Reading the Washington Post this morning, I came across this headline: "Fan cuffs self to Hugh Grant." Note that it didn't say "himself" or "herself," but just "self." Rather than thinking that a crazed person had intentionally become chained to Hugh Grant, I instead assumed that a fan (as in, a motorized fan, not a sentient fan) had somehow latched itself to Hugh Grant. I imagined that the actor walked a little too close to the fan while filming his latest movie, and then became inextricably attached to it. You can see why I wondered that this was news at all. Of course, it clears it up a bit more that now, hours later, I find out that it was a female fan that had affixed herself to him. Ah. That makes more sense.

If you were to ask my why I don't wear sweatpants, I'd likely give you some fairly obvious reasons: they're unflattering on most everybody, there's that fiddly bit of string that you have to muck with when you want to undo them, and so on. But the real reason why I don't wear sweatpants dates back to Kindergarten, circa 1983. Those were the days when I wore sweatpants constantly. At the end of each school day, our kindergarten teacher made us stand quietly, next to our desks, for several minutes before we could leave. One day, a boy circled around me while I stood next to my desk then, with a quick tug, pulled my sweatpants down. I was mortified! To top it off, the teacher then came up to me and said (I'll never forget this), "In this class, we leave our clothes on." From that day on, I never wore sweatpants in public.