Things I Love #1: Wolves on T-Shirts

Wolf T-shirts may seem like a fairly obvious place to start a list of things that I love.  And this is fine, because just as dogs can be traced back to wolves, so too can my love of wolf T-shirts be traced back to the movie Contact, which is either Number 2 or Number 3 on the list of best movies made in the last two decades.  And Contact has as its central character the universe, which is where all things originate, and so it seems appropriate that this list should in turn originate from the movie Contact.

I should probably note that wolf T-shirts may or may not actually appear in the movie; each time I watch it I am too distracted by the shrill noise the aliens make with their prime numbers to notice what the astrophysics people are wearing.  But this is immaterial.  Because the characters portrayed in Contact -- the blind guy who listens to stars; the frigid woman who also listens to stars; the fat guy with the ponytail who carves a pumpkin in the lab; the skinny guy with puppy eyes like large pools in his face -- they are the kinds of people who are capable of inspiring average mankind, who help the rest of us glimpse what we could be if we tried.  They are the kinds of people who do not need Bergdorf Goodman or Louis Vuitton or society or soap to give them beauty.  They wear their jeans tapered.  They wear their hair unwashed.  They eat pizza for water.  They are the ultimate cool.

And so I don't need to see wolf T-shirts on their persons on-screen to know that they in fact own them, and love them, and spill on them on a regular basis.  And when I wear my own wolf T-shirt, I feel like I too might be cool enough to converse purely in the language of numbers and to disregard personal hygiene.  Sometimes one has to make oneself look really hideous in order to feel truly beautiful.  This is how igneous rocks get by.

Anyways, I lived many years of my life happily unquestioning this world view.  But then, recently, a friend attempted to show me a link to a product page on Amazon where apparently "thousands" of people have been posting comments about a wolf T-shirt; it's the canonical wolf T-shirt depicting three wolves howling at a moon.  I have not been able to bring myself to look at the site firsthand -- this purported friend read aloud enough inane excerpts for me to conclude that I should never look at it (and he did not stop reading there; hence the purported) -- but its very existence pains me.  Wolves are dignified creatures, not something to be made light of alongside Tuscan Whole Milk.  Even worse are the people who now think they love wolf T-shirts because this fad suggested to them that wolf T-shirts are ironically cool.  That doesn't even make sense.  That would be like lactose intolerants all of a sudden downing Half & Half because the Internet told them dairy was ironically cool.  And don't even get me started on people who think they can pull off "recreationally nerdy" -- those people need to stop, right now, because being recreationally nerdy is basically asking for a punch in the face by a pasty physicist, followed by a smack upside the head by the Louis Vuitton handbag of someone who at least has the decency to acknowledge his or her desire for social currency.

But I can't end on an angry note in a post about Things I Love -- that's saved for posts about Things I Laugh At -- so let me think of something pleasant to say.  Well, I like milk, for one.  I also like Amazon, for buying books.  And I like books.  I am also selling my vintage bookshelf, for anyone who is interested.  Vintage means it's from my childhood.

But basically I've never talked so much about wolves in my life, and now I'm exhausted.  So that's all for now.