hooray, pants!
Jan. 12th, 2009 12:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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wotw, I bring you: Comic Jeanius, a selection of some of the best pants stories you've ever heard before.
The chief objection I have to this list is that I did not have a chance to contribute to it. Which is actually just as well, since this was a contest for a pair of women's pants and so it appears to have been chiefly women who wrote in.
But I'm not about to let that stop me. What are your best pants stories? Don't be shy, we're all friends here. Most of us, at least.
I'll start:
I do not care for pants in warm weather. Not in the least. There have been years when between April to October I have not worn anything on my legs for even a moment. I keep myself well stocked in shorts so I can avoid cloaking my legs in suffocating, sweltering trousers.
Until a few years ago one of my backup shorts was a pair of very short cutoff jeans. Very, very, very short. Actually kind of alarmingly short. In fact, there was not much material left in the crotch but the seam. They were not (usually) my first choice for wearing when going out in public, but if it was a choice between the Shorts of Extreme Immodesty and wearing the dreaded pants, on any day warmer than about 65dF, there was no real contest.
On just such a day, a very warm day in Chicago, I joined some of my friends and co-workers on campus for lunch on the quads. We passed the time, as we usually did in those days, making obscure in-jokes and carrying on bizarrely obscure geeky arguments. Then there came one of those lulls in the conversation, a moment where everyone's sentences came to an end at the same moment and there was dead silence in our little group.
It was that moment that Sid chose to comment, just a little bit louder than he needed, "You know, Tim, your manbag is showing."
I stopped. I was sitting cross-legged and hadn't really worried much about it -- as you all know, modesty is not really my strong suit. But I glanced down to check. And it was not just showing. It was really more like "lying on the grass." If any passersby noticed, they might have been forgiven for thinking that the baloney had fallen out of my sandwich.
I gathered myself up as my friends all started throwing their food at Sid. And I found myself wearing those shorts much less often after that. And "manbag" entered our group lexicon as an unspoken tribute to the incident.
wotw, I bring you: Comic Jeanius, a selection of some of the best pants stories you've ever heard before.The chief objection I have to this list is that I did not have a chance to contribute to it. Which is actually just as well, since this was a contest for a pair of women's pants and so it appears to have been chiefly women who wrote in.
But I'm not about to let that stop me. What are your best pants stories? Don't be shy, we're all friends here. Most of us, at least.
I'll start:
I do not care for pants in warm weather. Not in the least. There have been years when between April to October I have not worn anything on my legs for even a moment. I keep myself well stocked in shorts so I can avoid cloaking my legs in suffocating, sweltering trousers.
Until a few years ago one of my backup shorts was a pair of very short cutoff jeans. Very, very, very short. Actually kind of alarmingly short. In fact, there was not much material left in the crotch but the seam. They were not (usually) my first choice for wearing when going out in public, but if it was a choice between the Shorts of Extreme Immodesty and wearing the dreaded pants, on any day warmer than about 65dF, there was no real contest.
On just such a day, a very warm day in Chicago, I joined some of my friends and co-workers on campus for lunch on the quads. We passed the time, as we usually did in those days, making obscure in-jokes and carrying on bizarrely obscure geeky arguments. Then there came one of those lulls in the conversation, a moment where everyone's sentences came to an end at the same moment and there was dead silence in our little group.
It was that moment that Sid chose to comment, just a little bit louder than he needed, "You know, Tim, your manbag is showing."
I stopped. I was sitting cross-legged and hadn't really worried much about it -- as you all know, modesty is not really my strong suit. But I glanced down to check. And it was not just showing. It was really more like "lying on the grass." If any passersby noticed, they might have been forgiven for thinking that the baloney had fallen out of my sandwich.
I gathered myself up as my friends all started throwing their food at Sid. And I found myself wearing those shorts much less often after that. And "manbag" entered our group lexicon as an unspoken tribute to the incident.
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no subject
Date: 2009-01-12 05:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-12 09:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-12 05:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-12 06:03 pm (UTC)When I moved to Vermont from North Carolina, I kept on wearing shorts at home year-round even when it was cold outside, and if I needed to run to the store or something I'd just grab a jacket and go on out anyway. One day, though, a set of errands turned into a day-long affair and when night fell there I was, walking down the cobbled-over marketplace in downtown Burlington, Vermont on a day when it was 13 degrees Fahrenheit, wearing shorts and a Durham Bulls baseball jacket, chatting with my wife and thinking nothing of it. Until a couple of very cold-looking women, well-bundled up, stopped us and asked "Are you... are you from ALASKA?"
I looked blank for a second and said "Um, no. Virginia, originally."
Then I looked down at my legs and figured out why they were asking. Then I looked back up and saw that my answer had made them *more* bothered. If I could read their minds, I'd guess that they were very unsettled by the idea of someone from the South being hardier and tougher in cold weather than *they* were.
(It wouldn't have been the first time that I disrupted the Vermont stereotype of southerners being all wussified vis-a-vis the cold. I'm much more capable of handling it, actually, than many lifelong Vermonters.)
no subject
Date: 2009-01-12 06:06 pm (UTC)No, really? Would never have guessed.
no subject
Date: 2009-01-12 08:25 pm (UTC)Modesty? And you?
*giggles some more*
no subject
Date: 2009-01-12 10:01 pm (UTC)