#TheDress

So I was checking my email.  Yes, on AOL!  And I saw something about the dress that broke the Internet.  I noticed at the bottom that it was blue and black, but in the main story it was gold and white.  But I also noticed that it was quite ugly and mature looking.  Now in my mind, at 45 I still think I’m 25.  So maybe someone would think that dress is right up my alley, while I’m thinking that dress is for an older lady.  I don’t know……say somebody in her 40s.  It’s amazing right.  They say 40 is the new 20, and I think they mean that we in our 40s still think that we are in our 20s.  And I’m guilty of it sometimes.  Some days I look in the mirror and I think, “Damn!  You’re 45?”  And other days I look in the mirror and I think, “Damn.  You are 45.”

Another reason why I ignored the dress was because I’m too old and too jaded to waste my time on frivolous things that the media call news.  “Bobbi Kristina has come out of a coma.”  Not my concern.  “Bobbi Kristina is getting worse.”  Not my concern.  And it’s not that I don’t care about Bobbi Kristina because I really don’t care either way.  It’s just that I don’t know her, and these things are not really news to me.  “Any Kardashian has done anything.”  I unapologetically do not care.  Life is way too short for me to give these people any of my time. 

So when I saw an article about a dress, I couldn’t give a flying fig.  However, the kids came home from school, and they couldn’t wait to tell me that for the entire day at school and on the bus, kids were arguing about the color of a dress.  Then I said, “Wait.  That dress was such big news?”  My daughter showed it to me on her iPod, and to her it looked gold and white, but to me and her twin brother, it looked blue and black.  Her dad thought it looked blue and black, and so did my younger son, but my nephew thought it looked gold and white.  They shared with me that kids on the bus and at school were seriously arguing about it with each other.  I was amazed that the kids took time out to stop roasting each other and the poor bus driver to discuss the color of a dress that looked gold and white to some and black and blue to others.

Around 11:30 pm, my husband’s cell phone rang.  I realized he was talking to a fellow employee, and when I heard him mention something about color, I couldn’t wait for him to get off the phone.  Teasingly, I said, “Was that about the dress?”  Boy was I shocked when he said yes.  My husband does not waste too much time on important things much less on trivial stuff, so now I’m curious as to why he was having that discussion at 11:30 at night.  But there was a valid reason.  The person on the other end mixed him up with another Francis with whom he was having the discussion earlier in the day and couldn’t wait to tell him that he saw it over the news.  Later the next day, I too saw it over the news!

Like I said, the dress is pretty unattractive, so whether it’s blue and black or gold and white or periwinkle and mustard, it really doesn’t matter.  The whole concept just drove home a deeper meaning to me.  We are all individuals.  Sometimes we could have the same genes and still have different perspectives.  Why are people fighting over the fact that some see blue and black and others see gold and white?  Isn’t it sufficient that they all see one ugly dress?  We have different moral compasses.  We have different beliefs about the same deity.  We have different levels of compassion, sorrow, vanity, love and every other emotion that one can think of.  What we need to do is to just accept others for how they see the same world around us.  Accept others for how they view ideas in this same world; accept others for their varying theories about everything because perspectively speaking, it doesn’t matter how much we try to make those around us see things our way; they can only see things their way.