The sweater man, to me, is one of J's most memorable people. This man ladens himself with sweaters, the heavy wool kind, wearing upwards of 30 at a time. He spends his life regulating his temperature which is in odd fluctuation due to his sweater habit. Wearing all those extra layers makes him sweat, so he'll take some sweaters off, then the sweats cools and he feels cold again so he puts more on. The effort of putting on so many sweaters makes him hot again, thus the cycle continues. Further complicating matters is that under all these sweaters is the inner most layer, the one that needs to be washed. So every day he goes through a production of removing all the layers in order to wash the inner layer, repeatedly reordering the sweaters to rotate the clean garments, while trying to keep up with his tiresome temperature management.

I used to wonder about the internal drive to behave this way but today I'm struck by the layers themselves. We all have them, but I'll speak for myself, since I know that I've got many layers of additional weight that I've been somewhat arbitrarily wearing. And it's wearing me out.

Sometimes people ask me what I'm doing with my summer, an innocent enough question that shoots straight to my workaholic guilt like an accusation that I'm not doing enough. I think: you're right, I should have published a book or solved world peace or secured a new job or at least gone on a date by now. But the truth of what I'm doing is that...I'm  un-doing. I've spent so many years accumulating all these heavy and exhausting layers that I am now working on taking them off. And the guy is right. It's a lot of work.

There are the perceptions and the misperceptions. The disappointment, the guilt, the regret. The fear - sometime mine and often others' - and its power to dismantle my dreams. The craving for approval, the need to please, the expectations. The career choice, the graduate school(s), the bad decision(s), the exhaustion. The real stuff (like student loan debt), the imaginary (like needing to stay in this job-apartment-life I've made). All cycling through this dirty wash but never coming clean.

What strikes me is how the original issue gets buried under so many layers that the layers themselves become a problem. Never mind what started it, now there's a whole new world of regulating the layers and their conflicts with each other. They take on a life of their own - relating, reproducing - until suddenly sweater management becomes a full-time occupation like a stay at home mom. Lost under cover, masquerading about like the Michelin man, dying for the mummy to be unwrapped, meanwhile...

Buried somewhere under this fabricated mess is the original skin.

"They were both naked...and were not ashamed" (Genesis 2:25)

Ask me again. I dare you. What have I been doing this summer?