Death Pants

So I have these two pairs of pants, one light gray with a nearly-invisible houndstooth and the other brown with a faint rust stripe. (Let me go ahead and say it for you: "Greeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaaaaat. Now she's blogging about her pants.") They look harmless enough and, every once in awhile, when I flip past them in my closet I think to myself: "I should wear those more often." This morning I bent to the guilt, broke out the gray pants and now, here I sit, trapped in my office when I should be walking to my 1:30 meeting.

For these are The Pants of Death: Volume One.

Both pairs of the pants in question are what I call my Hepburn pants: normal, wide-leg, hip-sitting pants with even wider cuffs. When I wear them I feel like I should be chasing some guy in a fedora with a "PRESS" card in the brim through a black and white comedy, talking a mile-a-minute, and saying things like "swell." What I usually end up doing in these pants is catching my heel in the cuff and falling over.

So far, in this pair (Volume One), I've fallen down courthouse stairs, rug-burned my palms in the hallway, and landed at the feet of some frightened looking exchange students trying to walk to the 2nd floor bathroom. And I always forget about their deadly ways (the pants, not the foreign exchange students) until it's too late. For instance, I was almost to my office door this morning before I went flying into the wall, with my foot still tangled in my fashion statement. And now I'm here on the fourth floor, terrified to walk down the stairs to my office.

As if the gods themselves are shaking their sensible pants at me, the elevators in my building are out of service this afternoon. I don't know when I'll see any of you again. I'm hungry, frightened, and seriously considering sawing my pants off at the knee and tossing the offending fabric out the window.

Honey, if you read this, come get me. And bring a change of clothes. Just don't succumb to the siren song of The Pants of Death: Volume of Two. A nice pair of pedal pushers would be just lovely.