It's so nice on a Friday night to come home to a quiet building (everyone gone out) and to sit in the quieter yet of my apartment without a note of music anywhere, just the interminable drip drip drip from the old faucet.

After my haircut today, I asked the stylist to dry my hair straight. I almost never do this because I like to see the cut in curl, and I almost never wear my hair straight because I don't really feel like myself when I do. So I don't know why I felt like straightening it today. A wild hair?

But then I left the salon and immediately I noticed people turning to look at me. It was almost certainly the straight hair and all that it represents for people, whatever that is. If I had to guess I'd say it has to do with popular notions of what is attractive, and I think it explains to a large degree why it is that many women who have curly hair go to great lengths to straighten it.

It's amazing and a bit disappointing how easy it is to dress a part. You wear a certain type of outfit, you turn a certain kind of head. Yvonne calls this "social drag," a term I've wholeheartedly embraced since she told me about it. It's easy to manipulate gaze—and acceptance. Sometimes I like to play, in my own subtle ways, with the accessories or styles of different subcultures to make people think they're seeing "someone" they're not. I'm unchanged, but people see what they want to see.

I notice that many people, especially women, are afraid of falling out of the larger social gaze and of the gaze of men in particular. That's what happens when you don't dress the part. For these women, their "drag" becomes persona. And men in drag are a good caricature of the everyday efforts of women to be seen.

Tonight, Andrew and I were sitting in the Nordstrom cafe having coffee before heading up the hill to home when we saw a shoplifter dash out of the store carrying several brightly colored handbags.

At first I thought she was running to catch a bus, but then she kept on going right into traffic. Two yuppie-looking men were on her tail, and I thought, Oh, they're catching the bus too. But then one caught the shoplifter by the arm and swung her around hard in the middle of the street. She struggled to get free, but they twisted her arms around her, and she was generally no match for their size.

They pushed her up against the window inches from where we sat. We could hear her crying out, like any living thing caught and held. I was shocked, not knowing who the men were, even if I could identify the woman as a shoplifter. We saw them working handcuffs onto her wrists. Were they security guards? Police? Were they allowed to do what they were doing? Would they brutalize her right there on the street?

A man approached and began to yell at them. He looked like Morrissey in the early nineties. He said, "Times are tough. It's hard for people. You be good to her!" When the men ignored him, he stepped closer and one of the men held up a palm to his face while the other man ratcheted down the handcuffs. Then the men turned, with the woman and bags heldly firmly between them, and all four people—the men, the woman in handcuffs, and the man issuing admonishments—strode down the sidewalk and out of sight. I thought they might re-enter the building, but they didn't, and I worried for not being able to see where they were taking her.