Fashion

I love how, no mat­ter what, teenagers do their job of find­ing a way to offend the rest of the world with fash­ion – and with many other things as well, but it starts with the clothes. It is one of my favorite traits. They must do this or die. I know, hav­ing been one, hav­ing done my job with hair down my back, with checker­board Vans and with being part of a gen­er­a­tion to use the word dude in every sin­gle sentence.

A 17 year old boy/man is sit­ting on the exam table lis­ten­ing to me talk about how we have to clean out his colon before we do surgery. He made the mis­take of bring­ing his girl­friend who is look­ing blanker as the con­ver­sa­tion gets real-er, if you know what I mean.

Of course when I go to exam­ine him he has the CK boxer briefs. I know this because I see mostly all of them – the briefs. Some­where around mid-femur I encounter his pants which, if stood them next to him would look like weird hand me downs from a half-sized clown. They are short but they hit cor­rectly at the heel of the shoe because they are worn low, way low. I am as hip as the next guy, prob­a­bly more. When the ipod plays in the OR I can name any­one from the Shins to the Beastie Boys. I have a tat­too and I got it just over a year ago (my poor par­ents had to see that one). I read Wired. This low­boy pants thing though, I don’t get, even though I was part of the gen­er­a­tion in the 70’s that wore low rid­ing bell bot­toms. This is dif­fer­ent, because of the addi­tion of the of boxer briefs. I guess with­out the under­wear we would be get­ting a real look at twigs and berries so it is a mercy, but a weird one. Still, in all things, some­thing to be thank­ful for…