--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Share Long wrote: > > turq, good point that unisex means women dressing like men. I hadn't thought of that because for me wearing uniforms happened in Catholic schools and they did want the girls to look different from the boys, albeit, like one another. > > I think part of uniform wearing is to simplify life and help a person have their attention on something other than what to wear to school. Also uniforms are easier on the parents budget. > > I'm fascinated by the topic of uniforms because I wore them to school from age 6 to 18. Then when I went to college, everyone wore blue jeans so that was also a bit of a uniform. To this day, I tend to be nonchalant about clothing, tending to wear what's comfortable. > > I've noticed that people for whom clothing is a medium of expression will find ways to express their individuality even when wearing a uniform.
True that. Back in my TM daze, my "medium of expression" was ties. I mean, you can't look all that much different from the other TM Teacher Clones in your TM Teacher suit, right? And the "rules" said you had to wear a tie (even to the beach...really...I heard Maharishi say this several times), but they didn't specify what *kind* of tie. Heh heh. I specialized in Tastefully Outrageous Ties. I still have a collection of Jerry Garcia ties that are now worth 5-10X what I paid for them on eBay. Jerry (whatever else he was into) had great taste as a watercolor artist, and so when those designs were transferred to ties, what you got was great taste, not psychedelia. I had a number of "museum ties," patterns taken from works of art in museum, that I thought were pretty damned tasteful, but which were so colorful that many might have considered them...uh...unfashionable. My favorite tie to wear during the six months I worked and lived at the TM National Headquarters at the end of Sunset Blvd. was a nice pale blue tie with a line drawing on it of a female nude. The drawing was lifted from a famous artist, but was subtle and (IMO) tasteful, and so I liked wearing the tie for aesthetic reasons. But the tie was also useful as a Consciousness Test. As I said, the design was subtle, so from a distance it probably looked like swirls of black lines on a blue background. But get closer, focus on it for half a second, and it was obviously a fairly voluptuous female nude. So I'd wear that tie around National, all day, and count the number of people who even noticed it. Interestingly -- and perhaps revealing of the state of attention of full-time TMers -- I could often get through a whole day without anyone noticing. I once wore it to a meeting we were having with visitors from Seelisberg, the "higher ups" of the European TMO. Jerry Jarvis was there, and all of the US leaders, but not a single person noticed the tie. And I don't mean "no one acknowledged it." I'd been running this Consciousness Test long enough at this point to know the difference. They just didn't care enough or weren't conscious enough to notice that one of their number was sitting there wearing a tie with a naked babe on it. The memory of that meeting still cracks me up to this day. :-)
