Notes on Things...

Standing in the subway the other day, I noticed a fabulous South Asian man wearing what would be considered in this country an excessive (and excessively feminine) amount of jewelry on his right hand. He had on both a pinkie ring with a pearly white stone and a ring on his index finger with a shiny, multi-faceted clear stone that sparkled brightly even under the subway's dull fluorescent lights. He also sported on the same wrist a bracelet made of red string punctuated by about 8 or 10 finely filigreed silver half-shells holding inside each pair some kind of nut or rough stone or even dried pot bud or incense or something. Little brown wads, contained inside intricate silver cages, strung on silky red thread. The whole thing was mesmerizing, and I almost asked him if I could take a picture of his hand. Almost. But I did not want to make him uncomfortable. For the record, he also wore a tight red polo shirt over his prodigious man-baby and red nikes with the bouncy-bouncy things in the heel. All in all, definitely a fabulous candidate for my imaginary version of the "spotted in New York" fashion blog.

The fixation I had on this man's jewelry distracted me, for a good 20 minutes (long enough to get from 34th/Harold Sq. to Atlantic/Pacific), from thinking about the many piles of things I have stacked up on every surface of my tiny room. And then, it reminded me all over again of all the things I have acquired. And then, I started thinking about how much these things - much as the marketers and peddlers intended - work like talismans to ensure me of the continuity of my identity. And then, I remembered how disconcerting it is to find the little stashes of things that I have let sink in the swampy marshlands of memory and my mom's basement but that had figured so prominently in my identities in former lives. Big, colorful earrings. Fancy 40s-style dresses. Heels and heels and heels.

It's not just gender, either. There was a time when I stashed art supplies like I was starting a summer camp. Old journals and sketchbooks were squirreled away as if some art historian would need them later to trace the filaments of my brilliant career back to the bored suburban childhood of an accidental immigrant. (That's how I saw myself.) Letters were bound in packets and wrapped in twine. Photographs in shoeboxes. Syllabi, class notes, xeroxed articles - a category of projection unto itself.

I have been told and get the sense myself that "Russians" like to "dress up" - meaning they press their pants, they wear appropriate footwear, they do not leave the house in their pajamas, even if the outing does not involve a meeting with anyone they know. I've heard that "Russians" can identify "Americans" by the casualness of the "Americans'" dress, the lack of restraint or consideration of what others might think. Bluejeans, flip-flops, no makeup, hair undone. Or, what my mother calls, "pulled out of you-know-where." (How will those girls find husbands?) Clearly, some part of it is still deeply tied up in gender and courtship, both at the local (I need to find my husband) and the societal (Look what our women look like!) levels. On the other hand, subcultures abound, and my recent limited adventures with the pictorial side of the Russian internet has furnished glimpses of all kinds of gender- and mainstream-nonconformity from emo boys to extreme bike-riding girls. And then, there's always the flagrance of Russian fashion (as occasionally documented by kg, for example) to bring a little levity to the situation.

Where does all this leave me? Well, with a bunch of stacks of things, daring me to fit them all into two 50-lb suitcases. A serious case of "what if?" Or "what will be?" And my grandmother's amber necklace. (It was not purchased from a store that sees me as a demographic. My mom says it has healing qualities. Whether or not it registers to others (I highly doubt my reading of the subway guy's bling in any way matches his desired self-presentation), I see it as post-gender. Though it is clearly not post-identity.)