2
Sep
2010
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Swimming in the shallow end
My first ever truly girlie jeans


and they’re not levi’s. Aaaggghhh! Why do the girlie jeans I like cost 5x the sale price at which I buy my levi’s? Oh yeah, now I recall. For girl jeans, you pay extra if you do NOT want your butt cleavage exposed! YES, this is a fact.

Kindergarten and pre-k I wore those stretchy polyester-knit (green) pants with a raised seam down the front and little loops at the bottom to slip beneath the arches of my feet (think Mary Tyler Moore) while learning to ride my bike on Governor’s island. Though the pants were a little problomatic because the little girl pink ruffles on the backside of my panties showed through the stretch polyester, it didn’t negatively impact the development of my bike riding skills, bar me from my first movie theater experience with my mom and Mary Poppins or diminish my crush on the chimney sweep, Dick Van Dyke. When I started public school, it was one big experiment with open concept classrooms (a dismal failure) with a required dress dress code. Naturally I wore shorts underneath to be prepared for the unpredictable surprise playground games of “dress UPs” the boys were just learning. The dress code quickly devolved to pant suits. Oh and I had this awesome cotton ultra awesome, even a bit feminine, pant suit covered in its entirety with a hippy paisley to go with my plastic pale blue rhinestone encrusted cat eyed glasses. Got cut from choir cause i couldn’t sing which lead to always taking visual art when i had a choice. Soon enough we could wear pants but not BLUE jeans, all while the tail end of Vietnam raged on. For the remainder, I showed up to school in my red sears’ toughskins and went out to play afterwards while the Watergate debacle over took the networks and my teacher, Miss Humphreys, wore her gold rimmed tinted stop sign glasses, so of course i got my own wire rims. Junior high was big belled hip huggers and learning to play basketball. Amen that we were prepubescent with those hip huggers. High school was overalls–blue, red, white. College, athletic shorts and daily runs with the team and then Joy when we invaded some place down towards Cuba at least that’s what i heard one day in my psych class. Early jobs i pushed the dress code to the boundary of ultra casual, especially with my shoes. Bought my first mac SE with a loan from my dad. Was shocked and appalled that racism in the town I’d moved to was alive and well. Had to decide for voting purposes between a crook and a Klan master…I just couldn’t bring myself to vote that year. Moving to Houston and entering the church, I let them know I would NOT be wearing dresses and they should not hire us if this was going to be a issue. It was the principle of the thing, besides when has God ever really given a rip about our external trappings. Really! They hired us. Rodney King got a beating and OJ’s glove did not fit. When I got the memo some years latter from Bob that I had to wear dresses to work, I let him know that I would not be doing so. The desert storm came and went. The towers crumbled. I quit my job and went to grad school. Our war on terror began. The terminator became a governor.

So here I am four decades later from my little girl pink ruffles buying my first pair of fitted truly girlie jeans. Our soldiers still march off to war while I shop, the earth rumbles, flood waters rise and fall, the resulting diseases steal the breath from children and adults alike so far away. And I can’t decide if these cutsy jeans are good or bad. They are probably neither, but they were ridiculous in cost. So I consider this my contribution to restore us from recession. Swimming in the shallow end I am, no doubt.

Oops and apparently I paid extra so the girlie jeans would be cute even inside out.

Dang! that is just wrong.

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