Tuesday, August 05, 2008

Jammies, The Great Equalizer

Lori and I had to make an unscheduled midweek trip to town today which is fine since it gives us a little car time together, which we love. Along the way we were discussing our pompous and pretentious neighbor who's life peaked when she was delivering Meals on Wheels to AIDS patients thirty years ago. While we agreed that it was certainly a kind and admirable thing to do, it should not be the LAST thing one does before one retires from life at 30, and spends the next thirty years retelling the story and waiting to receive her own Meals on Wheels so she can die.

During this conversation, I referred to the neighbor as Florence Nightingown. Lori laughed and said "What is it about you and jammies?"

I didn't actually realize I had a thing about jammies, but after some consideration, I guess I must. I thought about it and decided jammies are a little bit vulnerable. Not so nakedly exposed as say, nakedness, but certainly not so armor plated as daywear, which people often choose based on it's ability to make a statement of some kind. No one wears Power Jammies.

Children wear cute jammies with feet. Old ladies wear those old lady nightgowns that they've had since the '50s. Old men wear cool old two piece cotton jammies where the bottoms and the tops match. And in the summer, they wear the even cooler ones with the short pants that highlight their skinny old man legs.

Lori and I sleep in jammie pants and crappy old t-shirts with paint stains or dumb slogans that we've acquired from life. I have about a thousand t-shirts from the Red Cross from being both a blood donor and a blood banker, and I tend to sleep in one of those. In the summer. we swap out the jammie pants for SIU jersey shorts.

I like to talk to people about their jammies, especially people who are a little too impressed with their own perceived power. Jammies are nice. When people are wearing their jammies, they're rarely in a position to be an asshole, except to the person next to them in bed, which is not my business anyway.

And people who sleep naked? Unless the sex has already begun before bedtime, don't you think it's good bed etiquette to at least put the jammies on for a minute, and THEN tear them back off? At least for a minute?

I know. I'm old.

3 comments:

Jazz said...

I can only sleep nekkid when it's really really hot. Otherwise I just freeze.

Summer is a huge bright yellow Brazilian soccer team T-shirt I've had since 1998 (when they were supposed to win the world cup but didn't - grrrrrrrrrrrrrrr)

Winter is flannel jammies. Flannel jammies almost make winter worth it. But not quite.

Anonymous said...

The whole nightwear culture kind of ticks me off. We have so much other crap we have to buy, why do we need special clothes to sleep in? And why do these clothes have to be so expensive and mostly so ugly? I wear a tank top and boxers to bed all year round. In the winter I sometimes add socks. I thumb my nose at matching pajamas and diaphanous negligees.

Anonymous said...

Hey! I'M old too, and I've slept nekkid all my adult life, except when I'm staying at somebody else's place and can't avoid pajamas. I can't stand the feeling of having clothes on when I'm underneath sheets, and can't figure out how anyone else can either. For me, all that fabric gets all tangled up together and wakes me up, whereas with no bed clothes I can luxuriate in the feeling of the cool sheets (in the summer) or the flannel sheets (in the winter) against my skin.

Having said that, it has sometimes occurred to me that if I were roused in the middle of the night by something like a fire and had to get out quick, I be up a creek without any clothing on. It was always hypothetical until this spring, when I was awakened from a sound sleep by an earthquake at 4:30am in the central Illinois town where I live. My second thought (after "What the fuck is happening?" even though I knew) was "Where the fuck are my clothes?"

Now I make sure I know where my clothes are before I go to bed, and I still sleep nekkid.

Jessie