Mini-rant: Pants

This makes me SO mad.

It's tough being a tall woman in a world where clothing designers design for women who are 5'7. Pants especially. Because if the pants aren't long enough, your options are pretty limited. A lot of the time with trousers these days, there's a pretty deep hem. If you're lucky, you can rip out the hem and re-sew/perky bond (magic stuff) a new hem a lot closer to the actual edge of the fabric. But if there's not a deep hem, and the pants are two short, there's nothing you can do.

I pull out this argument a lot when short women complain. They don't like re-hemmed pants. But, you know, you've got options. You've got fabric, whereas tall women usually get bubkes. Nothing.

Things have gotten a bit better the last few years. Gap has a tall line, and J.Crew is pretty reliable. Mind you, these are usually for pants that are JUST long enough for flats. I keep reading in magazines that they recommend buying two pairs of pants at a time (since pants and money grow on trees) and having one hemmed to wear with heals. Technically, the edge of your pants, with heals, is supposed to be no higher than one inch off the ground.

Are you kidding me? They don't make pants that long, and it's not like I'm that tall. Despite common belief, I'm two inches under six feet. There are scores of pants-wearing women taller than me. Most of them play basketball.

So here I am, 5'10, and I marry a man who stands just over 6'4. He is taller than I am. But here's the thing: we can buy his pants at Costco. And Fred Meyer. Most places make men's pants with a 34" inseam. In fact, they'll give you the option of choosing your waist size and your inseam. Finding a 29"-34" range for inseam is pretty common.

I ask you - why is it that designers acknoledge that men have many different lengths of legs, and women (if they're lucky), are petite, regular, or tall? Or in many cases, just regular?

Tall women are clearly being discriminated against and we don't even have an organization for our advancement with a clever acronym.

Don't even get me started on how rarely you'll ever see the words "hand wash" or "line dry" on menswear. Usually it's "Wash on the tough cycle and dry till crisp."

Resolved:

Granted, New Year's Eve was a few days ago. Today is Epiphany, the day the wise men showed up with gifts for the baby Jesus. We attended a White Elephant gift exchange (does anyone want a turtle-shaped flute? An inkjet cartridge refilling kit?) that discussed the advent and the Twelve Days of Christmas, not the song. I like the idea of Christmas lasting that long, although I'm ready for my tree to go away.

(Nothing against the tree. It's a great-looking tree. I've just been irrationally bitter about it since it arrived, damp and unshaken, at our tiny apartment.)

Today, however, I've scored the assitance of my lovely sister to help me with the take-down of the tree. Seems if she's given chocolate (preferably Dove) and if Gilmore Girls is playing on the background, she'll agree to any number of tasks.

But I was thinking around New Year's about resolutions. I'm not much for resolutions - I don't like to resolve to do things and then not do them in two months. One year I resolved to buy a pair of gray pants - that one was pretty cut and dried. This year, I've made two decisions.

1. When there are people on the side of the road holding advertising signs, dancing, waving, and possibly dressed as a gorilla, I'm going to wave back.

2. I resolve to limit the amount of time my clean laundry spends in my hallway.

The latter will be the tougher one. We have a washer and dryer conveniently located in our hallway closet. Clean clothes come out of the dryer and land on the floor if I'm not immediately prepared to deal with them. They may spend a lot of time afterwards on the floor. One pile in particular spent a great deal of time there before Christmas (granted, this is when I was sick), and when I folded everything up before a trip I was amazed. Who knew our hallway was so large?

So here's hoping the resolution helps.

It's going to be a busy next few months. The book is due at the end of April. I want to be finished at the end of March and spend April doing dry edits (dry edits are when I've printed up material and edit on real paper). To comfortably reach that (very neccessary) goal, I need to be putting out two chapters a week for a while. If I kept it up throughout this month and the next, I could conceivably be done by the end of February. The idea of not worrying anymore about the deadline has a certain appeal.

So here's hoping. On top of that, I have a mound of wedding photos to be edited, as well as a Heart Gallery shoot (and subsequent edits) coming up tomorrow afternoon. There's a lot to be done in the Lodge household.

Including folding laundry.