On Pajama Bottoms and Being One of Four Non-Batshit-Crazy, Non-Hormonal, Non-PajamaGram males in the house. (Also, being the only one still in possession of his testicles.)

I don't know what women go through when they're on their periods. I know it involves being self-involved, making internal excuses for irrational behavior (look, it's not funny – or rather it wouldn't be if there isn't an element of truth to the stereotype that batshit female behavior often coincides with doing the tampon tango) and lunging like a starving hyena in pajama bottoms for a bar of chocolate or whatever comfort food seems to fit the bill.

Incidentally, pajama bottoms are the modern equivalent of a flannel fucking nightgown. I comprehend the idea behind them. I also know for a fact that if you sit a drop-dead gorgeous woman in front of me wearing an oversized hoodie and a pair of pajama bottoms, almost every man in the world would likely go “eh? Eh” and chase after the girl in the stretchy yoga pants, regardless of whether or not she looked like the current incarnation of Kim Kardashian (how can someone so vapid and so incredibly, completely and totally useless as anything other than entertainment still be so hot?)

I hate the existence of pajama bottoms. I have since my days of college. I hate seeing them, I hate trying to convince women they're unattractive and look ridiculous, and I refuse to buy any for myself on the same general principle that I refuse to buy a pair of bunny slippers. If I can't go outside in clothing or make a run to the store to pick up something, then it is not clothing. I am not a doctor, a nurse, or a med student, so I don't wear scrubs. If I'm wearing comfortable clothing around the house it's a pair of pants and a t-shirt that was well-broken in long before I bought it.

Don't get me wrong. I found the concept of formal wear, suits and ties repellent mainly in the idea of buying and taking care of them. Funny thing is, though, now I have the “nice jeans” I wear to work and the “around the house jeans” –  the ones frayed at the hem from being dragged along, the knees comfortably bent, the pants pockets in the rear showing holes.

Before I'm accused of being sexist and insisting women be held to a different standard, I'll point out that I married a woman who has dressed up for work exactly twice since I have known her, has worn a dress exactly twenty-two times in my memory (once on our wedding day) and refuses to wear makeup on principle (which I still argue is informed in part by an inability to give a flying goat's nutsack about the latest makeup line from MAC or Avon or Maybelline). I own more business suits and outfits than she does, and I also find it somewhat ironic that with my intense dislike of pajama bottoms – which I didn't tell her about until recently – she owns more pairs of “comfy pants” than I think she owns pairs of jeans.

I also love her for all of these things, but also know the minute she steps into a power suit and heels, I may well have a new fetish. She looks -good–  dressed up, but she hates doing it and revels wearing the very thing I could happily deposit into the donation bin without a second thought.

It is, in short, the thing I hate more than waking up early on a weekend – the arrival of the fucking pajama bottoms for a day-long appearance.

I also find people who wear sweat pants on a daily basis annoying as hell. Partially because as someone with a 6'5” frame you would LOVE to have the fashion choices most people under 6'1” get to make, and they wear…sweat pants.

I would gleefully strangle someone with a pair of Hanes double-knits if I could get away with it. I've lived for periods of time in the Midwest and on the east side of Seattle, where you see women of certain ages moving from what would be considered sensible, sexy, even daring outfits, then migrating into the herds of SUV-driving women in tracksuits, with expanding waistlines to match. There are times when I've sat in a food court in the more affluent shopping centers of my home city and watched women with frosted hair and long pearl necklaces wolfing their way through a salad, wearing stylish shoes with a matching track top and bottoms. The outfits make perfect sense –  why make yourself up when all you're doing is going shopping? Might as well be comfortable.

The only problem is there's something to be said about wearing the clothing that's uncomfortable as hell. To a large extent, comfortable = frump / hobo. My most uncomfortable clothing is also the clothing that makes me look the best. Some of my really nice clothes make me look great –  the tuxedo, cummerbund and tie that I know how to array in dishabille make me look good. The linen suits I've owned always are comfortable as hell. The discomfort comes from knowing that this clothing is something I don't want to ruin –  so I don't wear it in the garden or when I take The Beast for a walk (or in his mind, Food Guy gets the Rope Thing and We Go Exploring Around Our House Until I Get Tired And Look At Him Hoping He'll Pick Me Up And Carry Me. The problem is, this worked when he was a cute little puppy of eight weeks and 15lbs. Now he's a cute little puppy of two years and 175lbs. Unless your leg is broken, you're walking your own ass home, dog.)

But by definition, pajama bottoms are meant to do one thing –  keep your ass warm when you sleep. They're loungewear, and I can't ever understand needing to lounge that much. The concept of changing clothing to do multiple things is constrictive to me, so I figure if you have to put on different clothes to go out, and change back into those pants when you come back, it's a layer of “oh, I'd have to go do that to go out” that effectively constrains your ability to do just that. Keys in pocket and go. It's worse if you think of it as a procrastination tool, which is exactly what my first girlfriend in college used it to do.

Angela couldn't actually go out somewhere if she was wearing her pajama bottoms. Those were what she slept in, ran around the dorm halls in, etc. Except the morning I pounded on her dorm room door and woke her up to go to our last final of the year. Then she panicked, because not only had she overslept, she'd overslept and not put on her makeup, done her hair, etc, etc, etc. I gave her a once-over, said, “It's Finals Week. Get dressed afterwards” and hauled her out the door, skidding to our seats just as the professor closed and locked the door. She kept hiding behind my bulk, borrowing a baseball cap out of my bag midway through because she didn't feel like she was actually able to be seen by anyone without careful layers of foundation, eyeliner, eye shadow, etc., etc. Angela was what most women now would call “high maintenance”, but she was also the most low-key person I met there. She knew what she wanted and she was going to school to get it. That I was both a good study partner and relatively easy on the eyes made me a good combination.

We gnawed our way through the final and went back the quarter mile across campus to her dorm, where Angela immediately set to work showering, shaving, curling, styling, and smearing makeup over her face. She came back from the bathroom looking like we were going out –  which I then promptly ruined by doing what most hormonally charged teenagers do confronted by a woman in a matching pair of bra and panties who looks like she's about to go out on the town. But it didn't matter –  the armaments for the outside world were on, and when we did venture out (after a five-minute repair job) to have dinner and go hurl stone-like bread crumbs at the increasingly nimble ducks along the mill race, even in a basic shirt and jeans, she looked like she could march into Washington DC and slam a stack of papers on the nearest Supreme Court Justice's desk.

Apparently that's what she does now, so more power to her.

But as a result I've always detested pajama bottoms –  the more twee and cute and “ooo, the little fuzzy [insert animal here]” they are, the more I've hated them. It's as if the textile manufacturers of the world specifically target beer-referenced pajama bottoms to guys (who, let's face it, would much rather be drinking the eight pack of Guinness than wearing the pajama bottoms purchased with the money instead) while attempting to delude otherwise intelligent women into believing that a pair of hot pink and purple bottoms made out of heavy cotton flannel are adorable. They're not. If I must, absolutely MUST buy sleepwear for anyone, adorable daughters included, those pants are going to look like they've been run through a Russian discount surgical outlet with pockets for useful things, like, say, baseball bats down the side.

But The Girl loves her pajama bottoms with almost the exact same level of adoration as the level of antipathy that I carry for them. And so goes my subtle nods to things like yoga pants, or Athleta or Prana's latest catalogs, hoping that at some point the detested loungewear could be consigned to the bin of All Things Not At All Sexy.

To a certain extent that's what I think the pajama bottoms mean –  they're the symbol, like a security blanket or a mug of hot cocoa that Now Is My Time, and My Time Is Going to Be Mine, and This Is Not Meant To Be Sexy. It's small wonder that leaping into comfortable, stretchy clothing is something that is almost always depicted in mass media as something going hand-in-hand with idiot males being idiot males, pints of ice cream and curling up on the couch with an empowering glass of white wine.

I hate that, too. If you're going to go off and have a good long sulk or cry or pity party, you might as well do it in a full length ball gown and tiara; planting your ass squarely in a pair of flannel trousers under a blanket isn't going to do you any good other than to ID you as either a college student in a hurry, someone who's just gotten out of a nine-hour surgery, or someone who uses the word “yummy” in a sentence with no hint of deprecation or irony. (Seriously, if you do this to my face I will growl at you. No human being who is capable of taking a shit on their own should use this word, and no woman over the age of 30 who isn't using it in a food-contextual conversation with a child should do so either. Any male of any age above six needs to be smacked upside the head for using it non-ironically, and this does not include hipster males of any age or creed, since my general opinion is that their default requirement is to be smacked upside the head in any case.)

To some extent I'd love to reincarnate the smoking jacket for modern men –  a jacket worn with the intention of being the equivalent of the pajama pants of women. Pockets for things like pens, tissues, maybe a liner for one of those baby wipe packages or a roll of dog poop bags. Comfortable. Washable, durable. A place for a pipe or (since we do live in Washington) an airtight container capable of holding a few grams of combustible materials of your choice.  And the point is not to be “comfy” or to revel in being at home, but to revive the idea that you can look stylish and be comfortable in something approximating a robe without turning into a straight-up slob.

Granted, if I'm going to be a father, I think a patch on the shoulder capable of being both puke and pee-proof for burping babies would be a good thing, too. Washable would be another bonus. Reversible with another pattern on the inside? Even better.

In any case, I still cling (perhaps in a misguided way) to the belief that comfortable clothing shouldn't be used as an escape to look good, but rather a way to keep yourself grounded in the moment of where you are. My most comfortable pair of jeans is actually the nicest pair I own –  and yet I'll still grub out in the garden and happily wipe off dog puke with a little Febreeze and wear them another day.

And yet I've still worn those jeans to see Puccini in box seats at the Seattle Opera. Yes, I wore a pair of nice shoes, a tweed jacket and a shirt that didn't have a crew neck, but still. I wore jeans. I'm not asking for the world, pajama bottom addicts of the world –  I'm just asking that you don't wear the damned things that make you look like you're trying to masquerade as a permanent twelve-year old girl.

Being a Hopeful Father and Backup Plans

I am not a traditional male in his thirties by any stretch of the imagination. Oh, sure, I have many friends who have had their children ten years ago and my aging peers watch me poke ruefully at the top of my skull to find the hairs that are migrating away like a crop circle, but up to this point in my life, I thought I'd escaped the whole concept of having a kid.

I could barely keep a cat, much less a girlfriend. I had an elderly Siamese cat for five years and spent more time obsessing about him eating habenero peppers than I did about what the girl of the month was going to think about me ditching her to go out and have drinks with her best friend's sister. (Mostly because it did happen more than once. Not with the same girl.) Some people go through their high school and teen years and then grow responsibility like a goiter. I kept trying to make sure I was on the Responsibility Chemotherapy plan, which also meant a steady diet of cigarettes, medium-shelf alcohol, wine held in racks on the wall and a half-assed attempt to make food that wouldn't kill me and a date.

I don't know how many men I know kept a supply of condoms, lube and at least four morning after pills in their bedside table. After one memorable evening with a friend that also resulted in a “uh, where did THAT go, exactly?” the Plan B made its appearance. The expression of a pharmacist when a tall guy with a scruffy beard rolls up to his counter and says, “Yeah, so I need a six-pack of the morning after pill,” without thinking about the way the words will tumble out –  that's probably something I could have used Google Glass for once upon a time. (I did apply for the Beta, but the reality is Google Glass is something I'd be using now, and back then, I probably would have happily worn it at all times. I'd also probably be the first one to ask for waterproofing, and I'm almost certain at least one of those testers has uploaded homemade porn to their sites with it so far. If they haven't, there's something wrong with the world.)

At any rate the pharmacist was kind enough to fill the request, though, in retrospect, he was eyeballing the at-home STD kits and using the hand sanitizer a little too much while he rang me up. I guess visions of some hedonistic orgy where six ovulating women somehow simultaneously became impregnated were dancing across his cortex, and while afterwards the friend and I laughed, drank a ton of water and had dinner on the balcony of my thoroughly urbanized and crappy 1960s–style apartment, I still had those Plan B pills.

Then I met The Girl, and she was…irritating. But funny, and smart, and somehow centered on me. I don't know what made me think “this is the one” but it was always a question of “this girl is the one I can't think about not seeing on a daily basis”. She also didn't need the Plan B, since she'd been on the knock-sperm-dead-in-the-head pill for a good ten years previously, faithfully taking one a day. Somehow knowing that if I routinely drank enough and went off the rails in the bedroom enough to lose a condom inside someone while having wild banshee screeching sex I should probably have backup plans, just in the event said person wasn't on some form of birth control other than the calendar method.

And she still knocked me back. In those days I didn't expect to really keep seeing someone for longer than a couple of months, and usually concurrent with someone else. But something about The Girl made me keep going back to her place. Granted, we were both in the single mode where bad decisions that are made when drunk and horny are often considered good decisions. To this day I can remember exactly the first time I saw her naked.

Two months ago she told me she doesn't remember much of the night and that she more or less blacked out. I am absolutely positive this is not much of the truth –  she was capable of speech, she was capable of conversation, and she was capable of introducing me to the Abusive, Deranged, Evil Spawn of Satan that was her elderly, cranky-ass cat. So either she's embarrassed that the first night we had sex she was out her gourd and made what most of her female friends would call a bad decision, or she truly doesn't remember.

I do remember asking, though, “Are you on the pill?” Memories of my tall, leggy, blonde friend having a moment of “wait, WHAT?” while performing a gorgeous, completely nude, acrobatic on-point ballet leap from the bed aren't supposed to dance though your head at such times but I'd been a nervous wreck six months beforehand and making sure certain constraints were in place…well, that's the key to a good relationship. Good company, similar backgrounds and values, and fantastic sex.

You move in together. You get married. You fight. You make up. You take showers together. You try to revise your schedules. You look forward to seeing them when you get home. You bump asses in the tiny, tiny kitchen and dream of getting a bigger place. You get the bigger place. Life goes on.

Fast forward through the next three years, and suddenly the problems that show up when you realize you have a finite window of fertility make you WISH for the magic of a lost condom. Because it's time, says the genetic clock. Time to make a kid or call it a day, because you didn't do it when you were in your twenties or your early thirties. A pregnant belly fifteen years ago made a man run for the hills; now he catches, simultaneously, almost all his formerly thick, rich hair falling out at the crown and finding the movements of pregnant women at the gym both graceful and sensuous. That the women are probably ten years younger than him doesn't hit home until he actually hears one of them talking about growing up during the 90s.

Shit, says the brain. What? says the penis. We talked about this. You were EXPLICIT about this. And now you're all trying to hurry up because your master plan to execute bachelorhood for life got thrown to the winds once you met someone you didn't want to hurl out the window via James Bond ejector bed after three months? Suck it up, I'm on a break. You remember those Viagra commercials? Yeah. They WERE funny, weren't they? Now you want to have a kid. Suck it, hot tub boy. We're on strike tonight.

Now we're looking at the clock together and wondering how it's all going to pan out. It means egg fertilization has to occur on a clock, with apps on our phones to sync up and check everything. It means the purchasing of tests in the form of sticks.

Sometimes it also means wondering if the days when you could just have a night (or morning) in or heading home from a party early to “get an early start tomorrow” are gone, because now you are both on a timeframe. I never understood how sex could be like loading the dishwasher, and how all the things you used to do together are now considered advantageous because it helps do X, Y, and Z.

Half the time I keep thinking, “I thought we just did that because it was a lot of fun. Now it's to make sure optimal fertilization happens? The fuck is wrong with people?”

And I have to realize that it's not what's wrong with people; it's that for so long I fought against being a parent by any means necessary that now the concept presents itself in a whole new light. I  –want–  to be a father. I'd love to have kids with my wife, and raise that child or children in our family. But the freedom-loving sex maniac that would have normally just laughed at a romp in the garage at 2AM has been replaced by someone who is as nervous and scheduled as someone who makes absolutely sure the right month is set so the tomatoes are ripe in the garden at the right time of year.

That The Girl's college friends are now having babies and doing their “firsts” might be pushing at her; that a woman in her late thirties is in the “okay, now or never” timeframe might also be another, and the fact that we simply still are figuring out how not to be fat and lazy on the couch together is yet one more.

But I still hope I'll be a father. I hope that I can be a father, and I hope that if this whole biological thing works out for us, that I'll be able to teach my son or daughter about having dreams and hope for the future –  for me, for my wife, and my kid.

Because as someone who finds himself in the odd position of now hoping with all his soul that the exact OPPOSITE of what he was praying to the contraception gods to grant him (namely, zero growth in the target zones) for twenty years will occur knows, sometimes all you really can do is cross your fingers, have some sex, and hope for the best.