It's Gotta Be The Pants (Of Fabric and Fabrication)

This morning, in honor of the first Friday of the school year, I put on my new red plaid button down shirt (red is a major fashion statement for me, I normally only wear blue, black, brown and gray) and my new Lee X-Treme Comfort Khaki pants, which are "the perfect combination of style and athletic performance," mainly because they are 98% cotton and 2% Spandex . . . you heard me right, two percent Spandex . . . so while these pants masquerade as work pants, they are comfortable as all hell-- and not only are they comfortable as all hell, but they are also super-functional, so much so that they may have saved my life this morning . . . or I certainly thought they saved my life; it was 7 AM and I was deep into the crosswalk in front of our building, thinking my happy thoughts, enjoying the crisp morning air and the soft fabric of my beautiful spacious new red shirt-- one car already stopped for me but as I passed the street's halfway point, a parent who had just dropped off their child went into zoom-away mode and-- despite the fact that I was wearing a bright red shirt, a shirt that said, "STOP! Do not hit me! I am a human being!"-- despite this fashionably colorful alert, the distracted parent almost ran me down, but I leapt backward and avoided the impact, the car stopped, I gave the driver a disappointed look, and then I went on my way . . . the security guard said, "Good thing you were paying attention, you could have been killed!" and I said, "Yeah, and the crazy thing is I'm wearing this bright red shirt!" and then I realized that while my bright red shirt didn't matter-- I could have been wearing a rainbow Afro-wig and clown shoes and that parent-of-an-honor-roll-student would have still run me down-- but my 2% Spandex pants did matter . . . they very well may have been the reason I was able to react so quickly and athletically to the oncoming car . . . and so I made a point to tell this story to all my students and colleagues, and each time I told the tale, I gave full attribution to my new pants (and even did some lunges and kicks and squats to demonstrate their comfort and elasticity) and things got pretty wild in the office last period, I ended up stuffing myself into Liz K's little green trench coat (I needed aid to extricate my arms from the sleeves) and then when I finally got home from work, pleased as fuck with my life-saving 2 percent Spandex pants, and I whipped them off and took a whiff of the seat (to determine if they needed a wash or if they could go back into the closet) it was then that I noticed something odd on the back of the pants-- a little red white and blue rectangle-- and I realized that these weren't Lee brand khaki pants-- that was a Tommy Hilfiger logo on the waistband!-- and I remembered that I had bought these pants last year at Costco, and while they were very comfortable, they were 100 percent cotton and contained zero-point-zero percent Spandex; then it dawned on me in it's entirety: my entire day had been a weird lie, a lie I told myself and everyone else in my path . . . I truly believed that my pants were 2 percent Spandex, convinced myself of the fact, and I acted like it-- I felt them stretching when I did karate kicks and lunges in front of my composition classes, I praised their supple elasticity when I put my foot on the desk, and they were just regular old cotton pants . . . and now I'm going to have to actually wear the 2 percent spandex pants on Monday, to prove that they actually exist, and i'm going to have to confess to my Friday fabrication . . . yes, that's right, I thought of it and I wrote it down: it was all a fabrication.