Goodbye Granny...

I've written several blog entries that I thought were pretty darn moving, some written solely for the purpose of eliciting a response. But never have I received a response like the response to the admission that I wear granny panties. Nothing else, it seems, has touched the hearts of young and old, men and women, friends and strangers like the thought of me in some enormously ugly saggy baggy granny panties.
I'm so glad that I could bring everyone together in the bond of skivvies...
Why, you asked me. Why do you only wear granny panties? You may laugh, sitting there smugly in your cute little lace-bedecked polka dotted panties, asking jokingly if I was traumatized by a pair of underwear as a child.
Well I wasn't! Not as a child...as a newlywed.
I have never been interested in lingerie. Bras and underwear were utilitarian, kind of like backpacks and duct tape, there to gather it all into one place or keep it from flying around uncontrollably. But as a newlywed with a troubled addiction to Cosmopolitan I realized I was going to have to spice things up if I wanted to, uh, keep things spiced up.
After much deliberation and consultation with several teeny tiny sales waifs I purchased a pair of thong underwear. With my husband working nights and me working days I figured that I would wear the thong to work and when I was changing out of my work clothes and he was changing into his, it would be a nice surprise. I put it on the next morning, reassuring myself that it was the most comfortable thing in the world and why would teeny tiny sales waifs lie?
Breaking news: TEENY TINY SALES WAIFS LIE
There was no comfort. There was binding and chaffing and rubbing and stinging. At one point there was a bit of crying and a vague thought given to making up an illness that would require me to go home early. But as bad as the pain of the thong was, the thought of removing it and going commando in a knee-length skirt was even more so. I could just see a tornado blowing through and lifting my skirt over my head, exposing my now incredibly-raw rear end. Or worse yet, throwing them in my purse and getting randomly searched by security on my way out of the building and having to explain why I had a pair of thong underwear in my purse. So I waited it out...it was the longest day of my life.
At quittin' time, I ran as gingerly as possible to my car in an effort to quell the chaffing and rubbing and binding and stinging. The front porch steps were like an experiment in torture and sure enough my husband was in the bedroom getting ready for work as I walked in like a bow-legged bull rider, holding back tears. My husband just looked at me as I shucked out of the skirt and turned to face him, finally letting the tears fall, blubbering incoherently about Cosmo, spice and teeny tiny sales waifs. He was beginning to smile, which of course ticked me off even more.
"What? Don't you want to save our marriage?" I yelled at him.
"Yeah, but you've got those things on all whopperjawed. It looks king of painful."
Sure enough, I had put a leg through the waist, the waist through my legs and ended up wearing the thong less like lingerie and more like a straightj acket for my goodies. One week, one panty burning ceremony in the front yard and one bottle of Goldbond later, I devoted myself to granny panties and never looked back.
But last week, two of my friends performed a panty intervention. And while I was reluctant to plunge privates first into the panty pond, I slowly came around but still have some questions.

• Why do they call them "boy shorts"? They don't particularly look like something one would wear hunting, romping through the woods, or four-wheeling.
• What's with the "hipster"? They looked comfortable enough but every time I picked up a pair and saw the word hipster I had flashes of Kramer from Seinfeld and who wants to think about that guy every time they put on underwear?
• Why would anyone want their cheeks to hang out of their underwear? Is it just so that they can say the word "cheeky" more often? Because I like that word, too. Cheeky, cheeky... my underwear is "cheeky". Cheeky.
• Who thinks up underwear styles? I mean, is there some little girl out there dreaming about the day she graduates from design school with her Distinguished Diploma of Delicate Design trying to figure out new and exciting ways to incorporate latex and lace into the wardrobe of the woman of the future? I really want to know who to blame for the thong. Really.

So, to bring this to an end, pardon the pun, I have not had an anti-granny-panty epiphany, but I have picked up some not-so-utilitarian non-granny-panties and am desperately trying not to twitch and fidget when I wear them. Do I like them, you ask... Well, they're no six-year-old-no-elastic-thread-bare-granny-panties, but I could learn to dig it...especially if they continue to ride up like the new sheriff in town!

My Six-Word Life Story

About a year ago I discovered a book in Barnes and Noble called "The Six-Word Memoir". It challenged famous, infamous, and unfamous writers to sum up their life in six words, no more, no less, no abbreviations. As I read through the book, some made me laugh, like "I should have married his brother." Others were tragic, like Ernest Hemingway's "Baby shoes for sale; never worn." Never being one to shy away from a challenge, I immediately started contemplating mine. I reflected upon all of the wonderful things that had happened to me and after 20 seconds of stumbling down memory lane, I began to come into the reality of myself: I was neither incredibly funny nor incredibly tragic. I was kind of middle of the road, however my life was marked by an awful lot of good ideas gone bad, failed attempts to be cool, clever, or more than I was intended to be. Things that seemed like really good ideas at the time.
And thus, my six word memoir was born: It SEEMED like a good idea... I have the credentials to back it up.

• When I decided to convert our bedroom into an office which involved painting over a hideous shade of pepto-bismal/blood cocktail pink I didn't use primer because I just wanted to get DONE. After about five coats of paint I had blisters and painters elbow so I went to the hardware store and bought an industrial strength Wagner Power Painter. It seemed like a GOOD idea except for the fact that there was no ventilation, the device was so heavy I couldn't control it and somewhere along the line, after I passed out the first time, the fumes got the better of me and I ended up spray painting my name on all the doors.
• Born of Scotch Irish/Irish Scotch background, I was in a constant state of ghoulish whiteness. Two summers ago, the first day of my vacation I decided that Canned Tan wasn't enough, plus I had a coupon for a local salon who would do airbrushing. It SEEMED like a good idea, until I found out that you had to be completely naked except for these paper string panties they give you...and we all know how I feel about cutesy undies and a complete stranger basically fires up one of those contraptions that resembled sprayers used by exterminators and makes you strike all kinds of completely humiliating poses while she blasts the bejeezes out of you with Tropical Sienna henna dye. I went from CarrotTop to Beyonce in five minutes...well parts of me did. When I was naked, I looked like a Cooper Tire skidmark.
• The latest example would have to be a device I found as I ran into Walgreen's today. It was in their "As Seen On TV" section and they were playing a DVD demonstration. It's called an Emjoi Tweeze and it's for those of us who have so many hormonal imbalances that our next career move could involve a bright pink Airstream and the words "bearded lady." The women on the DVD looked so happy and smooth. And the lady sitting on the gorgeous silk sectional assured me it was dermatologist approved and completely painless. It seemed like a good IDEA...she looked directly at me and explained that this device would keep me from looking like Mustapha the Lion King with backlighting in every photograph and I was SOLD. I read the instructions and fired up the Emjoi Tweeze. I didn't listen to the DVD long enough; I didn't read the instructions in depth enough...okay I just put the batteries in and looked at the pictures. This thing is a facial epilator which is French for UNIMAGINABLE, GRANNY-PANTY SATURATING PAIN AND AGONY. This little device, which all of the happy and smooth women on the DVD were using while they smiled, cooked supper and did pole dances, literally RIPS the hair out of your sensitive facial areas by the root. There's a small, small, tiny, teeny sentence explaining that there may be some mild stinging the first time but it would get better. Yeah it will get better, my skin is terrified to allow the hair to push through now. My whole dermal system in trying to get Dr. Phil on Blackberry for a consel/convo. It SEEMED like a good idea. And so now, I'm sitting here with an ace bandage wrapped around my head holding lunch bag ice packs all around my chin area because let's just say there is some swelling (picture Jay Leno with a third degree sunburn). It seemed like a GOOD idea. That's the story of my life.