Tag Archive: leather

Ubiquity in leather

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Fri. November 19, 2010

Back in February I was happy to reward myself for hitting a certain milestone on my weight loss journey by purchasing a new leather jacket. Hey, I was happy with it. I mean, it was on sale and it looked good on me. No problem, right? The jacket has particular details and a certain styling to it that I can pick out. Well, slowly over the next few months I was slowly starting to get annoyed. I was seeing my jacket style on a handful of other people. First there was this guy at work. He had the same jacket. No problem because we were on different floors and hardly ran into each other. Still, the fact was that we’d come in some days looking like we coordinated somehow. This isn’t the first time something like this has happened in my workplace. I think week later I saw a dog trainer with his own TV show on television wearing the jacket style two sizes two big for him. Weeks later I saw a weather newscaster on the 24 hour news channel wearing the same jacket. Seriously.

So, thankfully summer rolled around and I could give the jacket a rest. No problem. I could reassess by the time cooler weather rolled around. I was able to avoid wearing the jacket though when I bought a thin fall jacket from Rudsak. I really love this store’s urban style, and how they don’t mass-produce. If you get a piece from there, you know it won’t be everywhere. Anyway, when the leather jacket finally made it back into my daily rotation, I started seeing it even more frequently. One guy on the streetcar had it. I saw one on the subway. I saw it on an older guy in church. I’ve seen it in the grocery store. All of that made me nuts! Just the other day I decided to throw in the towel and seek out a new jacket to swap in as my main leather go to. I ended up going back to Rudsak and ended up getting a new leather jacket. I swear, I love how this jacket looks!

Sorry, it’s hard to take self-photos. The photo doesn’t really do the jacket justice, but yeah, I can rest easy again, yes? I can consider this as a late birthday gift. If I feel good wearing it, then it shows that I made a good choice, right? And I doubt I’ll end up seeing a glut of this jacket out on the street. Right on.

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How I chose the couch

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Wed. August 12, 2009

Just a few words on the couch. Back when I signed the contract and paid out my first chunk of the down payment, my mind immediately started churning out ideas with regard to how I wanted the place to look. For a couch, my mind immediately gravitated toward having a sectional sofa. I even wrote about wanting one about two years ago. Why did I want one? The plain and simple reason was that I enjoyed the idea of having a corner of sorts to curl up in when I wanted a nap. A lot of people kind of scoffed at the idea saying that I basically wouldn’t have the room for it. So, ultimately I just put the thought on the back burner for a long time.

Fast forward now to August 2009. I ventured into Leon’s just with the intent of looking around to see if there was anything that caught my eye. I was helped out by this friendly sales lady who really seemed to have a decent handle on what all the trends are for today’s youth (yeah, I fall under that category, I guess). I told her that I was interested in having a sectional so she showed me the fabric options. They were all kind of large, and really I wasn’t feeling entirely enthused about any of the options. That’s when she convinced me that a sofa would probably be more appropriate. So, we started looking around at those options, but again I didn’t feel that any of the sofas really fit what I had in mind. That’s when I asked to see leather options.

Now, I wasn’t planning on going the leather route at all. When I thought of leather furniture, I always imagined the big puffy things that you tend to sink into. I also imagined that on sweaty days I’d have to peel myself off the couch. Was all kind of gross if you asked me. Well, when she took me over she showed me a nice mini chocolate brown sofa. Well, I sat on it but wasn’t completely sold on it. Then again, compared to all of the fabric couches that one was leaps ahead of the others. I eventually decided to go with that one.

So, afterwards the sales lady started taking me to other parts of the store to see what else she could show me. Just as a matter of circumstance, we ended up in one of the back areas of the store where the decor seemed to be very sleek and contemporary. I ended up seeing a black leather sectional and immediately fell in love with it. It was low slung, relaxing, and taut. It pretty much shattered any conceptions I had about leather furniture; the darn thing was just really comfortable! It just so happened too that its dimensions just fit nicely into the scheme of things. I asked about it and the sales lady said that she was going to show it to me but thought that it might cost a bit more than what I was looking for. Fine. This couch was probably $1000+ over the chocolate brown sofa. I replied, “yeah…I’m not made of money.”

And that was that. Or, at least, that would have been the end of it. As we kept going around the store I kept thinking about the couch. I knew that I’d be taking advantage of the 18 month promotion that they had anyway. Eventually I decided that this would be my splurge item so I made the switch. And that’s that.

As I type this, I’m reclined on the couch tapping away at the laptop. I took a picture of the couch the other day. I’m posting it here in this entry. Please ignore the socks in the picture. Despite how it looks, the couch isn’t a behemoth at all. It really is just enough for a guy like me, you know. I’m happy with this piece of furniture. Yes, I am.

The couch

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The swagger

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Wed. April 1, 2009

I was out at lunch with a colleague. As we were walking I started talking about how I was in desperate need of a new spring jacket. I was wearing a lightweight brown suede-look jacket that I’d gotten while I was in Arizona. I guess back then the jacket was already the slightest bit large for me. Since then, I’ve managed to shed a few pounds, making the jacket just look even larger on me. I can adjust it a little bit to make it look all right. In particular, what I tend to do is to push up the sleeves so that my forearms are exposed. It doesn’t look so bad then. Even so, with a good gust of wind it’s not uncommon for the jacket to just not look right on me–at least, so says I. That’s why I need to go shopping at some point in the near future.

Back to this past lunch hour, when I mentioned that I needed a new jacket, my colleague had a bit of a surprised look on his face. “Oh yeah. Where’s your leather jacket?” Good question. I decided to leave it at home because really I kind of felt like I’ve been wearing the damn jacket for way too long. I didn’t want people to think that I didn’t have anything else. I suppose I could have switched to my black leather, but showing with two leather jackets in succession? Hmm…that doesn’t sit right with me, eh? So, that’s why the light jacket came out. I told my colleague that I needed to give the jacket a rest. The way he was reacting, you’d think there was something just not right about me not wearing leather. He told me he associated me with that jacket. It’s kind of what I was trying to avoid, but there you go. He followed it up with something that kind of stuck with me: “without the jacket, you don’t seem to have that swagger.”

¿Que?

From Merriam-Webster:
intransitive verb
1: to conduct oneself in an arrogant or superciliously pompous manner ; especially : to walk with an air of overbearing self-confidence

So, in the case of this conversation, I’m taking the comment to not mean that I’m being a pompous ass, but rather I carried myself with confidence. I can understand that. With this current jacket I kind of feel like I’m constantly fidgeting. With every wind gust I feel like I’m adjusting something. What interests me most about the idea of me having “the swagger” is that it’s totally an unconscious thing. I don’t walk around acting like I’m God’s gift to the world. If thinking though that perhaps it’s a state of being that I should get back into, you know? It creates great first impressions. I guess tomorrow I’m switching back to leather, but I want to analyze my thought patterns while wearing it. Thing is, that’s something you can’t really check out because as soon as you become self-conscious the effect is gone.

No matter. Time to reclaim the swagger.

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