I'll Allow Two Weeks To Transition

Why is it a pair of pants, but only one shirt?  


Here we go...Jeremy's pondering again.


Well, it makes no sense.  Things need to make sense.

So, today's status obviously deals with semantics when it comes to articles of clothing...


That all depends on what you mean by "semantics..."


People tend to refer to certain clothing in singular terms, but others in plural, and I don't always know why.  I mean, some of them are pretty obvious, like a pair of socks, or a pair of shoes, in which there are two entirely separate pieces of clothing that come in a matched set, and you tend to wear both of them at the same time.  Gloves fall into this category as well.

But, when you talk about pants (and for the sake of today's discussion, we'll be dealing with the American definition of pants, and not the British version, but the same concept applies), they are most often referred to in the plural.  As in: This is my favorite pair of pants.  Why is this?  There is only one article of clothing. 

Pants and shirts are fairly similar clothes in concept.  They each are designed to cover a segment of a body's core, and two extremities.  The the case of a shirt, it covers your torso and two arms versus pants, which clothe the pelvic bum area and two legs. 


Can people please start using the phrase "Pelvic bum area" now?  


So I don't really understand where the semantic difference comes from that would lead you to need a pair of pants, when it is a single garment, versus a single shirt.  Sure, you have a pair of pant legs, but you also have a pair of shirt sleeves and nobody says "I'm going to wear this pair of shirts" when talking about one piece of clothing.


Can we at least say that this debate you're having with yourself is pants?


No, because that would be using the British version, which we already discounted.  Also, that's the slang usage anyway.

At this point, I'm not sure which side of the debate to fall on, but I would like us, as a society, to settle on a single usage for the sake of consistency.  We either need to refer to shirts as plural, or pants as singular.  So get used to it, folks...you will either need to start wearing a shirt and pant, or a pair of pants with your favorite shirts.  It's the only way. 

...Just Staggering

Every day, I get surprised by static electricity.  One might say it’s...startling  

I'm dumbfounded, Jeremy.  You had a perfect opportunity to make the world's dumbest joke and you passed it up?  

Well, that pretty much is the joke.  Thanks for ruining it.  

You ruin comedy all the time.  Mostly by writing it.  

So anyway, it is winter.  A time of cold temperatures and dry air.  This leads to two things.  First, I wear a coat when I go outside.  My coat (actually one of two coats, but they're largely the same, so we're splitting hairs now) is made of wool which is magnificent at storing up massive amounts of static electricity.  The second part is that the dry air is a significantly worse conductor of electricity, meaning that the charge build-up is not allowed to dissipate quite as much as it would in more humid air. 

I've never put an ammeter to myself while being discharged, but I estimate the total charge collected in my woolen capacitor coat to be 8.3 metric craploads.  

All of this charge is stored up in my coat every time I come into work because that's how the world works.  All of this charge is discharged the moment I attempt to hang my coat up in the little metal cabinet in my office.  Because that's also how the world works.  

No matter what I try to do, I can't seem to stay properly grounded while taking my coat off, meaning I get the world's second worst electric shock (only surpassed by the one generated standing up off my couch and touching the metal plate around the light switch) every fricking day.  It doesn't matter what I do, like trying to stay in contact with the metal housing while taking the coat off, slapping the door, wearing metal shoes, etc.  It always ends the same way...with poor Jeremy getting a static shock from my cabinet.  I don't know why I find this so astounding now, since it happens all the time, but for some reason, I'm never expecting it. 

Fewer Than Fifty Shades

For Halloween, I’m wearing different colored shoes!


Oh that wacky Jeremy.  Always coming up with Halloween costumes that make the lamest people say, "wow...that's pretty lame."  


Well, in this case, that's really not what's happening.  I recently discovered that the shoes I'm wearing today don't match.


How hard is this, you moron?  You find two shoes that are the same in your closet, then you put them on.  People usually figure this out at some point before kindergarten.   


Also not the point!

I am, in fact, wearing a matched pair of shoes.  They are a pair of brown leather casual shoes that I purchased recently to replace an identical pair that wore out since I wear them to work any day I wear brown pants, which is approximately 50% of the time.  I like them.  So much so that this is at least the third or forth pair of them that I've had, and I've largely stopped paying much attention to them.  When the old pair is done, I go to the same store I've always gotten them in, making sure to have my 30% off card that they send me in the mail, find them in my size and go on with life.  That's exactly what happened not long ago. 

As it turns out, one of the shoes is slightly lighter in color than the other. 

I didn't notice this at the time, or on any of the other times I've worn these particular shoes...which has probably been around a dozen times now.  But for some odd reason, I noticed it this morning, and will never again not notice it.  My shoes don't match.  None of you would have known this if I hadn't said anything.  Oh well.  I'll have to leave for a week to overcome my disappointment in myself. 


Well, that part was partially true.  Jeremy's going to be on a business trip for the rest of the week.  As such, Jeremy Is In The Office will be out of the office, returning next Tuesday, November 8th with all new Sametime Goodness for you all.  Have a good week, and don't eat too much candy. 

This Story Stinks

What on earth possessed me to think I needed to buy more socks?  

Your feet were cold?  

That's a perfectly reasonable explanation as to why I may need to wear socks, but unless I was outside the house wearing no socks and happened to be in a place that sold socks where the temperature was too low, this seems like a stretch.   

This seems like a good time to explain some things about The Mind of Jeremy.  

So, I tend to be prepared for things most of the time when I have not made an active decision to fly by the seat of my pants.  Why there are differences, I'm not sure, but that's how things go.  Now, when I say "prepared," I tend to go at least a little overboard.  The best example of this might be party hosting.  Let's say I'm having a party for 10 people, and I've decided to grill hamburgers, hot dogs, and chicken.  Not too bad, right?  Well, let's say everybody there decides to go with hamburgers, I need to have enough hamburgers to make sure all 10 people are satisfied.  Then, I need just as many hot dogs, and just as much chicken.  Effectively, I've now organized enough food for at least 30 people.  Plus, there's always going to be the fact that there are sides and salads as well, plus everybody is probably going to bring something to contribute to the festivities.  There will be 3 1/2 metric craploads of food, and only 10 people to serve.  But, better this than to run out of chicken and have somebody who really wanted some of my famous barbecue chicken to be stuck with a crappy old hot dog.  

The same sort of situation applies to my sock drawer.

So, I have multiple categories of socks.  I have dressier socks for work and fancy days, which come in primarily black and brown.  I have casual socks for standard days of wearing jeans and sneakers.  I have older socks for mowing the lawn and other assorted house projects so that I don't get any of my good socks covered in paint or some such nonsense.  I have athletic socks for athletic things like volleyball and bike riding ,which come in many colors and assorted lengths.  

Let's say that I do my laundry every two weeks.  It's not a rigid schedule, but that's a decent enough estimate for our purposes here.  In order to not run out of socks, I need to have at least 14 days of socks available, with a small buffer for safety.  It follows, therefore, that in the event that I wear khaki pants for 14 consecutive days (It's never happened), that I would need 14 pairs of brown dressy socks.  conversely, for 14 straight darker pants days, I need 14 pairs of black dressy socks.  So on and so forth.  Bottom line, I have 3 1/2 metric craploads of socks.  True story: My sock drawer is currently sitting outside of my dresser, in my guest room, having had the bottom and back glued back together because I had so many socks that the drawer quite literally burst at the seams.  

So, not long ago, I was out shopping for shoes (another thing I absolutely do not need more of...but my outdoor volleyball shoes are on their last legs and tournament season is starting soon, and they stopped making the shoes that I like, so I needed to find something new...) and the store I found myself in had athletic-type socks on sale.  Buy one, get one free!  So, sure...some of my sportier socks could probably benefit from a trip to the dump, but I have many, many more.  All of that aside, these were pretty nice socks, and they were cheap...so I bought one and got one free.  And by that, I mean I bought one pack of six, and got another pack of six for free.  

I have no place to put 12 more pairs of socks.  

Science! It Hurts, Sometimes

I like this fuzzy shirt I have because I can see the static electric sparks it makes  

You're not wearing a fuzzy shirt.  You have a pretty standard fare gray button-down.  Why are you lying to the nice people, Jeremy?  

Okay, so I'm not wearing that particular shirt at this very moment, but I wear it quite frequently at home.  It's soft and warm.  It also has the downside of being amazingly good at generating static electricity.  

This has its good and bad points.  

Another thing that I have which is noteworthy for static electricity is my couch.  Either of them, for that matter...they're both the same.  I've gotten into the habit of grounding myself to my computer case when I stand up, otherwise, I run the risk of an impressively powerful electric shock when I touch the light switch.  Here's a Fun Fact...a standard static electric spark that you get from a couch or scuffing your feet across the floor is around 4000-20,000 volts.  Anyway...combining my gray fuzzy shirt with my devious couch provides a nearly dangerous* amount of static electricity, which manifests itself in several ways.  

*It's not actually nearly dangerous.  The amount of charge is WAY too low to actually hurt anything, despite the high voltage

 So anyway, what's especially fun about this shirt is moving it around in the dark.  The shirt itself will actually discharge its static electricity to whatever happens to be nearby, which is usually my arm.  When it does, there is the tell-tale sparking sound, which sounds like somebody stepping on the world's most adorably tiny bubble wrap, and the sparks themselves.  If the room is dark enough, you can actually see my shirt lighting up like a really busy thunderstorm.  It's amazingly fun, and just makes me want to wear the shirt even more.  Even if it means zapping myself on the light switch all the frickin' time.