The Immersion

 

The screen on the Huawei phone lights up on top of the Argos nightstand, next to the Ikea lamp in a bedroom made with building material from a source I ignore, I pull my Primark duvet and cover set from me and step onto the Homebase carpets while I scan with my yet untouched eyes for my pair of Westwood Specsavers glasses. I look at the screen through the Varilux lenses and see that it's 7:40 am. I unlock the device, my password is related to the Sunday when I was born in the public funded university hospital in Brasilia, Brazil. 'Check your memories', one of the apps say, the one with a blue dinosaur character that makes supposedly motivational remarks about my past, "you looked stunning", it says. The video it refers to is a representation of a dark winter morning in which I used the Leica lenses and led flashlight to find my New Look pyjamas in the dark. All you can see is the Homebase carpets and some clothes from TkMaxx (TjMaxx in the US). I looked stunning, though.

 I put on my Cast Essential underwear as I recall that past boyfriends had already made remarks on how much I "didn't care" for buying underwear in Extra, one of the "Grupo Pão-de-açúcar " (Sugarloaf group in Portuguese) supermarkets in Brazil. In my Irish reality, the equivalent of buying briefs in Tesco's F&F. Not only did he, back then, have a set of unconsciously forbidden silhouettes, brands and locations to buy underwear in, but also deemed unacceptable that any person involved or aiming to be involved with him didn't abide by the same inconspicuous mental list. As I put my sales FARRELL jeans (a supposedly upmarket Primark range, Primark being the operator of British owned, Irish founded, Penneys, even though it couldn't be called that outside Ireland where American JC Penney's has the right to use the name) ,  I realized that the idea didn't derive from his own aesthetic values but the formation of his economical being, which includes early blogs from condescending gay men to whom he looked up. Having been brought up with the same kind of gay men as role model, I couldn't condemn him for assuming my body and "fashion" (what I'd call consumption choices in most of the times when I didn't feel socially engaged) were within his jurisdiction or circle of influence or, worse, the assumption that my existence as a human being with its own set of socio-economic values and choices was second to his viewing pleasure upon looking at my half naked body. But I did question the fact that the critique coming from a person who supposedly liked my personality, bore no remarks on my body as a concrete expression of my individual, but would rather digress - and I'm as straightforward a person as I know in my own monad - to something as unimportant as my underwear, which I had consciously chosen to buy. A choice that stemmed not from an attempt to please his ridiculously black eyes , but from my pragmatically inclined point of view and a budget that, even though he did not approve of, was unable to outline how that made my human experience "less than" instead of just "different". 

I, of course, went quickly through how biased all my thoughts are and how I'm using the fact that someone "so materialistic" stepped over their line of influence into my personal space to criticize my choices, when they too were made based on early blogs and ideas coming from condescending gay men, except with a less apollonian and more dyonisiac point of view. 

7:45, I have, at this stage, ruined my mood for the rest of my getting ready to work routine, which includes brushing my teeth with PS Hollywood Charcoal toothpaste that while probably does whiten my teeth, tarnishes my image as a being who should, as a sign of acknowledgment of my privileges, stick to fairtrade products. The issue being that within my economical shortcomings, I'd have to make a "mindful" choice of either choosing from cheap brands of underwear and thus feeding a market that is terribly unfair on developing economies and upsetting people's expectations on my body and aesthetic values, or buy cosmetics from people that promised results but couldn't ensure that there is no cruelty, be it to animals or to people, in the production of stain lifting toothpaste. The ideal choice being not getting my teeth stained in the first place and refusing, in one of the biggest tea drinking nations, to have so many cups of tea. My Vietnamese Colgate toothbrush might also be liable to questioning from me or someone else, but I did not want to go into that unimportant a matter. Instead, I trimmed the edges of my beard with a Babyliss trimmer in the hopes of getting a sharper look, also in denial that the whole reason why I grew a beard at first was to feed my "masculinity" and state that, even though I am a man who's gay, my body was not any other man's territory because of my diminute size or high pitched voice. I did realize later that I was being sexist by wanting to get away from "feminine" to avoid oppression from other men, when instead the ideal position would have been to attack the oppression itself and its representation on my exes way too black eyes (for someone who was not wearing contact lenses, either Varilux or some other brand he would have given "thumbs up" to) or just grow a beard with the intent of avoiding any resemblance between my face and McVities rich tea biscuits. 

I will not dwell on all this negativity, honestly I just wanted to get ready to work and maybe check the news of other disgusting people interacting in a questionable way with their surroundings, using a supposedly stingy phone app in comparison to the paid app that includes the full articles. I decide to dive into escapism/ self-indulgence and upload pictures of the park nearby, a recommended post interrupts me and tells me to diet quickly before summer and I'm suggested to follow some other condescending gay man whose life consists of telling people to live by his own rules, which didn't come out of thin air, but from a build up of interactions leading towards defining our bodies as liable for dispute. This body is mine, I scream internally in case the neighbors decide to finally lock me up if I actually shout it. I put on my Converse black canvas shoes and a t-shirt that says I love Penneys (the same pronunciation of penis in Portuguese) and stride in a debatably manly confident way towards a 10 hour shift in which I cater for people who do not see this body and mind as mine, but, like a taxi with its lights turned on, I am on duty.