But Let's Talk About Those Pants

Facebook told me (whenever a story starts out like that, you really should put on your grain-of-salt hat) that apparently "Blue's Clues" turned 20 today.

....twenty.

When I was five or six, all I wanted (aside from Barbies) was one of Steve's notebooks. I wanted my crayons to make the perfect, thick circle that Steve's crayons made. And I was really, really into the name Paprika.

I also was really skinny and remember the horror that Steve (Burns--I didn't even know he had a last name, but apparently that was it) referenced on his Twitter account, according to this article. And in all honesty, Steve Burns:

Yes. Those pants did make your butt look big.

But hey. It was the '90s. I would say that poofy khakis were a Thing in the '90s, but let's be real: 1) I'm probably the last person anyone would go to for fashion advice, except my dog, who asks me how his coat looks every day *weak rimshot*, and 2) I was too young in the '90s to have had any legitimate opinion on fashion anyway. Or maybe I was old enough, but my mom still dressed me, so. There. Yes. Power.

Anyway, the point was khakis.

Every time my mom bought me khakis (which was a lot, because I went to a school with a dress code), they had to be taken in or risk falling off me completely. Even with belts, the waistband scrunched up and moved around, or the belt stayed around me but the back cuff of the pants would open like a spout when I sat down. Or, if I had the good fortune to find pants that were my size in the waist, the bottom of the leg rolled up to my ankle. I have therefore not deliberately worn khakis since middle school. But thinking about those khakis reminds me of Octobers in Fresno, of back-to-school nights and being at school when it was dark out, the playground full of sand damp with the coolness of autumn, apples MacGyvered with straws and peanut butter and graham-cracker elephants to make merry-go-grounds to display for our doting parents. 

I remember the smell of pencil boxes, the graphite dust on the coated plastic. The orange tunnel slide. Hanging on to the building poles with one hand and leaning away from it, spinning around it. 

It's so easy to get sucked into the memory. My adult self feels safe in that memory, because Halloween was one of the times I felt safest in life. It's possible that this is because there's something about the color orange that makes people feel safe in our subconsciouses, or there's a real sense of safety in the world feeling like the leaves are covering everything. Or there's something about being in first grade again that I miss. Maybe it was getting liquourice for being a Good Rester. Or maybe it was being a true believer in Christianity. Maybe I miss the innocence of it all, of guessing all of Blue's "mysteries," of the rose-colored haze of the '90s.

But we're all twenty years wiser now. We know that the world hasn't gotten worse; we've just gotten older. As awful as things might be politically, globally, environmentally--it's important to remember, I think, not to get lost in the wave of nostalgia. It's important to remember that all of us who were kids now have twenty years of life experience under our belts, and our pants don't need to be hemmed anymore, because we pick our own pants. 

...it's a metaphor, okay. A metaphor. God. 

Anyway, don't lose hope, keep on and carry on, etc. To my Millennial generation: I'm glad you're on the planet. And if you're single, rumor is that Steve is on Tinder.