Ten Reasons You Can Put On Pants Today
Everyone I know loved obstacle courses as a kid. Every time I’d visit friends who had backyards (those lucky bastards who never sufficiently appreciated the luxury of having enough space to do cartwheels without breaking nice flower vases) we’d put hours of effort into trying to create the most difficult, challenge-filled pathway possible. To be honest, it’s kind of a pity that obstacle courses don’t age well as a popular entertainment option. All you really need to do is find a timer, gather some odds and ends to prance gracefully around, and summon that fierce, insatiable, competitive side that comes out when you’re trying to get in front of “that asshole in the next lane” in heavy traffic. Make sure to have some gloriously useless prize waiting for the winner (Think about the Herculean tasks people at county fairs complete to get a three dollar participation trophy and a 10% off coupon to some local pizza parlour, and let your imagination run from there.) Rubbing alcohol is good for removing remnants of adhesive. Drinkable alcohol takes care of anyone who’s “mature adult” label is stuck on too firmly. And boom. There you go. Adult obstacle courses. Better than Season- Two, Episode-Number-I’m-Ashamed on Netflix, and a hell of a more entertaining way to see how loud you can get before your neighbors complain.
Purposefully-installed obstacles are oodles of fun. Weaving between a bunch of poles is great when you’re a kid on a sunny day or a more grown-up-kid with a wholesome party game, but there are definitely days when weaving between poles is the last thing you want to do. You look stupid,feel clumsy, and barely get anywhere. The subway is crowded and people’s armpits are smelly and your train is delayed. (What other poles could I POSSIBLY have been referring to!? Go hula hoop and finish your apple juice - you need an intervention.) Some days, you like a challenge. Other days, you don’t want to struggle.
Yes. I’m talking about putting on pants.
Whether they’re hanging neatly in your closet, in a heap on the floor, or thrown over the back of The Chair, I know they seem like an insurmountable challenge right now. Difficult roads may lead to beautiful destinations - (a personal favourite of mine is Exit “Yeah..In Five More Minutes” off Route “Get Up and At Em.” But, pants aren’t the destination. They’re more like an obstacle in the jolly course of “Get It Together Or You’ll Be Late.” Some days, the task of putting them on requires some contortion. Like an obstacle course, this task can result in loud swearing and broken lamps - just try putting on skinny jeans when you’re wet after a shower. But sometimes, we have to just get up and feel awkward and uncoordinated as we manage to accidentally shove our foot through the gaping knee-hole that we totally didn’t come pre-torn into our jeans.
So let’s do this. I can’t promise you a discount on your morning coffee, but we both know you’ve got a receipt with a coupon code shoved in some pocket somewhere. Let’s beat today’s obstacle course. I’m giving you Ten Reasons. Choose a suitable one. We’re putting some pants on.
Who do you want to be? What do you want to do?
Ten Pants you Can Put On Today.
1) Put on Smarty Pants. You can spend an hour building up a story about the book you just COULDN’T put down all weekend. Tell them you bought them a copy, and sit on the edge of your chair as you watch them tenderly open a beautifully-wrapped unabridged edition of The Design and Construction of Reinforced Concrete Structures. Volume IV. Hijack your coworkers’ desktops with a wireless mouse and tell people you base dating compatibility on preferred quarks. Flip all the books on the Mystery shelf to face spine-side in and stick some Bibles in the Fiction section.
2) Take a shower, do your hair, and put on Fancy Pants. Go to the fanciest restaurant that you can think of - you’re now well-dressed and fit to order fancy-sounding French Things that you can’t pronounce and heard about on Food Network. Or, in New York City, you can dole out green ten-dollar bills for individual leaves of kale. All served on an iphone opened to Instagram, seasoned with a Saturation slider and dash of Valencia. Or, go to a late-night Dunkin Donuts, order their finest silver needle white tea, fold your hands, and wait expectantly - I won’t judge.
3) Take a risk and Fly By the Seat of Your Pants. Submit papers to Turnitin at 11:59 PM. Lend someone your laptop without clearing the search history! Try a bite from that mysterious tupperware in your fridge. You can finally try skydiving or ask out that cute girl in your class - or you can just start a new Netflix series during finals week. Put on pants and you too, can live dangerously.
4) You can get excited enough about something to have someone tell you to "Keep Your Pants On!" Talk about something in that way that lights up your eyes and makes your whole face start glowing and your hands waving about (and maybe occasionally almost smacking someone.) Be it your favourite book or that beautiful, magical place you discovered, or your best friend getting into their Dream School or even the fact that there exist wine-infused tea bags. The world needs more enthusiasm on Thursdays.
5) Put on Leggings-that-aren’t-pants, eat white chocolate-that’s-not-chocolate with peanut butter made from peanuts-that-are-not-nuts. Don’t even get me started on berries that aren’t berries- I’m a herbivore and I still don’t know the freaking difference. Tell people Koalas are your favourite bears, turn on the news, and tell yourself America’s a great Democracy. A little existential crisis never hurt anyone.
6) Put on pants and spend time with your local Ants-in-Pants-Having-Five-Year-Old. You’ll spend enough time in a playground to avoid the gym for a week, give a Barbie a buzzcut, practice your vocabulary and convoluted sentence structure when answering oodles of delicate questions, and witness enough creativity to launch an Israel’s worth of startups. Plus, I’m dying to know what kids say instead of “Fudge” nowadays. “Tofu?”
7) Put on nice jeans and wear them until they ACTUALLY rip in a cool way. Climb trees, jump fences, fall off of a skateboard a couple hundred thousand times, or try taking pretty photos of splits while in skinny jeans. Each natural rip saves you like, twenty bucks. Nothing more stylish than jeans split in the crotch, right?
8) Scare the pants off someone. Lots of options here! Call a friend and start yelling “Jeez, where are you?! We’ve been waiting for you for ten minutes in the conference room!” Or, tell them that you’re absolutely wasted and you’re going to come visit them at the office and tell everyone “That Thing That They Did” (the more convincingly drunk you sound, the better.) When you’re in an elevator, instead of doing the proper thing and staring at the door for two minutes, face someone directly and make eye contact. Place a recorder that growls softly every now and then in some inconspicuous location.
9)Have someone in your life who puts Fire in Your Pants? Or maybe you’re just in the mood to drive your loved ones up the wall with your impeccable wit and seduction skills? Ask that special someone out! Or spend a day greeting people exclusively with Pick Up Lines. (I swear there are days when I DON’T do this, I promise.) When I see you, my temperature rises FAR above Fahrenheit 451, and you surpass all of my Great Expectations. You must be a library book, because I can’t stop checking you out. Do you like it dog-eared style?
10) Lastly, do you need to Give Yourself a Kick in The Pants? Are you on your seventh cup of coffee before 7 AM? Maybe your bedroom carpet has been obscured by an installation of “Everything I Wore Last Week,” and you’re approaching the need to eat cereal out of a pot with a measuring spoon. Maybe you really need to get your shit together. Go write some “To Do” Post-Its with tasks you’ve already completed, cross them off, and tape them to your refrigerator. Put some pantry goods into aesthetically-pleasing mason jars and adopt a succulent.
