Of Sunny Saturdays, Shims and Skinny Jeans...

What a glorious day it was today! It was comfortably sunny and slightly breezy as I walked with my kids in their walk-a-thon. What a herculean effort they put in. Well, most of the time. They kept me out there for 5 hours. I was in no way expecting to be out there that long. I think they did close to 10 miles. I did about 6 myself before manning a popsicle station as a parent volunteer. As it got warmer in the afternoon, these were quite popular. I think a couple kids must've had about 17 popsicles. It was unbelievable. Right next to the popsicles, I had a tray of oranges but nobody touched those. It's amazing how you can't get kids to touch any real fruit these days. I remember at halftime of my soccer games as a kid, we'd tear up some orange wedges while the coach gave me and the other 8-year-olds the all important pep talk which we surely took to heart while making faux orange smiles with the peels in our mouths. Now the kids get bagels or even donuts and/or some sort of energy drink. As if THAT's healthy.

While walking with some other parents at the walk-a-thon we got into a conversation about, among other things, skinny jeans. Now here is a fashion trend that I do not understand. Why are teenage (and even 20 somethings) wearing jeans that would make Robin Hood proud? Does this make them really popular with the ladies? Probably not, but who knows? Then again, these are usually the same cats that have noses, lips, or eyebrows pierced and even have those National Geographic stretch-out-your-earlobe-hoop-spacer-things, so maybe making yourself attractive to the opposite sex is quite far from high on the priority list. Even more puzzling here is that these boys are not only almost always very thin, but they also wear the biggest shoes they can find, thereby accentuating the skinniness of their trousers. Maybe that too is by design. No one was able to offer any valuable insight on the "why" of this situation, but I did manage to learn something from one of the parents. Apparently, the guys are both finding their skinny jeans in the girls Juniors department as well as trading with jeans with girls at school. Back in my day, getting into her jeans meant something else.

Driving home around twilight, I noticed a rather motley crew congregating on the corner in front of the fire station. Call it a Shim Summit or Cross-Dressers convention if you want, but instead of the one shim that usually works the corner of MLK Blvd. and 17th, there were 3 of them. This was an interesting development indeed. I wonder what they were talking about? Was this like a meeting amongst super powers? Were they defining new territories? Would there be a treaty or an accord signed when they were all done? Maybe they were talking about recession proofing their occupation. Maybe high gas prices were hurting them too since their customer base has to hit them on the drive-by. At these prices, maybe cats aren't cruising around to find them as often. And who are their customers anyway? They MUST know what they are getting. Maybe they DO know. If they do, is this like some unwritten rule of same sex encounters that its not as bad if one of them is dressed up like a woman? Who knows. These are questions that my little brain is not advanced enough to process. Besides, armed with such information, I couldn't do anything but have further random thoughts to think about, so its pointless. So this too will remain a mystery, right up there with Skinny Jeans and how cats always land on their feet when they fall out of a tree.