Monday, October 11, 2004

Rockin' Reputation

Some of you may be asking, "Antonio, as an advocate of the Rock N Roll 2L lifestyle how should I express myself while still maintaining my 'professional reputation'?"
This is tough. As I'm sure you were told a hundred times at orientation and a bunch more since, your "professional reputation" starts today. I heard this and thought, well my rock n roll life is completely separate from my law school life and neither will be affected by the other. But the fact is that people at law school will be more likely to judge you as weird for listening to Black Flag than they will for wearing khaki baseball caps and playing beer pong with your "Bros". This makes no sense to me, but that's life. Also, law school financing took a big bite out of my scenstering. I no longer had the means to spend every night at the clubs, pay covers, run up outrageous bar bills, and still maintain my record habit.
So it's a question of balance, a two part test of maintaining the inner rocker against a budget and no time in an extremely image conscious environment.
My answer is called the Talking Heads method. Basically it means buy four or five cool t shirts, like these ones, and wear them under collared shirts your mom bought you at Ross the last time you were at home. You can wear a beat up pair of Chuck Taylors and mismatch your socks. It's easy b/c you won't have time to do laundry so the only socks you'll have will be an old argyle sock from when you thought Ducky from Pretty in Pink was the look to go for and a black sock that got stuck in your pant leg. Old Chuck Taylors just seem to undig themselves from my closet when I run out of shoes. Everyone else is in the same boat. Old laundry and beat up shoes are the norm after the first three weeks of school. You now fit right in, but the instance class is out on Friday and you head out to catch Mr. Airplane Man, you can remove your Ross shirt to reveal that sassy (It's sassy b/c it has the right Ramones on it instead of that piece of Urban Outfitters [I was excited when I saw all these kids with Ramones shirts, but wondered why they all had that line up and none of them had Tommy or Richie on them and then I found out about Urban Outfitters selling them, not cool] Ramones T shirt. There is nothing sassy about Markie.) which perfectly matches your beat up Chucks and mismatched socks.
The rest of the look is just as easy to cultivate. The pasty complexion will develop on its own after hours in the library. The fluorescent light at your study cube isn't all that different from light diffused through cigarette smoke. The haggard "spent all night at the club" look intensifies with a diet of ramen noodles and totinos frozen pizza and late nights of researching the finer points of Title VII, Prior Restraint, or whatever your favorite doctrine is. Extra research and all nighters will score you bonus David Byrne points. Rock On.

1 Comments:

Blogger La Madre said...

dear lord you are hilarious. record habit...hehe.

5:17 AM  

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