Tag Archives: pants

Pants. PAAANNNNTTS

Overall I am not fussy about my appearance. Sometimes I think I am and then I meet people who spend much more time on personal grooming than I do and I realize I am quite low maintenance. This is fine if you always spend your time with small children and other parents of small children. Standards are low. (Maybe that’s why I stayed home so long? No, it isn’t.) Eventually you, I mean I, might have to go work in an office with people who dress properly and you/I have to wear something.

Ugh, wearing something. Not that I’d rather go to work naked because think of the germs. Also, I’m frequently cold when fully clothed so nudity in March is not for me. But figuring out what to wear vis a vis the weather, the office functions (client day or no client day), my personal style, age, and preferences, and ugh. It’s 5:45 am. Can’t I just wear my bathrobe?

I like looking nice, by my own admittedly low standards, so I’m not going to be that person who just commits to jeans and a sweatshirt and flips the bird at the boss. And I like clothes. I like having choices of clothes to wear. I like wearing clothes that make me feel comfortable, and confident, and competent. To that end, I have been doing some shopping for pants-that-aren’t-jeans-and-made-more-recently-than-2010 and have run into a predictible pants obstacle.

There is always something disagreeable about the year’s fashion choices and I had decided to embrace it rather than be mad at it. Approaching pants-shopping like “Wow, all these great pants!” instead of “Geez all the pants are stupid this year.” But there is a pant trend this year that involves pants stopping just above your ankle and I just can’t get behind it. Cropped pants that hit at the calf or just below the knee, OK. But pants that hit just above the ankle just look like they’re the wrong length. Maybe it’s because I’m tall and I’ve already spent many years dealing with “R” length pants that look too short and make me look ill-kitted. I’m not keen to look like I had a growth spurt at age 41.

There are also floral pallazo pants available for purchase this season. Seriously, a lot of them. So maybe I *could* get away with pyjamas at work?

Yeah. Bathrobe, I think. I could be The Lady Dude.

House Pants, Revisited

Several years ago, for my birthday, my mother wanted to buy me some nice yoga pants. We went to the Lululemon factory outlet store (don’t google, it no longer exist) and I tried on a lot of different pants and observed that their pants give everyone The Toe (you know the kind I mean. The camel kind). I chose a pair of non-stretchy, more-like-harem pants in the biggest size they had, which was 12, and we moved on with our lives. That was FOUR YEARS AGO! also an Olympic year.

Oh how I grew to love those pants. They were comfortable, non-binding, airy and light. I did not wear them to exercise, but around the house. I called them My House Pants and when I came home from anywhere, even the park, I put on my House Pants and I was home. Even when — especially when? — stay at home parenting is your full time job, it’s important to divide the day into work and not work. Or some other fuzzy line that everyone can place for him or herself.

In the Fall of 2013, I washed my house pants and the elastic waistband didn’t dry properly or in enough time or something and it took on a funk. The smell of mildew, or clothes-that-sit-around-too-long-in-the-washer. I washed them several times, used vinegar, pine-sol, stain remover, magic voodoo sauce, to no avail. The waistband of my favourite pants smelled bad. And no, the waistband is not near my face, but it is the only part of the house pants that touched my body, so my body’s heat would sometimes activate the smell and then I would get a whiff that was bad and you know, house pants are for RELAXING, not making you feel bad about your smell.

I kept them in the drawer for a while and then, recently, I gave them away, rationalizing that maybe some other genius person in the world would be able to get the smell out, or maybe a person who has no sense of smell could buy them and enjoy them, since they were otherwise in fantastic shape, having only really been worn around the, you know, HOUSE for four years.

This left me with a lack of house pants and this was sad, especially as it is winter, the season when we most need house pants.

I purchased some tights on a whim and they have worked out great as running tights but they are not so comfortable for lounging around the house.

I purchased some cheap flowy-style yoga-ish pants but they are shiny fabric’d and remind me of Elvis and have no pockets.

I have been wearing flannel polka-dot pyjama pants but the waist is held by a ribbon and it’s always coming undone and also they have no pockets.

WOE IS ME.

Yesterday my mother called me.

“I was given some yoga pants,” she said. “They are too long for me. Would you like them?”

Leaving aside the question of who gives another person yoga pants (except I know you’re curious, so the answer is: the friend of my mother’s who is a relative of someone who works in or near a yoga pant factory) I had the feeling these pants would work for me. She described them as harem-style, with an elastic waist, and pockets, and drawstring around the ankles. It was too much to hope that they would be the same style as my dearly beloved and recently so stinky house pants but hope I did because what is a life without hope.

Today, my mother met me at the mall and we had coffee and shopped for things and she gave me the house pants and THEY ARE NEARLY* EXACTLY THE SAME.

*they are pleated and I think they might be a size 10 (there is no label) and the inseam is shorter than the old house pants but other than that, they are the same. Same! Same! Pants!

It was an average, ordinary day, and then my new house pants came home.

Here is a picture of my trying to show you my pants. In the House kind of yoga this pose is called “teenage flamingo.”

2014-01-15-133243

Ten — You Have to Cover Your Butt with Something

Summer has sort of arrived and I have Pants Issues.

In warm weather, I like short pants. Not shorts, never shorts unless I am running recreationally. And not SKORTS because I just have a thing against skorts. I trace it back to my adolescence when I was shopping for a cute skirt and all the skirts I thought were cute actually had shorts attached. It was the betrayal that stayed with me, not any actual objection to skorts, per se.

Well except for the word SKORT, which I hate.

Skirts are OK, but I don’t feel I have the right blend of semi-dressy-casual shirts to go with skirts. A skirt feels dressier than pants, it just does. It feels like it would necessitate a lifestyle change. I would love the perfect casual skirt that I could wear with my assortment of knit, various coloured, v-neck t-shirts. Anyone have one?

Which leads us to pants, my summer bottom covering of choice. I used to have linen capri pants and I loved them and they’re gone. LETTING IT GO. Recent years have found me in an assortment of light cotton beige pants and last year I decided I will no longer be buying beige pants because they match my skin and that freaks me out when I look at myself in a full length mirror.

After some browsing, last year I bought a pair of grey, cotton capris at MEC and they were awesome — an investment at $40 but I do tend to keep pants for years and years if I love them — and I was happy to find them in the summer box this year and happy to wear them, exactly twice, before they got washed with lip balm or something oily and now they have a giant oily patch on the left front pocket. It looks like I peed on myself, basically. So even though I Shopped for Pants just last summer, now I have to do it again (although a friend tells me I can get an oil stain out of cotton by rubbing eucalyptus into it? I will try this) and lo, I am cranky.

The other day I stopped at Reitmans (apostrophe? No apostrophe? Don’t care enough to google) and tried on what I thought were going to be the perfect blue plaid pants — oh, I am such a sucker for plaid. I tried one size and it felt too big but the smaller size felt too small so I went with the bigger.

I bought them, yes I did, and when I got them home, realized that they are just too big. I look like a clown in them. Reitmans just always seems like a good idea and then it isn’t; the pants I like have no pockets and the sizing is messed up. I should just not go in there. But now I have to go back and return the pants.

Meanwhile it’s HOT out and #whine.

Pants, man. Pants.