The Lobby and The Appearance of Dignity

Here's my day - I learn (or maybe notice) two interesting things.

I wake up in DC for a meeting with a prospective customer, emerge optimistic but wary of the work involved in finding out, fly back home to Atlanta, arrive at 6pm, repack, apologize to my wife on her birthday, take my son to the basement so he can play my drums (which he can only incessantly call "bum" and which also includes my guitar - either me playing it while he endlessly motors around, or me holding the chord with my left hand while he attempts to strum.), much consternation on his part at the end of our impromtu "session," and then it's off to Philly for two days. An odd city, if you ask me, Philly.

The perimeter of it is depressing. More than a couple of times, the thought crosses my mind that I would be very destraught if I was suddenly informed that I'd have to live here. Just sort of cluttery, but desolate at the same time - I'll pass. But then I cross over this river and go into some scary areas, where I think I would be very nervous if I was to suddenly have to live here. Abandoned buildings with broken glass all throughout, on streets that look like the video game, the shooting game, where villains pop out from behind every object and shadow. And it's overlooking water! Truly puzzling from a real estate development prospective - seems like some Trumpionnaire would clean house and put up a revitalized waterfront district or something expensive-sounding like that. It's like nobody cares, which is the first remarkable thing I notice today.

Almost as quickly as the cab and I enter into this archetypical run-down area of a city, we emerge into a Chicago or New York kind of downtown, with massive buildings right on the street, with shops at street level, and residences or offices (or both) going up into the heavens. Street vendors, convention centers, bars, restaurants, mass transit, hotels, shopping centers - all in about 3 square blocks - at least that's what it seems like. The transition from ghetto to modern metro is like passing between two different worlds, not mutually exclusive, but recognizably distinct.

In one, folks care about looks. In the other, they don't, at least not enough to take care of them. That's what I notice tonight as my cab pulls up to my hotel. Kind of hum-drum, but that's before a few rounds on the old cognitive spin cycle. The only minor-league, and I mean really minor-league excitement is my well-timed dart through the huge rotunda of a lobby to avoid colleagues who might be in the bar. One false move and I end up in there all night. It's happened before and it ends up leaving me tired, hungover, and generally off the next day.

Of course, that doesn't necessarily mean shit. I can almost always be counted on to join in the festivities if people I work with are. I have what I call the party gene. (That's another topic that'll get its ink in due time.) Anyhow, that's where the drama, minor league as it is, comes in. The inner conflict. You see, attendance at the professional, expense-account boozefest has a long record of benefiting my work environment, even though, these days, especially today, I am more apt to settle into my room, get online, and see what happens. A quandary you might say, settled by the half-assed, but probably still better than your average civilian's covert lobby crossing. If he gets spotted - bourbon and ginger (plus requisite cigarettes) till two. If not, the tamer tour through the blogosphere, but the benefit of a feel-good tomorrow. Finkel. Einhorn. Finkel. Einhorn...

Being a master of compromise (and lobby crossings - it's all about the diversion), I settle upon forcing myself to encapsulate the random, but not so random, thoughts that have crossed my mind on my three city tour. Then, I may see what's happening downstairs. Whew. Glad that's settled. Anyhow - let's make this quick.

I keep coming back to this two cities thing. Think about how important appearances are in different socioeconomic settings. People with nothing could care less about how they look. They can't afford to. And it seems like there's a direct, but leading, correlation between taking care of appearances and achieving prosperity and predictability. It's direct because the guy who cares about his appearance gets the job before the slob in most cases. Nothing shocking there. But, it is a leading (as in an economic leading indicator) correlation because the appearance change almost always precedes the achievement of prosperity.

As they say, you sometimes gotta fake it till you make it. This is why stock-brokers wear Rolex (would the plural be Rolei?) watches, drive expensive cars, and live in expensive houses, even when they're just starting out and can't make the money to support the lifestyle - it gives the impression that they're successful at handling people's money. The "he makes money if his clients make money" arrangement is understood, so the broker's wealth means his clients must be doing well. Ergo, it makes sense to do business with him, to let him help you manage your money. In our terms, it makes sense to accept him.

Now, obviously, if the guy's a total boob, he probably won't do well. But if he's not, and he's persistent, that interpersonal acceptance will pay off. So, what I'm saying is that you have to start caring about what you look like before a lot of good things will happen to you in life.

Appearance becomes a sort of investment. You do the things you need to do to keep your person looking right - right clothes, right hair, right teeth - and you take an instant step up on the ladder of mass social acceptance. In essence, you're decreasing your delta. Remember, the idea is that it is possible to have an appearance that virtually guarantees that, unless you're a total jerk, the people you meet will accept you. They'll be interested in you, and they'll be hoping that you like them. Your delta is how far, objectively speaking, you are looks-wise from that point. The further you are, the more likely it is that the exact opposite will happen - the people you meet will not lock eyes with you or take any interest in you, and if you dislike them, they will not notice, nor will they care if they do. That's harsh, but it's reality for some people. Fortunately for most people, the delta problem is tractable.

Suppose there's a figurative delta scale from zero to 100 - zero being the lowest delta (closest to mass total acceptance) and 100 being the highest delta (closest to mass total rejection). Something as broad (and purposefully vague) as an appearance delta would not have your typical bell curve distribution, would it? Yes, buuut, zero would be on the fringes of one side, say the left (arbitarily, lest any political notions enter into this). There are only a handful of folks at the zero delta point. They're the ones who presumably have the life. They set the styles and dominate all visual media. But, relatively speaking, there aren't many of them.

The numbers increase steadily as you move to the right, away from zero. Eventually, they peak and you have the average-looking person, not perfect, but not noticeably or distractingly flawed. Then, those drop off to the people who have something troubling about their appearance, something that causes people to be careful about looking. The curve ends at the other fringe with people who have it the worst in terms of human acceptance - maybe they're shut-ins because they just can't bear to go out, or maybe they're just invisible. Even though, thankfully, there aren't that many of them, there are still too many, and I hate to think about what that must be like. But I musn't dwell, there's booze to swill.

(That was the lamest rhyme ever. I have to admit that.)

Getting back to the point here, the delta scale is useful because we can imagine that one who has no interest in his appearance, somebody like your urban-variety bum, has a lot of easy ground to make up in terms of delta. A nice shower, a haircut, a trip to the dentist, some consistently good nutrition, and the guy can go from say a 70 to a 40. At 40, he may be close enough to the average person to start finding interpersonal acceptance fairly expectable. This, from some psychology I've read but honestly can't remember where (told you this was vague), is the turning point for self-esteem.

The moment you start to expect that you'll be accepted in interpersonal situations is the moment you begin to have self-esteem. Don't know if it's true, or if it's possible to know, but it sounds about right. So, thinking back about my cab ride (but now with the Bill Conti music from Rocky as a soundtrack - ahh, editorial license), I'm wondering how many folks are living there who just don't care about how they look, about how their house looks, or about anything like this. And I'm wondering, what if they did?

Socially sensitive people will answer that caring about your appearance isn't going to suddenly make a job materialize. These people are in poverty, they'll say. I'll grant that this may very well be the case for many of these people. But what about the ones who could simply decide to care about their appearance? They live within walking distance of any number of mail room-level jobs, jobs that go to guys (and gals) with the same background, only they clean up.

Maybe it's about dignity. Maybe this whole thing is just way to say that dignity begets pride in appearance, which begets acceptance. If so, I'm an idiot for wasting the festive hours in the bar downstairs on a single sentence. But that brings me back to the second thing I learned today. There's a self-perpetuating cycle going on here. I might ordinarily have ruminated on this idea and forgotten about it until something cued it back up again. But, as the word "blog" is short for weblog, which connotes ship's log or captain's log, and since I don't always have something particular to write about, I am informally committed to putting something down. In this case, it turns out that the whole thing is about information distillation and articulation, which happen to be the toolset of the writer. And duh, epiphany - that must be why I do this. Having written a book, I still don't think of myself as a writer. But tonight, considering that I distracted, and then deftly out-manuevered the lobby threat, and now it's too late to reconsider, it occurs to me - I am a writer. (It sounds gay to even type it.) Nevetheless, it's a milestone, I suppose.

Then, reality sets back in, as I wonder if it ever really pays well.