While a very energetic man with gray stubble and a black necktie was jumping around on stage and throwing his mic stand around, I was distracted by the guy hugging his girlfriend a few feet in front of me. He sort of looked the way you'd expect a guy temporally transported from the 90's would dress. He wore a black t-shirt and jeans and he accessorized with a backwards black golf cap and a pair or purple-tinted sunglasses. He also had a shaved head. To my eye, this seemed to be a clear case of a girlfriend sculpting her boyfriend into some ridiculous way that she thinks he ought to look, a la a Ken doll. It probably started with the wearing of the all black: "You look really good in black," says the girlfriend one day. Then she encourages him to shave his head, for some reason on which I won't even hypothesize. Eventually the cap then sunglasses entered the picture. Now hopefully, this event was solely the product of shopping together, since I'm pretty sure a guy buying these items on his own is a mortal sin. Given that this really is an instance of sculpting, I have to wonder how long a process like this takes. Six months? A few weeks? Several years? Since the whole get up fits roughly into a short time period fashion-wise, this implies it happened on a shorter time scale. On the other hand, this could be a much slower process if the girlfriend (who was dressed relatively normally, incidentally) is perversely using her boyfriend as a nostalgia doll for the 1990's. If the process is slow, then I have relatively little to worry about: if I'm ever in the position to be sculpted, by the time the girl is done with me I'll be too old to care what I look like in public. On the other hand, if it's a short-term process I need to be ever vigilant that I might not become the laughing stock of passers by.
I have no audience, and I have no motivation to write things down for myself in a place where anyone can read it. So why do I have a blog? I know many of you out there have wanted to know the true story behind "The Observer's Blog," and so I will finally tell you. Two dudes I was a summer intern with encouraged me to join their blog ring. I didn't know what I'd do with such a thing, but peer pressure eventually won me over. Not exactly "VH1 Driven" material, I know. If only I had some direction, maybe the life would come back (was it ever there?) into the blog. Maybe a name change. The name could be something super-witty and chuckle-inducing and not at all geeky. Ideally I'd get a ghostwriter to write my blog for me, and I know who I want.