Bad Pants

Originally Posted Wednesday, October 15, 2014

I had a great idea yesterday.  After spending all the money I could on pants and a new pair of fat boy slim jeans, I decided to wear a pair of Levi 501 jeans which are fairly skinny on me (I usually wear 565 which are cut like the ones they give to prisoners on highway cleanup duty).  They were traditional with the button fly.  I thought that I was very sharp as the pants cost 1/3 of what I paid for the fat boy slim pants. 

Nope.  I was ridiculed. 

"These are cool, right?" 

"Uh. . . in the '80s."

"What!?!?!  What's wrong with them?"

"They are too light.  They don't fit right." 

"They fit like the ones I bought this weekend."

"No they don't." 

Later, I was sitting in my office with another woman who works in another department.  My friend who dissed the jeans came by.

"These jeans are cool, right?" I asked the other friend. 

"My dad would wear those, but he's been dead four years."

"What's wrong with them?"

"They are too light." 

Now I could argue that they are being facetious in their judgement, that saying pants are the wrong color tone is just stupid. . . but I know better.  Aesthetics.  They are real.  I had that argument with an architect friend once.   He held the same idea about kids and their taste in clothing though he was dogged in his taste in buildings, about the right and wrong of design. 

"There are aesthetics to dressing whether you recognize them or not," I said to him and his girlfriend who was backing him. 

"It is silly bullshit," they contended. 

"My uncle and cousins can build a room.  They just added one onto their house.  They just put up walls and a roof, ran some electric wires and they were done.  Now it is an extra bedroom.  It is just as good as something designed by F.L. Wright." 

He paused.  "Well," he said, "you might have a point." 

I don't want to criticize what I don't understand.  I'll put the pants back on the hanger (I'm too cheap to just throw them away).  I'll wear them someday to an AARP meeting. 

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The day is gloomy, a prophecy of the coming weather.  The south hangs heavy and green but without summer's fertility.  Emotional weather is coming.  Hugging and kissing rather than. . . or so it seems.