Clothing

It's time to rethink our clothes (or why I should be allowed to wear my bathrobe in public).

Let's start with the redundancy. After putting on a pair of socks, I cover them with a pair of shoes. I wear a belt to hold my pants up; my pants also have a waist that's narrows slightly to provide the same effect. A pair of sweat pants clearly shows that the waist band can completely replace a belt. I have a tie that provides a constant feeling of potential choking, however a good turtle-neck works just as well.

Then there's the anachronistic features that get perpetuated. What purpose does the collar of a shirt serve? Why am I buttoning my shirt when we've created zippers, velcro and stretchy cloth that I can just pull over my head? The zipper on the pants? Maybe it would be useful if there was a corresponding zipper on the underpants and if there was some reason I'd want easy access to that region of the body.

And what would it take to get some balance? My shirts go into a colors load of laundry. My pants go into a colors load of laundry. I've recently been told that my blue and brown socks also go into a colors load of laundry. The whites load gets seven pairs of underwear and two pairs of socks and a few handkerchiefs. To make things worse there's nothing wrong with mixing in a few of someone else's shirts to fill out a load, but would you consider that for your underwear?

We've developed excellent climate control machinery. What would be wrong with walking around in those plastic rain slickers? (Opaque ones of course so the decency-people can't complain) They weigh almost nothing, cost little, don't restrict movement and can be cleaned with anything from a garden hose on.

Until then, it's a nice bathrobe. Soft in case of wooden furniture; thick in case of outside ventures; polyester to fill out both color and white loads.