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To understand the rest of this post, you must read this entry over on Go Fug Yourself. Because, until I read it half an hour ago, I had no idea that I wasn't the only person to ever have this problem. And I felt so alone!

Some backstory: I made a nifty cotton twill a-line skirt for myself about a month ago as part of my Wear More Skirts in 2007 Initiative, and wore them to campus with a toasty pair of sweater tights. Here's what I didn't figure out until I got to campus: that thick cotton tights, plus thick cotton twill, love to stick to each other. And when you move, as soon as you move, your skirt will climb unevenly and awkwardly up your knees, until you are sporting a much more dramatic and ugly version of the pouchy phenomenon above. And this will be awful, because of course you won't be home for another 11 hours, and you're teaching, which means that you will have 38 pairs of attentive eyes idly noting your outfit for the day. (These are majors, you see, and more stylish than the average undergraduate bear.) And so your trips to the bathroom, the copy room, the 7th floor printer, will become fraught with anxiety and awkwardness, and so the only way that you can get through teaching your sections without tugging awkwardly at your hem every three steps will be to move with a slow, magisterial grace about the room. Which, surprisingly, works quite well.

And I, too, spent the entire day bemoaning the fact that I've spent my entire adult life ignoring the words that my mother drilled into my head throughout my childhood: "Are you wearing a slip?" Because, for the first time in my entire adult life, I finally understand that those ugly elastic-waist pieces of flesh-colored polyester with cheap lace actually serve a function.

But I'm not getting one. I'm going to sew a lining in the skirt this weekend, instead.