Substance died screaming, killed magnificently by form

by effenheimer at 04:35 PM on January 02, 2003

Appearances matter. Sorry to say so, but it’s true. We like to tell ourselves that deep down, it is what a person is made of or capable of that matters most, but don’t believe it for a second. In the battle between substance and form, substance died screaming of a sucking chest wound years ago. I think it was when “Smoky and the Bandit” came out.

Think about every place you ever worked in your entire life. Promotions and kudos are not the domain of the grubby yet hard working. In the many places I have worked from Taco John’s to the Psychic Hotline, those witth clear skin, symmetrical features and nice shoes have succeeded regardless of how high they might have scored on an intelligence test.

My advice is dress for success and success will be yours whether you deserve it or not.

I worked with a couple of guys at my college paper who couldn’t put two good words together. One was a sweet, little fella with pretty blue eyes and “Friends” hair. This guy once said – outloud mind you – that Hansen should have won artist-of-the-year over Bob Dylan. He now works at MTV asking boy bands where they get their ideas.

The other kid was a vaccuous, dull-eyed airhead who thought the word “lustrous” was dirty and couldn’t tell her art from her elbow. She works as an A&E writer now constructing insipid leads of pure fiction. Good thing mommy and daddy had friends, huh?

What both of these wastes of skin represent in my mind is proof positive that form beats substance every time. Each was gifted with the most inpenetrable sense of entitlement based solely on that house of cards that is social status.

Each “looked” like somebody’s ideal professional journalist because they spent more money on clothes, haircuts and make-up every year than on rent and food. Frankly, they would have looked like anybody’s ideal Taco John’s assistant manager, Psychic Hotline night supervisor or White House Communications Director. It doesn’t really matter.

Looks work better than anything. Why? People are completely taken in by appearances. We want to sum others up as quickly as possible because getting to know them is a painful, time-consuming and boring process.

No one is ever going to suddenly think a guy whose breath smells like warm cotto salami is a valuable person of great insight and sensitivity in spite of the fact he can’t get it together enough to brush his teeth. So get used to it. Get a haircut. Buy a suit. You could be Gandhi, Nikola Tesla and Howard Hughes all rolled into one, but if you walk around in a crusty diaper with a bad hairdo and dirty, long fingernails, no one will care. Comic shops and game stores are filled with guys who are pretty sure they are smarter than the average bear, but never got anywhere because they like to wear shirts with wizards on them that don’t quite cover their stomachs. Trust me, if you can spend $1,000 a month on Pokemon, you can afford clothes made this century.

Stop riding kid’s bikes in jeans and workboots. Realize the “mustachioed mullethead” is not a good look. Feed caps ... hello, tacky. Take a shower, buy some nice slacks, get a current haircut.

We waste far too much precious time in schools these days trying to teach children NOT to judge others by their appearance when what we should be teaching them is how to take advantage of the situation. We should teach courses like “How to look good on $25 a week,” “Dressing thin for fat people,” “How to cover up bad skin with makeup and scarves,” “Expensive shoes – the shortcut to success and nightclubs.”