Plaid shorts

I envy guys who can wear plaid shorts.
So far, I haven’t been able to make myself do it. It’s just not me. Sigh . . .
When I see a guy wearing plaid shorts in public, with no hint of self-consciousness, I have to admit that, barring any unfortunate clash of colors/patterns or the presence of long dark socks, it looks pretty good. In fact, that’s a look that says, “I’m with it, I’m confident in who I am, and I like to have fun more than I like to be cool even though I‘m still way cooler than you.”
I like that. I want to be like that. I don’t really want to wear plaid shorts, because I don’t like them, but I want to look like that.
My problem is, I already have a well-established look. It consists of khakis on workdays, cargo shorts or jeans on the weekends, all of which I wear like I wish I was still wearing a uniform. The most charitable thing you can say about this look is, old school. In truth, it screams, “Retired army officer whose idea of fun probably involves discomfort for others, who would rather shoot someone than dance in public.”
And there-in lies the difference: Stupid is a self-fulfilling prophecy. The very fact of being worried about looking stupid makes you look stupid. If you could care less how you look, you just look fun. And I invariably look stupid when I do anything but walk. I can’t just act as the spirit moves, go with the flow, move with the groove. I have to calculate, consider effects, mull over possible outcomes. And when you do that, that fleeing moment where you can look smooth and natural passes while you’re still stuck on, “Hey, maybe if I . . .”
Somehow, plaid shorts have come to epitomize in my mind this basic inability I have to be naturally fun. For one thing, my knee jerk reaction when I see them on a manikin is, “Never in a hundred thousand years.” Give me earth tones or denim. But then, if I ever work up the courage to point out a pair to Dawn, she wrinkles up her nose and says, “Never in a hundred thousand years.”
It’s not that she hates plaid. She just instantly processes all the factors and reaches the fashion-attuned and socially-aware conclusion that anyone who knows me, upon seeing me in plaid shorts, would immediately assume I was having a mid-life crisis with possible alternative-lifestyle overtones. Which would be not so good.
So I’m stuck wondering if there’s a way to project that fun attitude while wearing khakis. And I realize that, yeah, the guy in the plaid shorts could, but I can’t. Because it’s not the shorts’ fault that I look like the third-least fun guy on the planet, after G. Gordon Liddy and Dick Cheney.
To fix that, I’d have to go back to the first day of kindergarten, when I was scared and shy and lay under a table sucking my thumb because Jack and the Bean Stalk was too intense. That start to my social career pretty much defenestrated any chance of being cool or fun.
I guess I’ll just have to live with the fact that even though strangers will think I’m gruff and unbending, those who know me understand that I’m really just a grouch who on his best day on earth didn’t have as much fun as that guy in the plaid shorts has just walking to the coffee shop. Not that I’m bitter.
So, new resolution: I’m going to be fun if I die in the attempt. I will try so hard I might sprain something. I will work at it until people who see me think “fun” even if I have to choke it out of them.
Or, maybe, I could just relax, be who God made me to be, and have fun watching the cool people have fun, and maybe join in a little if invited. Since all the people I love are cool, that should work out OK.
I think doing it that way may not make me fun, but it could give me joy, at least as I think God means the word. That would be the ultimate cool. Yeah, think I’ll try that.