When I was a kid, it always felt like the older women in my life were trying to get me to wear jewelry and other accessories for some reason. My great aunt bought me a gold ring with my initials on it for my bar mitzvah. My grandmother bought me a watch that felt very fancy to me at the time. There were a couple of necklaces along the way. Other stuff I’m forgetting.
I tried to wear these things, but I couldn’t hack it. My whole life, I go through these swings where I think something will be fun to wear, wear it, feel like I’m drawing attention to myself, and stop wearing the thing forever. Tried and failed to be a watch guy, a ring guy, a gold chain guy.
During the one semester I spent in California in college, I briefly became a bandana guy. It didn’t last. In recent years, trying desperately to find cool ways of keeping the sun off my bald head, I tried for an incredibly short period of time to be a cowboy hat guy. I don’t think I ever made it out of the house.
What I ultimately want for my physical self, I think, is to be ignored. I appreciate the body’s capacity for unique kinds of joy, but I don’t really want anyone looking at it or thinking about it. I don’t want to be ignored as a person; as a person I want to shine, to be seen as unique and special, to stand out. I imagine we all exist on some sort of spectrum in this regard.
But why I’m writing this is recently I found the old watch my grandmother gave me. It’s a Citizen C480, and she must have purchased it in 1995.
I remember thinking, well, this is classier than what I’m used to, but it’s cool because it still has a stopwatch. I loved having a stopwatch because when we were kids for some reason we thought it was fun to compete to see who could start and stop a stopwatch the fastest. But this watch sucked for that game. The stopwatch feature seemed to be tacked on; it wasn’t, like, the point of the device.
When I found the watch recently, I wanted to make it work again. I don’t wear a watch, but this felt important to me nevertheless. So I bought the batteries you see pictured at the top of this post. They worked, and I wholeheartedly recommend them.
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