Lonely No More
I actually have trouble remembering the song title because it's not the song that I like. It's the beat and the visuals.
I don't know where I got this idea but I assume I read something about Rob Thomas around the time the video came out, but my impression is this video is his version of Ricky Martin's Livin La Vida Loca. Both songs are nominally love songs but the title for Livin La Vida Loca came from a conversation Ricky Martin had with a friend when he was first really big and that phrase is what his friend blurted out in response to him describing some of the stuff going on in his life due to his career taking off like a rocket.
So I like both songs not for the romantic content but for the idea of a life speeding up due to success. Both the above video and the Ricky Martin song/video evoke for me a frantic, busy period of career success where things are just changing around you so fast you can't keep track of it all.
In the past day, what I have had in mind is clothes I used to wear that I haven't thought about in a long, long time. I used to wear a lot of leggings and I haven't worn those in years and years.
I've struggled with my relationship to clothes for a lot of years. How I kind of THINK I "should" dress and how I actually dress tend to not match.
I was in my late forties before it dawned on me that my mother's very conservative ideas about being dressed properly sound an awful lot like articles I read about the dress code required of the British Royals. Most likely, this is because my mother's mother was from a low level German noble family and they sold the title when they fell on hard times financially.
I briefly had a job at K-mart in my teens. I showed up on day one in an unlined cotton suit my mother had sewn me that I felt was appropriate for my job and my boss's boss gave me the evil eye for being better dressed than her.
At my first break, I rolled up the sleeves and unbuttoned a couple of buttons and belted it to tone it down and make it more casual. Looking back on it, I probably looked kind of like the daughter of the business owner or something like that rather than a cashier with an entry level job.
Then I was a homemaker for a long time and I mostly wore what I liked because I didn't have to meet some kind of work dress code. Though I also, you know, had the occasional ball gown for attending military balls and looking appropriate.
I'm tall for a woman and I have a serious medical condition that strongly influences my attire choices in practical terms. I can gain or lose a dress size overnight due to bloat getting better or worse, so I tend to wear things with some give -- knits, things made out of jersey (the kind of material t-shirts are made from, basically).
I had a corporate job for a few years where I had to meet a business casual dress code. I applied for a job at one point with the spiffy title of Executive Director and kept getting told I might have another shot at that job, so I kept thinking in terms of how to dress something better than business casual while still accommodating my medical issues.
But that is old news and I am likely to be an entrepreneur instead and also may end up buying a bicycle as primary transportation at some point. I might even use that bicycle to travel throughout the region I live in and the kind of leggings and sweaters and tunic tops I used to wear might fit right in with all of that.
I don't know how to think about that or feel about that. I was so sick for so long that I had not been considering getting a bike or traveling regionally as part of my work and the idea that I might get well enough for that to make sense is something of a shock to my mind.
I mean I had kind of thought about it -- that Project Bike Rack would best be pursued by me personally using a bike as transportation and using it to travel beyond just my local town, but that just didn't seem realistic. Maybe it's not, but something clicked in my mind just yesterday and I have all these images of clothes that fits more with that kind of active lifestyle and it hits a certain note of marrying my athletic past, my career goals and my interest in clothes and I'm kind of stuck on the idea and not sure exactly where to go next with it.
This post is me basically doing free therapy. This is a very new thing in my mind and I don't yet know what to make of it.
It seems pretty far fetched but I've done so many things people have said "cannot" be done that I've gotten used to reality telling me what my limits are rather than my own broken mental models of what is or is not realistic for me and my life.