I was recently shopping for new shorts this season. I wasn’t looking for anything special, just a pair of jean shorts that fall somewhere six inches longer than indecent but still above the knee. All I could find were just shy of regular long pants. What, I ask you, is the point of allowing only four inches of one’s calf and shin to see the light of day? The worst of both worlds – too long for a hot day and too air conditioned for a cool day. After much searching I finally found a risqu? pair that falls just above the knee. I had to abandon all sense of style and go to Sam’s club. I’m over 30. I’m married. I’m a parent. People don’t expect much of me in the style department anymore – so I bought two.
In my wanderings, though, I noticed a phenomenon I’ve come to call The Natural Conservation of Short’s Material (NCOSM for short). I’m not sure if scientists have picked up on this bizarre happening yet, but there appears to be an inverse relationship going on between the length of men’s and women’s shorts. As I walked by racks upon racks of summer apparel in multiple retail stores (please don’t tell Sam’s Club – I might not qualify for my prestigious membership) I saw all of the aforementioned long men’s shorts and very (I’m talking Charlie’s Angels and Daisy Duke here) short women’s shorts. I mistakenly picked one pair up thinking some errant clerk had put the sweatbands in the clothing aisle. What I have come up with through extensive follow-up research (it only just looked like I was ogling women at the mall) is that NCOSM helps keep a balance of fabric in the universe. I remember when I was younger and boy’s and girl’s short were all relatively the same length. Now I see that men’s shorts are ridiculously longer each season and women’s shorts, adhering to the principles of NCOSM, are shorter.
In the interest of further scientific study, I hereby encourage all men to start buying only boxers instead of briefs, and I’m looking for funding to bring back the 1920’s style men’s bathing suits. We all owe it to the scientific community at large to follow this through to the very (uncovered) end.