I pick my socks out in the dark. Wait, let me back up.I sleep in a garage. No, that's not it either. One more try.
Four years ago my wife and I bought 10 acres of land just oustide a small California town named Ripon. We planned to build a 2400+ square foot house on it, but I didn't have the time or money to build it all at once. So we built half of it to start with. Unfortunately, it's the half without the bedrooms. Solution? LOTS of coffee. Not for the kids of course; we give them Mountain Dew and Pixie Stix. Who needs bedrooms? Our family hasn't slept in 9 months!
Actually, we partitioned the garage into two bedrooms, one for the kids and one for the adults (that's my wife and myself). We're going to start on Phase 2 pretty soon, but for now we sleep in the garage. It's not as bad as it sounds. Other than the slightly sloped floor and the Buick Rendezvous next to the dresser, you'd never know that it was the garage. Oh, and the lighting isn't so great.
So I pick my socks out in the dark. Well, there's a light but it's kind of dim and yellowish, so it's kind of hard to tell blue from black, or white from gray. I have to go by thickness, like Steven Wright. And since I have the memory of a gnat, I forget that I should really check my socks by daylight before heading into work. So I don't usually think about it again until I cross my legs in a meeting at work, catch a glimpse of my socks, note that they are roughly the same color and erupt with a delighted "YES!!!" And then I have to hide my footwear-induced euphoria by pretending that I was agreeing with whatever stupid idea somebody was vomiting up at the time, which results in me committing to rewrite all of our applications in FORTRAN or something. Which I pretend to do for three days, by which time everyone at the meeting has forgotten what they asked me to do. Then it's time to change socks again, and the cycle starts over.
My track record is pretty good; rarely do I end up with two completely different color socks. Sometimes, however, I end up with two socks that were originally a pair, but who have grown apart. You know what I'm talking about. Usually it's two white socks who were once young and in love. Then one of them falls in with a bad crowd, maybe the brights or the towels. Or maybe one of them has a fling with the family dog, or gets a little too adventurous in the dryer. Sure, they get back together eventually and try to make it work, but they both know something is a little off. One of them makes a careless remark about how the other's elastic doesn't seem as tight as it once was, or makes a caustic comment about the cause of some suspicious pilling near the toes. They are no longer able to work together as equals, and before they know it they've been shuffled to the back of the drawer, where they each secretly hope that some other pair will break up so that it might once again know what it feels like to be whole.
There's a lot of drama in the world of socks. It's probably best if I keep putting them on in the dark.
I promised I would mention my friend Sarah in this post, as she inspired the "socks who have grown apart" bit. The world thanks you, Sarah.]]>