Real Duds

I recently realized that I am getting old. At the age of 25, I realize, one should not start to notice how old one is becoming, but I have. It's the onset of male pattern baldness that's done it. I am not yet far enough along to be called "balding" but there will come a day, maybe 2 or 3 years down the road, that someone will stick me with that label, and my life will officially be over.
This grim outlook caused me to become somewhat nostalgic, and something Mel said when we were at a LAN on Saturday with Nick made me remember the good old days. The good old days of yellow pants.
The picture above is not a picture of me, but those are almost the spitting image of my yellow pants. They were outlandish, bright, cheerful, and omnipresent. Once I started wearing them, I didn't stop for what must have seemed to some people to be several lifetimes.
When I really thought about it, though, I started to comprehend that my penchant for odd clothing did not start at the yellow pants. I thought at first that my silk shirt phase was the first time I started wearing strange clothing. Strangely, my mother was very supportive of the silk shirt phase. At the time I thought it perfectly normal for her to happily spend thirty to forty dollars at a time on silk shirts that later would rot in the armpits due to my teenage hormone driven perspiration (for those of you who didn't know that silk did this, you now have a fun fact!). When I think back on those days now, however, I have the nagging suspicion that my mom was making fun of me, and my father was in on the joke.
And it was that thought, the understanding that my mother has secretly watched me ridicule myself with a terrifying glee, that brought back the oldest memory I have of wearing odd clothing.
Home made camouflage pants.
It was her all along.
Since practically the day I was brewed (I refuse to believe I was conceived. My parents don't get along that well) my mother has been quietly mocking me. When I was too young to protest, she did my hair in wings -WINGS! I was a tiny blond jetfighter! Then she dresses me in camouflage pants, which admittedly I thought were truly spectacular at the time. Then she waits several years and when I see my first silk shirt, BAM, she buys it for me and a new phase of mockery begins. Yellow pants, black velcro pants that allow me to drop trou at a moment's notice, trenchcoats that are far too big, winter coats with a waist elastic that when cinched make me look like a busty body building russian mennonite.
So now I wonder if my fashion sense for the rest of my life will be tainted by those early, formative days. Will I be unable to select a nice button up shirt without wondering what it would look like in silk? Will I secretly long for my dress pants to have velcro straps so that in the middle of a meeting I can undo the velcro and reveal my pyjama bottoms? Will all my ties be yellow, in loving memory of their bifurcated sibling?
I anticipate with dread my altzheimer's days. God only knows what sort of things I'll try to wrap around my shrivelled frame. Hamburger meat. Shania Twain. Chain linked undies.
Mmmmmmm.... chain linked undies.