i see you all the time in corduroy

back in high school (and college, and well, since then), i had a lot of corduroy pants. it started off my freshman year in high school when i was at a ropa usada in downtown brownsville and found this pair of purple cords. they quickly became my favorite pair of pants to wear (often coupled with the morrissey shirt i wore all the time my senior year). but my collection got a little out of control at some point. by my senior year, i had 12 pairs of cords. i don't remember how it happened, really. i myself only bought three pairs. i think my then-bff ariana got me a couple of pairs. same goes for my parents. i probably inherited the other pairs from exes.

speaking of exes, this guy (greg) i dated briefly in the summer of '98 loved the fact that i almost always wore corduroy pants. he said there was something about the way they felt that got him "going". i think that was the first time i thought someone had a weird fetish. (i've since encountered people with weirder fetishes that make getting turned on by the way corduroy feels seem really normal.)

my like of corduroy pants was pretty ubiquitous. friends of friends knew about it. which weirded me out. i mean, my friends could talk about other things about me to other people, but they chose to talk about my myriad corduroy pants. bah.

there's this song called "number one camera" on nina gordon's 2000 solo album. my then-bff ariana and i both loved the album, and when it came to "number one camera", we both thought for a while that whenever she sang "polaroid" that sounded like "corduroy", which led us to re-write the lyrics of the song so that it talked about corduroy pants instead of pictures.

when i moved into my current apartment back in july '05, i did some much needed whittling of my wardrobe, which included getting rid of a large amount of my cords. essentially, it came down to getting rid of the ones that didn't fit me anymore, which was most. in the end, i had a pair of light brown, a pair of black, a pair of gray, and two pairs of maroon (one a little wide-leggy, the other more straight leg that gave me the appearance of actually having an ass). i thought having the five pairs was pretty manageable.

i usually only ended up wearing the wide-leggy maroon ones regularly. but then back in january (i think), they somehow got a rip in my ass right where the left pocket is. my friend alison, who's a whiz with the sewing and such, agreed with me on there not being a good way to fix them. i tried my hand at sewing it back up, only to make it worse because these pair of pants was really thin. so i had to retire what had now become my favorite pair of pants.

since then, i've put on a bit of weight, and now none of my cords fit. that enough should be incentive for me to try and lose weight, but nope. i really should listen to tom ford about it. he did this really awful interview in the ny times (i think) a couple of months back where he said that every time clothes don't start to fit, he doesn't think about how he needs to go up a size, he thinks how he needs to not eat for a week or more. it's a philosophy i should probably get behind. or, i could just exercise and cut down on my beer and cheese.

i just miss wearing corduroy.