People...couples, families...who dress alike have always deeply disturbed/annoyed me. It's just another way of showing THE WORLD to whom one is attached. Except with less bodily fluids. (On that note, we encountered another lovely young couple whose love was so great that they couldn't stop pawing each other and swapping spit in our local coffee hangout. It almost put me off my panini. Almost.)

When I see those couples, usually American, who dress alike, I always wonder if it was a conscious decision on their part, or if they've just been around each other for so long that they've just about become one. It's like the people who look like their dogs. Or the other way around. You know what I mean.

As I was ferrying my mother around today on her errands, while my dad lay in bed feverish and anemic (we found that out later), I observed an older couple. We had taken the dog for a ride in the car up to the Safeway. But I realized that it was too hot for him to wait in the car (and for me too), so I decided to take him for a stroll in the shade of the building. While we were waiting (impatiently) by the "out" door, this older coupled approached from the parking lot.

What struck me was not the fact that they were dressed alike. They weren't wearing matching running shoes, t-shirts, or hats. In fact, the man was wearing, just barely, a button up shirt, unbuttoned, exposing his horrific middle-aged man gut and manboobs. I looked to see what his wife looked like. If that had been my parents, my mother's embarassment would have been obvious, especially because she would have been visibly admonishing my dad and telling him to do up his shirt. But this guy's wife was oblivious. She was walking beside him like nothing was wrong. And that's when it hit me...as I looked back and forth between the two of them: they were physically pretty much the same person. They had the same gut, and their boobs were just about the same size.

I don't know if it was the heat, or my considerable intellect, but my inner dialogue switched to the topic of this couple. What makes it somewhat acceptable (yet thoroughly distasteful) that this guy can flash his gut and manboobs to the innocent public while his wife can't? His were either the same size or possibly bigger than hers. And which is more offensive? It is more natural, in some ways, for the women to have the boobies. Wouldn't that mean that his are more taboo, and therefore should be hidden?

I'm not sure where I'm going with this. I wish that I had a neat little way of wrapping this up. Perhaps I'll suggest that that guy should have wrapped his up.