now, as some of you may know i have embarked on a journey of intentional living-of making and then accepting the choices i've made. displeased with an outcome? remember it and don't do it again... etc. one part of this intentional living is to eat well and take care of my body with exercise.

as you also may know a frequent side-effect of exercise is weight loss. positive for a girl like me. a side effect of weight loss is that your clothes start not to fit as snugly as they once did. this goes for underwear as well.

such a thing has begun to happen to me but i am a) too poor to replace everything and b) not quite a at good replacement size. i don't know what that means but i suspect my bank account will tell me.

ok, now keep all of that in your mind for a moment while I talk about a weird and lovely gym phenomena: exercise costumes. I use the word costume very deliberately here (and not just because I work in theatre); let's not pretend that we are not exceptionally conscious of what we wear to the gym. our costumes indicate a number of things: level of personal comfort with spandex; socio-economic position; personal feelings about lululemon; your desire to look either "sexy" or "unsexy" tied directly to whether not you are/are not cruising; your desire to look varying levels of sexy for yourself; etc...

my favourite gym costume is the dude who arrives at the gym straight from the job site and lifts weights or goes for leisurely treadmill walk in his work books and painter's denim. added points for the dude who wears teva sandals and sunglasses at midnight while lifting very heavy weights. my costume choice is usually a choice of 3/4 length pants and a t-shirt. it's very "please don't talk to me. EVER!" i'm aggressive in my unsexy choice. intentional living, motherfucker! my boobs also look sort of flat and mashed together so this wards off any beefcake weirdos too.

and there's laundry. and it is because of laundry and weight loss that this evening i made a poor gym costume choice. my only solace is that i went to the gym late enough that maybe only 3 people saw my humiliation rather than 50.

let's start at the bottom.

bottom: i forgot to grab socks so i rolled down and bunched up my navy blue dad socks into my hot pink and grey shoes. to be clear, i hate navy blue socks and ONLY wear them when i am certain no one will see them. knee high boots ensure invisibility, under armour sneakers do not.

middle: bare legs, unshaven, because i never thought i would wear shorts. well, i sort of had to wear shorts because everything else was drying. i did laundry remember. so these shorts are missing the waist string tie thingy and are now, far too big for me. "oh well!", i thought, "constantly pulling them up will help keep my heart rate high!" (will it?) under said too big shorts were a pair of too big and too hot pink lacy panties.

top: an eggplant v-neck tshirt that is very low cut and covered in nail polish. my sports bra was a champ.

hair and accessories: i also forgot a hair elastic and had both my cell phone and kobo in hand. clearly i was a hot mess.

"so what?" you're asking. SO WHAT INDEED. when the lower half of your body is clad in things that are too big for it and you decide a 30 min hill climb is on track for the day it is all too likely that things will FALL DOWN. and boy did they! but here's the thing: the third time my shorts fell down my underwear went with them and as i reached down to hike my shorts as close to my armpits as they would go my fallen (HOT PINK LACE) panties did not join them. instead, they sat perched rather hilariously just below the bottom of my shorts.

and they were definant in their chosen spot. i couldn't get them to come back up nicely and when they finally rose to my demands they simply fell further down my thighs a moment later.

the of annoyance flipped quickly to embarassment because i realised everyone around me was looking at my tragic panties chillin' on my thighs. i picked up my phone and my kobo and shuffled off to the dressing room.

and here is the moment of pure class friends. instead of pulling down my shorts and readujisting my panties correctly, and perhaps jamming them into my ass crack for an added measure of security, i simply reached up under my shorts, pulled them down as far as they could, lifted my leg through one leg and then the other and threw them into my locker. if that was unclear allow me to clarify: i took off my underwear without removing my shorts. i then went back to my workout and pretended, panty-free, that they had never ever existed. i hope everyone at the gym did too.

i think these were the same panties i took off in a public bathroom on the corner of whyte avenue during a massive hangover. i spent the rest of that morning with panties in my purse, holding down my rather short dress while the warm august wind challenged me at every step. asshole.

i suppose there might be a lesson in all this and maybe some larger issue about body image that i could tie this into this post to make it seem smarter or larger than myself but at the end of the day i was not well planned for my workout. it also made me wish i had an ass. i wonder if girls with actual asses ever worry about their panties just slipping off. if i had junk in my trunk, as opposed to the flat saggy back crack i have, could i could just heft my panties up and leave them there for the day and the hill climb after the day?

on the plus side, and in service of my promise to live intentionally, after i removed the stupid, tragic panties, i finished my workout. i promised i would do it and no lacy pink impediment was going to stop me.