sweatpants as a rule

I have a rule.

It’s not an old rule.

Rather new in fact.

I don’t change into my “comfy clothes” until my work day is finished.

You see, I spent the first 10 months of COVID in comfy clothes only changing to run errands and even then, I’d usually just put on whatever jeans had been worn a few times before as not to feel too badly about the weight the lack of activity for almost a year had caused. Getting a job changed that.

True. Working from home does not require a 100% professional look. We’re all familiar with the WFH mullet… business up top, party on the bottom. However, I’ve told myself that wearing jeans would make me more productive during the day. They also provide the opportunity to change into those “comfy clothes” when quitting time arrives and that feels SO DAMN GOOD.

So jeans it’s been since January 25.

Until today. Sometime around 2:45pm, I subconsciously wandered into my bedroom and when I returned to my home office, I had sweat pants on. I’m not sure what happened. Did my brain shut down? After all, tomorrow is a work holiday, was the act of putting on the sweat pants that same act as wandering from office to office the day before a holiday, seeing what people had planned with their extra time away from work for a day? Was it the equivalent of taking an extra long lunch late in the day as a reward for sitting through 5 hours of meetings that morning? Are the sweatpants a WFH version of early release?

And for those of you not familiar with early release, this is what no fewer than 6 of my previous employees would ask for the day before a holiday… every holiday. My answer was always “yes” in hopes they would quit asking and just be adults about it, leaving when they wanted to. They never did.

Now I miss having to answer it.

I suppose the most curious part of all of this is that I didn’t decide to go put them on. I just did it. And then I came back here and hammered out just as much work as I hammered out in jeans.

Rules can be so arbitrary like that.