take to break the trend of our cultural pajama party. Maybe it’s time we demand keeping score again… for everything.
You make an important point. Write more about it.
Sloppy has been the in thing for too long. It’s no surprise that a sloppy attitude goes with the attire. The same sloppiness seems to apply to the way we take care of our bodies as well. Don’t want to exercise to stay healthy? No problem! Let yourself go and then blame everyone else as to why your in poor health. Or heaven forbid someone says how bad it is to let yourself go and you can scream at the sky because you’ve been fat shamed.
We do need to keep score again, to excel is not a bad thing. Rebel by excelling