The Other Part of Prodigal

If you look up the word prodigal in the dictionary, you get words like spend-thrift, profligate, and wastrel. These are all good definitions of how one goes about becoming prodigal, but not how one goes about being prodigal. While becoming prodigal involves a great deal of action, primarily ill-advised action, being prodigal involves such complete inaction as to render oneself invisible. Being prodigal involves being lost. Being prodigal is the absence that is only seen when a single member of a pair is visible.

So how does prodigal have anything to do with socks. It has to do with creating only ONE sock. It has to do with challenging the idea that socks only come in pairs. It has to do with creating a lot of individual socks that are sometimes deceptively similar in size and shape, but otherwise completely unique.

What does Prodigal have to do with wearing socks? It has to do with wearing socks that might be made from the same skein of yarn, and might not. It has to do with wearing socks that have absolutely nothing to do with each other aesthetically. We're not talking one brown sock and one navy blue, here.

What does it mean when you wear socks that cannot be blamed on a dark morning or a inattention to detail, socks that are so radically different from each other that even color-blindness cannot be plead? It means that above the hem you conform and below it you retain your rights.

It means a political statement. It means that one has chosen NOT to part one's hair. It means choosing NOT to wear casual togs (that actually cost more than formal business attire) on "Casual Friday." It means choosing NOT to wear "business casual" when one is doing business. It means choosing to say, publically, that the Kafeteria Kulture is dead and Less is NOT More. Less is Less.

I want Less Monotonous Manufactured Crap. I want luxury and diversity.

That means consistently wearing business clothes to work along with socks that appear to be, but are not mismatched. They cannot be mismatched because they are matchlessly and luxuriously beautiful.