The Dark (Sock) Side

You can live in L.A. and be a perfectly respectably dressed individual without ever owning a pair of dark socks. Well, actually this might not be entirely true for businessmen, but as a lady, the combination of fabulous weather and decadent style render dark socks utterly useless. You know what dark socks mean: sensible shoes. Sensible shoes are taboo in the greater Los Angelean area — unless you are a Caltech graduate student.

When I left for the East Coast upon my admittance to Cornell, my brother warned me not to become a “dark sockser,” i.e. someone who would deign to wear dark socks. I heeded his advice for the better part of two years, struggling up and down the rocky Ithacan terrain in tottering and inexcusably impractical shoes. I had yet to join the dark-sock-side.

However, this last fall break, when I returned to Los Angeles to recover from the Herculean task of taking the LSAT — I literally felt like I have born a child — I forgot to pack socks. I pulled out my highly worn and dingy, yet comfortable flats, for what my mother and I call “the bread run.” The bread run doesn’t actually involve running at all: rather the activity consists of meandering, window shopping and looking at impossibly beautiful houses with illegally manicured lawns. During this stroll, Lolly (my mother) and I usually talk about my most recent failed relationship and discuss freezing my eggs — but she says that I am already too old to freeze them. It is a delightful conversation we have with some regularity. The walk is three miles from our home to El Fornio, a little café in Old Town Pasadena, and obviously three miles back. If we get too fatigued, we call my father to pick us up. Really, it is quite a decadent form of pseudo-exercise.

Anyhow, so I asked Lolly if I could borrow a pair of dark socks. She was astonished and inquired what I would possibly do with dark socks. I informed her that I planned to wear them. The next question was, with what did I think I was going to wear these dark socks? I showed her my tattered and sensible shoes, whereupon she nearly fainted. What had become of her daughter?!?

Dark socks were not the only alarming alteration to my wardrobe. On my mini-holiday, I wore sweats everyday, even to a swanky little spa in Burbank (not such a swanky area ), where someone who was married to a man who worked with Frank Sinatra’s son painted my toenails. Stuff like that only happens in L.A., and no one, but someone from L.A. would care. In addition, I hadn’t worn much makeup in six months. In fact, I haven’t gone out at all since graduation last year. I’ve been buried under the weight of the LSAT — the Life Sucking Anxiety-provoking Task — 22 credits, a neurobiology course in which the last prelim’s average was a 60 percent and the prof refused to curve it and my honors thesis. Boo-hoo! The combination of the LSAT and the honors thesis alone has rendered me entirely sexless or genderless. Well, what I mean is that they have destroyed my libido. Now I look at sex as a sedative — something to relax me, like a Valium. It is really bad when you seriously consider sex as a supplement to your anti-anxiety medication, rather than a fun and/or passionate experience.

I wear glasses, don’t wash my hair for days on end and would rather be comfortable than fashionable. What has happened to me? Where did I go? What happened to the flippant, superficial, absurdly shod ballerina? She doesn’t live here anymore, and I kinda miss her. (Just to clarify, I am still flippant and superficial, only now you can spot me madly scampering around Olin in flats with long, flowing, greasy hair. If I was a boy I would definitely have one of the yucky, pretentious graduate student beards, possibly braided at the tip.) My idea of “fun” or “relaxing” is to go into the stacks and look at books that I would read if I had the time. I make long lists of them, alphabetically, of course.

So, the question I am grappling with is: have I become a dark-sockser? If so, is this a permanent condition? Is it curable? Now the question of the hue of my socks may appear rather silly. It is silly. But the metaphor illustrates a profound question that every Cornellian must someday face: West Coast or East Coast? (There are really no other options.) Classically, most Cornell graduates stay on the East Coast, but for those of us who are considering betraying the Argyle Mystique (my term for the obsession with the East Coast and the Ivy League) and moving out west, there is an uncertainty as to whether we will be able to adjust to the pressures of perfect weather and beautiful people. Unless, of course, you move to Northern California where there is a dearth of both.

I think that those of us who are planning to move to (or, as in my case, back to) the West Coast should form a support group. We could have seminars on the correct usage and intonation of the word “dude” as well as “like.” We could research and make lists of which area codes to be snobby about. We could discuss strategies to avoid the dangers of drinking and driving, which is endemic to the nightlife in L.A. We could do reconnaissance work on the “it” spots. We could support one another in getting past the Argyle Mystique, which by the way is just as superficial as anything that goes on in L.A., the difference being that West Coasters are more upfront about being money driven, social climbing and superficial — it’s refreshing. We could even plan a dark-socks burning bonfire!

Claire Readhead is a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences. She can be contacted at creadhead@cornellsun.com [1]. Silk Blue Stockings appears alternate Mondays.