Living with Complexity

If Los Angeles has one lesson to offer the world, it is that things are never as simple as they appear. Yes, yes, this is ultimately a fairly obvious lesson, but one that we need to be reminded of, often.

Example: American Apparel. A very hip clothing boutique that has conquered LA and NYC and probably parts of your town, too. When I bought a Cars-R-Coffins sweatshirt for my honey, it sported an American Apparel label.

So the advertising for American Apparel is atrocious. It's creepy and it looks like porn. Moreover, the founder, Dov Charney, is accused of being quite the misogynist: allegedly hiring women at parties, sleeping with employees, decorating the office with Penthouse spreads, giving vibrators as gifts, and conducting job interviews in his underwear.

Yuck.

And at the same time, Charney produces all of his clothing here, in downtown LA. At double the minimum wage. He provides health care, lunch, and English instruction to his employees. What's next? Stock options for all low-level employees, of course.

I bring this up because it reflects the strange transitional space I have been living in for the past however long, where things are very grey (and not always in the comfortable grey style of Percy Grey Baby), very complex, and often conflicting; a space where it is difficult to find my footing. This dissonance is, indeed, the very stuff of life. As I said above, things are never very simple, and perhaps the key to contentment is giving up the fantasy that they should be simple. If we (and by we I mean me) train ourselves to seek out the anomaly in all situations, maybe we can come to appreciate it and to celebrate the fact that life is often an exercise in managing irony.