Sarsaparilla Alphabet #11

K - KHAKIS

I used to abhor jeans. They're stiff, itchy, and blue. Who the hell wears blue pants? Instead, I preferred the khaki jeans family whenever the weather called for them. Sure, it's not as bad as a jean shorts phase, but it was weird all the same. I didn't come around to them until one or two years ago, mostly because I had gained the Freshman Negative Fifteen and a lot of the clothes I had brought with me to college no longer fit. Somehow, the pair of jeans that I had brought "just in case" were suddenly an option.

What was worse was coming home to a closet packed with shirts that were a size too large. Some of them hadn't even been worn; there were others that I wish I could put in that same category. At some point, I had seriously considered wearing a red Hawaiian shirt with a neon teal floral pattern. Another shirt stated that, now that the room was in complete disorder, I had done my job. Wow Kohl's, your selection of shirts really speak to the kind of person I am!

To my credit, I didn't start growing until 10th grade and I didn't care what I looked like for at least another year. Sure, I was a huge dork, but I didn't really care. I went to the information technology center at my high school at my high school, went home, and spent the rest of the day trying to dissociate myself from there. A lot of people consider high school to be the playground for real-life social functionality. For me, it was 8 hours of Chinese water torture. The therapy for that, apparently, is a healthy dose of video games.

To say I'm ashamed of my teenage years is to say eating a pufferfish might upset your tummy. At one point, I figured that I had read all of the books that were worth reading, after I spent my middle school years devouring the formulaic Redwall series and every Calvin and Hobbes collection the library had. The light at the end of the tunnel didn't show until I somehow ran across Kurt Vonnegut and began to branch out musically past They Might Be Giants.

What happened – especially around sophomore year of college – felt like a fog was being lifted, like I was actually able to realize what I was doing and what that meant to myself and others. In that sense, my life resembles that of a robot who learns how to express emotions despite not having them programmed into its hardware. It was almost as if my life were a movie, but instead of acting, I was watching. In terms of Myers-Briggs personality types, it was as if I was a pure Feeler, governed completely by my heart.

The worst example of this was when I played football with a few of my neighbors and I'd run back to my house in the middle of the game to quench my thirst – quite literally – with a Sprite. No, not water, because Sprite tastes good. Oddly enough, being hot and sweaty ruins it. Anyway, when I had finished chugging the thing, I'd wander back out and finish playing rather poorly. At least there were grass stains on my khakis.