You Don't Order A Steak From A Burger Joint

In six years I’m out to dinner with my team at work. It’s a team dinner to welcome me to the group, my first real job out of college that came with a salary and a desk instead of an hourly rate and a uniform. I’m awkward and I’m uncomfortable and I’m entirely out of my depth and at this very fancy Italian restaurant we’re in I wind up ordering a burger and fries.

Practically ordering off the kids menu there. Real impressive.

It’s the first blunder in a series of them that I’ll make over the coming weeks all of which has a staggering domino like effect on my reputation at work, cementing me as the guy whose invitation gets ‘lost in the mail’ so that the night isn’t uncomfortable for everyone else but none of them know that yet.

I’m about halfway through my overcooked burger and undercooked fries and when the person sitting next to me asks how it is I **** on my food and tell them that I’m really enjoying it and they give me a piece of advice, entirely unsolicited, which really should have probably resonated with me a whole lot more.

“If you want to have a good meal you have to play to the strengths of a restaurant. You don’t order a steak from a fast food joint, you shouldn’t order seafood from a diner. You know?”

It’s well meaning and it probably would have served me well if I’d kept it in mind more often than I did. Because as metaphors go it’s not exactly catchy and it could definitely be over applied and result in someone being a little more cautious than they need to be, but still there is a good time and a place for it.

Right now, though, I can’t forget it.

Play to the strengths of the place. Recognize where you are and what your best option is going to be. The house special, if you will, not in terms of meal this time but in terms of… something else.

I’ve never been good at fashion, never really understood what it was or comprehended how to play in the space of it, but at least I knew my own shortcomings. Of course not that recognizing shortcomings here really helped at all.

I have a habit and a history of showing up to things either severely underdressed or overdressed or, remarkably, feeling like I’d somehow completely misunderstood the directions in a leftward direction. I always seemed to be dressing just wrong, somehow, and always misinterpreting it in new and exciting ways.

But at least I could rest assured that I had some vague sense of the cardinal directions. With men’s clothing I couldn’t tell you where I should head but at least I knew my north from my south and my east from my west. I had no such comfort anymore.

Where do you start? Where in the hell do you even begin? Why hadn’t I paid even the least bit of attention in all of the years that I’d been around women?

Admittedly I didn’t exactly spend a lot of time around them before.

Everything was tiny slips of seemingly insubstantial fabric and flimsy little straps. I could barely even figure out the top from the bottom of the outfits, let alone figure out whether they met the standards of the party.

‘Come as you aren’t. Dress from a time that you’re not.’

What the fuck am I supposed to do with that?

I had vague recollections of what women wore at different periods of time but my own time period was a good number of years in the future and completely different in terms of style to when I was now. Every time I tried to remember what the ‘fashion’ of previous time periods were I always wound up either jumping to the time period I currently existed in, which was technically my past, or else clung to the representations of dresses in the 1700s or some such ridiculousness. All poofy tall wigs and big wide hoop skirts. That’s the 1700s, right?

Either way, neither of those options would work.

Not if I wanted to buy in here. Not if I wanted to be the kind of person who wasn’t about to spend all night at home wallowing. Not if I wanted to change the future I had in front of me.

No, if I wanted to do that I needed to buy in wholeheartedly. And right now buying in wholeheartedly meant playing to her strengths, no matter how uncomfortable that might make me.

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