Schur's Lemma

On buying shoes, performing identities and being uncomfortable

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There is one swear word at the very end of the essay portion of this letter.

SCHUR’S LEMMA*

In this past week I spent a lot of time thinking about buying shoes for work.

I have a very simple relationship to shoes. I buy a pair, I wear them out, I buy the exact same pair again. When I am really broke, I get whatever color is on sale, but my style, brand and model choices don’t really change. I wear Doc Martens and Converse All Stars because I started wearing them as a teenager. Back then, I cared more about using clothes as a signal of my, very cliché, interpretation of subcultural allegiances. I run in Nikes because I ran in Nikes when I was a track team captain, around the same time. I was too broke to buy more professional track shoes. I bought heels to graduate high school in and re-wore them for our wedding. I bought heels to graduate college in and re-wore them for every engagement party or wedding we have been invited to since. I briefly flirted with a pair of creepers in college and a pair of semi-professional loafers in graduate school, but never committed to more than one pair of each.

In recent years, I have become less preoccupied with always being perfectly put together, no longer being embarrassed by the idea that someone may see me in sweatpants at the grocery store or make-up-less at the farmer’s market. However, I still think of dressing myself as something like billboard assembly. In my mind, everything I wear combines to send a message, to brand me and contextualize me. I have always been taken by how here in New York City there are men and women that do actually look like they stepped off of a fashion advice website. For years I thought that all the listicles of trends and themes deemed worthy of spending your money on in this particular season or that were more or less just a content-churning scheme that also brought in advertising dollars. Getting out of small-town Illinois would then often remind me that in different places you signal status differently. In different places you chose to brand yourself as being parts of different groups. You chose your bubble then plaster its markers all over yourself. Those in the know can decipher it, even when the name of the game is minimalism or feigned simplicity.

Teaching at a large, high-ranking state school brought this to my attention constantly as well. With a student body split between in-state students from the suburbs and international students the university really made its profits off of, popularity of certain clothing items or brands seemed to run along a few parallel tracks. After teaching any large general education course, you could guess what pocket of the undergraduate population a student was trying to fit in with, the most obvious examples being gear overflowing with brand-name logos or Greek life insignia. I would catch myself looking at a pair of slippers or an oversized sweatshirt a student had thrown on for an early morning problem solving session and thinking that I knew who they must be based on that choice. I’d have to correct myself and give my underslept mind a stern reminder that people are more complicated than what they advertise with their body. Regardless, the gut reaction, the fast judgement we have of each other often relies on visuals first.

Often, queer people have a heightened understanding of how misleading this construction of who a person is from what they look like can be. To me, queerness has always been about complicating it, maybe even playing games with it. In recent years, we have started talking about gender in more complex ways, acknowledging that gendering someone based on their physical characteristics can sometimes fail, and sometimes cause harm. Certainly, this conversation is more prominent in academic bubbles and it still has a long way to go. We are often reminded of its importance by elected officials that do not hold back on legislating if not gender itself but then everything related to the expression of it. There is an incongruence, however, between the pushback to the idea of gender being a construct and the love many people have for over-the-top performers in showbusiness and the arts who are most certainly drawing eyeballs and emotional investment by constructing their identities then playing them up. This is crucial for success in the public eye, even now when social media has brought celebrities seemingly much closer to us than they were in the past. In many ways, they just start performing themselves once they are constantly accessible to their fans. It is probably not controversial to claim that queer people always led the charge on this front, always modeled what it means to have a persona, what it means to perform, what it means to subvert expectations conveyed by visuals only. This is not surprising given how many have historically had to perform being someone who they are not just to be safe.

***

Buying shoes for work then, feels like planning a new performance, a construction of someone new I might have to be day-to-day. It makes me think of doing drag: being able to becomes someone very different and very stylized, but also someone that you have to truly work to put on. If a student looks at my work shoes, what will they think of me? What about a colleague I hadn’t met before? Or just another person on the subway platform, maybe also going to work, maybe returning from the kind of long, long night that I have not had in such a long time? And will any of the people they see have anything to do with me once I kick them off?

It seems silly, but in this odd time when we leave our home so infrequently and interact with strangers so sparsely, I am sharply aware of the power distribution in any of those situations. An older colleague judging me, a new hire, harshly may end up being a problem for me. A student feeling intimidated by my being too formal may end up being a very different problem. Whatever signal I chose to send with my appearance should not lay ground for an erection of barriers. And because I have no idea where the line between unprofessional and accessible actually lies, I start work in less than a week but have not bought shoes yet.

When I think of a woman in professional shoes, inevitably I picture her in a pair of sensible heels. And wearing heels has always felt like an unscalable summit on the imposing and intimidating mountain range that is traditional femininity. I have always cycled between something like tomboyishness and some comic-book-like version of femininity (my proclivity for winged eyeliner and a strong eyebrow being the most permanent side effect), but the pandemic has given me fewer excuses to perform the latter and more chances to just lounge around in workout clothes or t-shirts only slightly different from those belonging to my husband. A few weeks ago, when I had a day to myself and ventured deeper into the city for the sake of a good vegan sandwich, I picked through a variety of outfits I thought I’d take for a spin this summer – skirts, dresses, crop tops and one-pieces that signal confidence and boldness – then settled on a pair of leggings and a sports bra I’d usually wear to run, only slightly dressed up. It was the only thing that felt right on my body.

I have lost the daily ritual of the two-step program of putting on make-up and having a strong cup of Turkish coffee to get ready to leave the house and be a-person-at-work. Now there is also no set time for me to go to the gym and take that work drag off in favor of something simpler and more visceral. I do put on make-up for virtual meetings, but it does not feel routine anymore. It feels like a chore regardless of how much I love my overlined face. The thing that drag performers always talk about is not just being able to take it all off after the show is over, but also how putting it all on can serve as a catalyst for channeling some inner self that usually does not get much outwardly representation. The put-together-woman that used to live inside of me seems to be deeply asleep, if she is there at all. And so, she can’t help me pick a pair of shoes.

***

My mom teaches high school too. When I was young, she would sometimes take me to school with her. I’d watch her English students discuss Shakespeare or practice adding ‘s’ to the end of verbs in third person singular. I’d watch her too. She always wore makeup to work and, at least in my memory, in early years lots of skirts and shoes with heels. Eventually she started wearing jeans and flats, sometimes to disapproval of her older colleagues. My grandmother would comment on it as well; she is part of a generation that feels that being a teacher means being formal, stiff and put together.

Of course, traditional notions, and heteronormative notions, of femininity are coded into that. Jeans can be sexy, but they are not a hallmark of respectful womanhood. People like my grandma are acutely aware of that distinction though they may not always be able to verbalize it. Accordingly, the mother-in-law I share a household with now approved of my buying two pairs of slacks in preparation for the beginning of the school year. There’s irony to this: in my mind buying pants meant doubling-down on my flirting with androgyny and giving up on trying to do what my mom had done so well for years.

Another thing I remember from my childhood is all this talk about “real women” who get their nails done, who get regular haircuts and don’t have to dye their hair at home, who wear perfume and don’t buy dresses on sale. When I was young, these statements were certainly more about socioeconomic class than they were about gender. It is probably still true that a traditional performance of gender is a privilege you have to, at least partly, buy. Being poor and feminine is always seen through a very different lens than femininity that comes with the backing of recognizable labels and the polish afforded by money and someone else’s labor. It made me self-conscious to realize this as a teenager, and even more so once I moved to the United States and started meeting women that actually had the means to buy all the realness they wanted. However, for the first time in a very long time, I could be few paychecks away from being able to afford to be the “real woman” of the casual comments of my childhood. But I’d have to prove it to myself that that is what I really want first.

***

A day before I started physically going to work my husband and I went shopping. Inadvertently fully denying our adulthood as real-people-with-real-jobs, we got a ride to the mall from his mom and slinked into a Macy’s through a back door that was somehow judged to be the most pandemic-proof entryway into the store. I bought a pair of blocky, black kitten heels with a pointed toe. Probably a pretty common first serious job shoe for many, and with a sticker price that was reasonable even before we cashed in some seasonal discounts.

The next day, I woke up early, made it through a fairly long commute in as good of a mood as this time allows for, and had a decent first day. I walked around a new-to-me building where my new office is and kept meeting new people. I filled out many forms. I politely and quietly encouraged myself to speak up and participate in meetings. It all went surprisingly well. Except for one thing: all the other teachers were comfortably running around in sneakers and my feet were fucking killing me.

Best,

Karmela

*Schur’s Lemma is an important statement in mathematical theory of group representations. It is essential for a couple of proofs that are at the foundation of representation theory of finite groups. Here, groups are objects made up some elements (think numbers) and rules for some operation (think addition or multiplication). Their representations are maps, they take each group element and translate it into a function. Schur’s lemma expresses a rule for how different representations of a single group relate to each other when they have certain properties.

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ABOUT ME LATELY

WRITING: I had a short news item about a new theoretical study for controlling light through interactions with ultracold atoms run in the New Scientist. This is a really cool study, showing off the potential of ultracold atoms as a finely tunable tool and making unexpected connections to 17th century ideas about waves. My only regret is that I wasn’t commissioned to write a longer piece about it!

LEARNING: In the last week before starting work, I slacked off  a bit more than usual. We ended up spending a day at the beach twice in a row, eating take-out for lunch on both days and I skipped long runs in favor of long but leisurely walks and brisk shuffling from one iteration of public transit to another. I learned two things. I have routines because they keep me grounded. At the same time, my reliance on those routines is at times too inflexible to actually be useful. Which is to say that a day and a half into my slacking off, instead of feeling more rested and more joyous I was feeling cranky and unsettled. Seeing friends at the beach bought me some good-times-outside-of-my-head, but when left to my own thoughts I was reminded of how much the issues of maintaining my mental health requires continuous, consistent learning.

And then there is learning to be a new employee, to be the least experienced employee and probably visibly the youngest employee. Luckily, everyone at my new school has been really friendly and supportive. If we were still in the habit of shaking hands, I would have shaken so, so many that were, at this time, metaphorically extended my way. Everything could, of course, go haywire at any time given that we are operating under heavy pandemic uncertainty, but learning how to not just teach, but also be in a workplace again feels more reasonable than just panicking.

LISTENING: Refrain by Boris and Z. O. A. and Boris’ LOVE & EVOL. I liked the first but did not love it. It had just a touch more psychedelia and softness than I think Boris’ more drone-y, noise-y sound really needed. The latter was more my speed though the band took some detours and chances here as well. Here, however, they went in the other direction, throwing in more static and grating, scratchy texture to their music. I enjoy that sort of thing more broadly so it’s not much of a surprised that it worked for me here too.

A lot more Orville Peck. I’m still not sure he is actually any good, but he has style and bravado and I have a minor soft spot for cowboy-adjacent anything.

Cheap Queen by King Princess which is such a smooth, relaxed and comfy record that still manages to pack in some punches and a bit of edge. It reminds me of my past Lucy Dacus phase, but with a heavier implication of dancing, boozy summer house parties and overt queerness. I’ll probably be giving this one a lot more spins on the train or very early walks to work.

READING: This poem by Jean Valentine and this one by David Berman.

This Vox article by Terry Nguyen about explainer slideshows on Instagram. Nguyen explores how they walk the line between subverting an algorithm that would usually not put revolutionary messages on top of your feed and turning activism into just another quick consumable with little fact-checking, little staying power, but lots of aesthetic value.

About thirty pages of Gravity’s Rainbow.

WATCHING: We finished watching Too Old To Die Young and are making our way through the last few episodes of Halt and Catch Fire.

The end of Too Old To Die Young did nothing to convince me that this show was anything more than a major indulgence, at times probably one that is pretty oblivious to what things look like in the real world, by Nicolas Winding Refn. The amount of violence, of gore, of unnecessarily perverted sex, it all just kept escalating at a rate that made it feel like a cake with too much icing and too many sprinkles on top of a purely tasteless sponge. The finale answered no questions, resolved no plot lines and mostly gave us a music video stitched to softcore porn stitched to some more slaughter. Maybe had the whole series been cut down to a two-hour film there could have been some meaning coaxed out of it, but after this sort of a long and slow watching experience, it just didn’t land as anything other than exploitative in an aesthetically intense way.

I am getting somewhat frustrated with Halt and Catch Fire too and wondering whether it really needed so many episodes and seasons. Same old conflicts between same old characters keep getting recycled to keep the story going and their misery is not always pleasant to take in even when presented through, in theory interesting, talk of the development of the early Internet.

EATING: Homemade mushroom, onion and soy chunk pierogis and pickled green tomatoes. My folding is as wonky as it’s been in all my other dumpling endeavors, but I continue to be pleased with myself for being able to make dough from scratch. I very loosely based it all on this recipe.

Arepas stuffed with jalapenos, black beans, plantains and avocado on Rockaway beach. A really amazing beach food discovery. Pasta salad with marinated tofu ‘feta’ on another beach day, courtesy of my husband’s thinking ahead.

Minor meal prep for my first week of out-of-the-house work: maple miso roasted brussels sprouts, potatoes and beets roasted with olive oil, balsamic and rosemary, Japanese sweet potatoes roasted with coconut oil and red chili flakes, “blank slate” baked tofu that we later turned into a sticky stir-fry with broccoli stems, scallions and sesame seeds, a big pile of jasmine rice, marinated chickpeas, and a repeat of these really simple but remarkably flavorful lentils. And a whole lot of ajvar and hummus sandwiches with sliced cucumbers and piles of lettuce, all on a very good, very heavy, very dense rye bread from one of the Russian groceries in our neighborhood.