The Traveling Polyester Pants

Did you ever have an article of clothing that you didn't especially like but it fit and it looked OK so you hung on to it? Well, that's how I feel about my black polyester pants. I know, polyester is out - probably since the 70's but you can still buy them if you hunt around the clearance racks. And that is where I found these pants. They fit perfectly as soon as I tried them on. I never try anything on in the store so I was lucky this time. The length was even just right. And I must say that black polyester goes with just about everything in my closet. I do have a "thing" about not buying clothes that have to be dry cleaned. It partially has to do with saving the environment, and partially has to do with me being lazy and cheap, but I like the "saving the environment" reason best and I use it often.

I have to dress what I call "semi-professionally" when I travel for work. To me that means that I dress one step down from a real professional person. I don't believe that a real professional person has polyester pants in their closet. I do know that they usually have clothes that have to be dry cleaned. Remember, I am trying to save the environment here, polyester is dry-clean free.

Now in my years of owning and studying polyester pants I have found that there are good things and bad things one should know . The good things include:
1. They never wrinkle. I can wad them into a ball in my suitcase and forget to hang them up when I get to my hotel. Yet in the morning I open the suitcase, barely shake them out and I can put them on and go.
2. They wash and dry in about 5 minutes. If I don't bring enough clothes on a trip, I can wash them in the sink at night and by morning (or probably sooner but I don't set my alarm for the middle of the night to check) I take them off of the shower rod and again, they are ready to wear with a sharp seam that never goes away.
3. They are indestructible. I have had my current polyester pants for a couple of years and they look the same as the day I bought them. I'm not sure what "polyester" is made from but it is a wonder fake fabric.

The bad things aren't too bad but are a bit annoying. For example:
1. Although polyester doesn't seem to stain, it does seem to hold odors. Without going into detail I should just say that it is best to find a restroom quickly if one is feeling a little gaseous, if you get my drift.
2. This is the most annoying thing about polyester pants. You can not keep anything on your lap for more than a few seconds. I think that "slip and slides" should be made from polyester. I hate it when I'm trying to look and act semi-professional and I take a magazine out of my briefcase to read. I put it on my lap while I get a pen from my purse so I can do a sudoku puzzle and before I can even turn toward my purse, the magazine is on the floor. It's worse when I'm on a plane. I find my seat and then gather all of my entertainment goodies together so I can have things to keep me busy on the flight. You can't put your tray table down until the plane reaches 10,000 feet so you have to balance everything on your lap. I end up looking like I'm either practicing to be a clown or I have a severe jerking problem because I am constantly placing, dropping and retrieving each thing on my lap until the plane finally reaches the correct altitude. Sometimes I give up and just use my feet to hold on to the items that choose to be on the floor so they don't travel too far without me. The last time I flew, I had my DVD player, my headphones, a DVD, a magazine and a pen on my lap. First the pen slid off, then the DVD player and headphones flew off of my lap and ended up 4 rows behind me, and finally the magazine decided to join my wandering "entertainers". I was actually starting to breathe a little heavily from all of the bending and stretching. And I'm not totally certain, but I also think I was starting to annoy the people around me. I was thinking that I should try to explain to the people around me that I am not this clumsy when I'm wearing my jeans but no one seemed to want to look at me, so I choose to keep quiet.

I have to say that I think the good outweighs the bad when it comes to my polyester pants. How can you beat it when you can take something that is basic black out of your closet at a moments notice - forget the iron because it doesn't do any good anyway - that front crease is never going away. I know that my polyester pants have another 5 or 10 years of service left in them so it would be environmentally wrong to get rid of them. So if you see a woman sitting in an airport constantly dropping things from her lap, please try to be understanding. She's trying to save the environment.