> CD #46: Object of envy

It has taken me nearly two full months to feel at home on campus, but I do now—partly because I have finally found someone to be envious of, fashion-wise.

It’s a thing I do wherever I go, so instinctive I don’t always notice it: I’m forever on the lookout for someone to envy. Or, rather, someone who can act as an impossible standard for me to measure myself against. I did it during my school years, like I suspect many girls do, but it has continued through every job I’ve ever worked at. I’ll pinpoint one person who has incredible style and observe them closely until they become a kind of sartorial North Star, influencing my outfit aspirations for as long as I’m around them. It’s like I need someone to be envious of, someone to chase. It’s my natural state of being—and maybe even my comfort zone.

I noticed her earlier this month, the tall Asian girl with platinum hair wearing a yellow wool jacket and white wide-legged pants at the food court. Her clothes stood out against a sea of sweatshirts and jeans:

But it wasn’t until I saw her again a week later that I knew she was the one. This time, she was wearing a mini-skirt, patterned tights and a big cardigan with random phrases written all over it, including “good ideas” and “error 404 / page not found.” So good.

Now I look for her each week, and her outfits have never failed to inspire. And when I get dressed in the morning these days, I do it with a little extra effort. It’s not a competition—there’s no way I can compete at her level—but a simple reminder that clothes are fun and life can be more interesting if you make it more interesting.

Envy is not always so innocuous, of course. Many times during the past couple years, I have found it demotivating, sometimes debilitating. For a while there, it seemed like everyone I knew was making significant progress on their creative projects or announcing book deals or receiving praise and acclaim for their amazing work while I remained totally stalled and barely able to read a book, much less write one. That kind of envy did not inspire. I felt defeated, even though I know other people’s success has nothing to do with my own. Professional envy is almost always a dead end.

No, the only envy I recommend is the kind of meaningless, low-stakes envy that motivates you to be slightly better than you normally would.

But, if you want to take it to another level altogether, I suppose you could indulge in the kind of envy you can wrangle into art, like this brilliant poem:

The Book of My Enemy Has Been Remaindered
by Clive James

The book of my enemy has been remaindered
And I am pleased.
In vast quantities it has been remaindered.
Like a van-load of counterfeit that has been seized
And sits in piles in a police warehouse,
My enemy's much-praised effort sits in piles
In the kind of bookshop where remaindering occurs.
Great, square stacks of rejected books and, between them, aisles
One passes down reflecting on life's vanities,
Pausing to remember all those thoughtful reviews
Lavished to no avail upon one's enemy's book—
For behold, here is that book
Among these ranks and the banks of duds,
These ponderous and seemingly irreducible cairns
Of complete stiffs.

The book of my enemy has been remaindered
And I rejoice.
It has gone with bowed head like a defeated legion
Beneath the yoke.
What avail him now his awards and prizes,
The praise expended upon his meticulous technique,
His individual new voice?
Knocked into the middle of next week
His brainchild now consorts with the bad buys,
The sinkers, clinkers, dogs and dregs,
The Edsels of the world of movable type,
The bummers that no amount of hype could shift,
The unbudgeable turkeys.

Yea, his slim volume with its understated wrapper
Bathes in the glare of the brightly jacketed Hitler's War Machine,
His unmistakably individual new voice
Shares the same scrapyard with a forlorn skyscraper
Of The Kung-Fu Cookbook,
His honesty, proclaimed by himself and believed in by others,
His renowned abhorrence of all posturing and pretence,
Is there with Pertwee's Promenades and Pierrots—
One Hundred Years of Seaside Entertainment,
And (oh, this above all) his sensibility,
His sensibility and its hair-like filaments,
His delicate, quivering sensibility is now as one
With Barbara Windsor's Book of Boobs,
A volume graced by the descriptive rubric
'My boobs will give everyone hours of fun'.

Soon now a book of mine could be remaindered also,
Though not to the monumental extent
In which the chastisement of remaindering has been meted out
To the book of my enemy,
Since in the case of my own book it will be due
To a miscalculated print run, a marketing error—
Nothing to do with merit.
But just supposing that such an event should hold
Some slight element of sadness, it will be offset
By the memory of this sweet moment.
Chill the champagne and polish the crystal goblets!
The book of my enemy has been remaindered
And I am glad.

Poets are alchemists, aren’t they?

:) Teresa

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