A month without: slovenliness

As I write this, I am sitting in my shabby Queens apartment, where I work alone during the day. No one will see me except for my roommates and my deli guy, yet I’m smartly dressed in a gray pin-striped suit with a shiny green tie. I don’t have to wear this. My 30 straight days of donning a suit and tie, as mandated by this magazine, ended four days ago. What I told myself is that dressing formally again might help me reflect better on the experience, but the truth is this: I missed the suit.

This longing is beyond unexpected. I am not a suit guy. Aside from weddings and funerals, I probably hadn’t worn one since a semiformal waltz party in college (and only then because the waltz nights were known to be hookup extravaganzas).

I spent the first morning of this experiment, which coincided with a torrential downpour, rushing to a doctor’s appointment, futilely trying to keep my $350 jacket dry with my $5 umbrella and wondering why I had signed up for this.

Then I started to notice things. I went on a first date, petrified that the suit would paint me as grossly overeager. Instead, my companion warmly complimented the attire and said if she’d known it was a “fancy date,” she would have worn a sexy dress and heels. (Lesson learned.) Later I went to drop off writing samples at a very corporate publishing house. Despite my lack of an appointment, I was immediately issued a security pass and ushered to the proper floor. (In the old days I would have been directed to the courier’s entrance.)

That doesn’t mean there weren’t drawbacks. Whereas a suit elicits happy feelings all around, a tie does not. When you cook things on the stove or bend over to take out the trash, your tie will drop into things. Also, showing up for late-night beers with your tie still fastened tends to come across as a smidge… uptight. People will often say, “Nice tie,” but the subtext is: Do you realize you’re still wearing your tie, douche bag?

Perhaps the best illustration of the suit experience is as follows: About ten days in, I found myself at Kinko’s, trying to copy some articles for a job application. The only working copier was behind the attendant’s desk, where a surly, overweight woman explained that duplicating these stories (my stories, mind you) would violate copyright law. In the past I would have stormed away, cursing. On this day, however, a little voice rose up in my head:  “Fuck this, are you going to be pushed around by a Kinko’s clerk?” I straightened my tie, smiled at the copy Nazi and said, “This is really urgent. Is there anything you can do?”

She made the copies.—Dustin Goot