Sweatpants and Irish Catholics

When you are a high school freshman and the rest of the school feel like seniors, your best friend Ben, shows up to the first class on the first day wearing brand new blue jeans. Not a day has gone by where you can remember Ben ever wearing anything but sweatpants.

Ben is to sweatpants what the Yankees are to pinstripes.

What Milton Berle was to cigars.

The problem isn't that he's wearing jeans, or that everyone else in school also seems to be clad in denim, but that you are not wearing them and everyone notices. How did Ben get this important memo and you didn't? And why was there no mention of him switching his new clothing line for the fall semester?

You wonder if Ben even had anything to do with the decision. Maybe his parents knew what fashionable highschoolers expected of the incoming class and so they went to the Gap for him, laid the pants on his bed and told him they were for his own good.

Where were your parents you wonder? Had they dropped the ball? Were they social outcasts as freshman too? Never before had you imagined the social standing of your parents during their tenure at high school so pertinent to your immediate present. If your parents were dorks, then they will be helpless to defend you from the same fate, as thusly proven by your bright red sweatpants, tapered elastically around your lower calves.

This pants conundrum will prove to be the starting thread in the unraveling sweater that is your friendship with Ben for the following months to come.

* * *

It is the very first morning of high school. You are no less sure where your algebra classroom is as to where the nearest bathroom to your locker might be. You know nothing, but already you know that you've started all wrong.

Your first impression is going to take months to recover from.

This morning, all the underclassmen gather in the mammoth high school auditorium for freshman orientation. You are one of the first freshman there.

Where is everyone?

You assume everyone else is doing something much cooler. They're already mating under the bleachers. Or maybe they're still asleep high school doesn't scare them as it scares you. You wonder if Ben has a girlfriend already. You imagine he does and he's with her right now instead of taking his seat at the mandatory orientation, You imagine getting up and finding all the cool kids paired off one-by-one.

Tens go with tens.
Geeks with geeks.
Football captains with cheerleader heads.

You imagine that you've already been cut from the baseball team even though tryouts arent for another six months and the only available girls left are the ones wearing headgear and memorizing the periodic table of elements.

This is your fate. If it weren't your fate, you'd have worn blue jeans today.

* * *

Eventually your fellow high schoolers file into the auditorium. They arrive in bunches.
Scads.
Posses.
Revues.
They pile, not into seats, but into seating arrangements. Rows of six or seven. Columns of four or five. You sit there alone and wonder how all these kids in t-shirts of bands youve never heard of know so many people already. You wish you had planned better. You should have gathered every friend you had from junior high, set a meeting time and arrived in the auditorium together.

That woulda been cool.

Is entrance-planning cool? It is probably a good thing that you didn't entrance plan; that may have been a bigger faux pas than wearing red sweatpants.*

You look at all the other boys surrounding you and wonder where you went wrong. Where did they get their hair mousse? And where did they get those cool jogging shoes with pockets and pumps and multiple colored laces? Those are cool. So cool in fact, that you've never even noticed they existed until this precise moment.

Then there are the girls.

Where did all the brown-haired girls go? You cannot recall ever seeing so many golden-haired blonde girls before in your life. This is Illinois, not Malibu. Before, it was 45% brunette, 45% blonde plus that one freckled redhead who drew on her arms in pen all the time. Now it's almost entirely made up of shiny, shimmer-haired blonde girls.

Your entire class has seemingly turned into button-nosed blonde girls who haven't yet noticed you share this earth with them, opting instead, to notice some other boy five aisles away (wearing blue jeans) giggling the entire time.

So much giggling.

Why do high school people giggle so much? Sometimes they giggle even when no one has said anything. You imagine all your classmates taking some giggle drug (do they make giggle drugs? You haven't a clue. Just another thing everyone else is ten steps ahead of you on).

Anyway, you imagine your classmates taking their giggle drugs underneath the bleachers when everyone was finding first-day mates and kissing and complimenting one another on their awesome new blue jeans.

They did all this while being blotto on giggle drugs.

* * *

Your suburban town has a high Irish-Catholic contingency. And not that there's anything wrong with Irish-Catholics, but they tend to name their offspring after Saints and there are only a handful of saints to choose from. This is important to note only because everyone filing into the seats around you in the auditorium seems to be named either Pat or Katie.

You are sure you've never been amongst as many Patricks and Katherines as you are right now. There are hundreds of
them. And if they're not Patrick they are Pat, Paddy, P-Train, or just Ps. And if they are not Katherine or Kathleen, they are Kates, Kate, Katie, Kat, Kit-Kat, Katty, Kitty, K-tizzle, or just K.

This name thing is gonna wear on you before the end of the year.

You watch as Katie fixes her ponytail around her sun-kissed blonde hair.
You watch as Pat fiddles with his puca-shelled necklace.
You realize your mother would think this garb entirely inappropriate for the first day of school.
They look like they slept in their clothes.
This is what you're thinking as you undo the zipper on the red sweater vest you are wearing.

Katie and Pat eventually part ways, take their auditorium seats and nonsensically giggle amongst one another. You imagine they will be dating by weeks end (if they are not already). You imagine that their love is true and beautiful and they will go to the same college and become beautiful model-slash-lawyers and get married and all three of their perfect children will be Gerber Babies and happiness will follow them everywhere. And they will have a dog and name it Happiness, which will literally follow them everywhere! They will live the perfect life because they are wearing blue jeans and their mother named them after Irish Saints.

High school is going to ruin you.

Your only saving grace is if you can manage to make friends through another manner outside of dress and social standing.

Soon after you are struck with the crippling fear that dress and social standing are the only avenues of any importance in high school.

You continue to think this throughout the length of the boring freshman orientation, during which you learn nothing except for the names of the eight peers sitting in your immediate area. You only learn this because the principal of the school ordered everyone to introduce themselves to those immediately surrounding one another; like at Christmas Mass. One of the students in your immediate vacinity is not named Pat, but Steve. He is chubby and has, what appears to be, baked beans stained on the front of his Over 40 and Feelin' Foxy t-shirt.

Although it is difficult to tell, you think he might be balding which is really bad luck for a fourteen-year-old boy.

It guilts you to think it, but if there is anyone in worse shape than you, its Steve.
Steve says, "Dude, thats an awesome vest. Where did you get your vintage stuff?"
Steve is distracted and you never answer his question.

If Pats go with Katies, it appears you go with Steve. And youre in deep, deep trouble.

As Steve exits the auditorium ahead of you, when the orientation is over, three girls named Katie join him.
They seem to be old friends. He kisses one of the Katies on the cheek.

At this point, you have no idea how anything works anymore.

======================

* The more you look at your own sweatpants, the more you realize how faded they've become since you bought them. Faded red. Thats basically pink.

You're wearing pink sweatpants on the first day of high school and you want to shrink. Shrink and die.