Nothing better shows my taste

My problem with folding pants got started when I realized some morning (afternoon if I have my way) I haven't had enough ridiculous problems with abstract entities lately. You probably get that too. You're wandering along, wondering whether it's morning or afternoon (it ought to be afternoon, but it still feels like morning), and notice everything's fine, so you notice something --- soda cans, a homemade mother's day card affixed to the refrigerator even though you are not and have never been a mother owing to society being made entirely of creche-raised parthenogenetic clones, or washing gloves, or having paperclips, and then you've got yourself a problem. I know I have.

So that's where I get trouble with folding pants. I come by folding problems honestly, though, since folding them requires the concept of the fold, which I delayed developing because the only application I could find for it was origami cups and swans. Origami cups work, except as cups, and origami swans are the origami cups of the swan world. With the applications of folding not meeting my cup and swan needs, I felt folding to other people and look what they've done with it. I understand some people can fold over their waists until their bellies touch their legs, then stop. This fascinates me, not excessively, since I can fold only to a 90 degree (Fahrenheit) angle between my belly and my legs. It's too late for me to take up folding as a body option, but should it be too late for my clothes?

At this point I'd like to tell whoever makes those upscale clothes hangers where the hanging bar is on loops and slides partly out on one side, because those were excellent ways to introduce siblings' fingers to new oceans of pain. My siblings would like to beat you with an upscale clothing hanger. It's remarkable how many different kinds of people share the world.

Supposing that there should be folded pants we get that there are two kinds of pants: those that fold, and those that don't. Those that don't, sweatpants, are from the ``comfortable'' genus, while those that do, slacks, are of the ``if the whole thing were as comfortable as the fabric I'd be happy'' genus. There's also jeans, which I omit because they belong to the ``allegedly if you wear them long enough they become as comfortable as clothes which are comfortable when you start wearing them'', because I lack experience in folding or not folding them. You can fold sweatpants in the joyful liberty deriving from nobody being able to tell whether you actually did it.

Slacks look like they should be foldable, since they come out folded at the store if you didn't get there too late in the day after they've been tried on by a number of people you will never meet. Where the folds come from I don't know. Probably in the early 20th century the nation's inventors sought difficult, tiresome, low-paying jobs that people clung to for want of anything better, like pants-folders, and mechanized them. This way the nation's pant-folders had to switch to pant-folding as public art or just go ... away ... somewhere. And the newly rich inventor sulked that people don't know how to really fold pants anymore.

There's still coal-fired pant-folding machines in lower Manhattan, brought pants daily from Macy's and those other stores they probably still have. They're never get replaced because fuel-efficient solar-powered pant-folding engines lose the city yet more of its endangered quantities of airborne soot. Anyway, what I really know is the pant-folding is never done along what appear to be the natural fold lines. It has to be done kind of halfway across the pant legs on the wrong angle. This way the waist billows out, just as when your pants activate the emergency reserve zeppelins, and you're given a fresh reason to quit the folding project. This is why so many pants get thrown onto a roughly layered pile on the chair that's actually too comfortable to sit in.

Would-be swans or cups are advised to apply at the address below.

Trivia: Land crabs rustling in the brush caused a number of American sentries to panic and open fire at the first landings in Cuba in 1898. Source: 1898: The Birth Of The American Century, David Traxel.

Currently Reading: Stealing God's Thunder: Benjamin Franklin's Lightning Rod and the Invention of America, Philip Dray. The office lunch-room gang had one person mentioning I shouldn't let the part-time deacon see the title, which provoked others to mention that they had the same thought. I had too.