Dressing Up

If you are American and you are reading this, you may want to stop reading. This blog post is not very interesting for you because today, I decided to write about odd American things. And of course, you know your funny habits and I am such a sucker for loving them all. You certainly don’t want to read my tender love letter.

The first odd thing: Americans love to dress up. Not as in “dressing up to go to the office” – flip-flops and a hoodie are sometimes as dressed up as it gets in Silicon Valley – but as in “wearing weird clothes to celebrate random things.” Events like Halloween are taken very seriously. People come to the office dressed up as tigers, tomatoes or potatoes.

Last week, when I was volunteering as a roadie on the Aids/LifeCycle – the bike ride from San Francisco to Los Angeles to raise funds for programs to end HIV and aids – we had a different theme every night. My co-workers of the food line enthusiastically dressed up as Julia Child, lumberjacks and '70s dance queens while I – slightly bewildered – served dinner every evening wearing the same cook’s hat.

People dress up for fun and to vent, but also to express their feelings. Last Thursday, the 1,900 riders on the Aids/LifeCycle dressed in red dresses to form a stream of red along the road from Santa Maria to Lompoc, a symbol for solidarity with people living with HIV and aids.

Annelien was so overwhelmed on Thursday that she had a very odd dream at night. She dreamt that she was riding her bike in our Milky Way Galaxy, just like ET and that she saw the planet Earth and the planet Uranus. The interesting thing is, she also discovered the planets Big Hummus and Little Hummus. We wonder whether that says something about her unconscious fears or her desires. Or maybe it just means that you should never go to bed hungry.