Volume 5, Issue 98: Planet Waves

"I've just reached a place where the willow don't bend."

This week, I did something so cruel, so monstrous, to my children that, to judge their reaction, they will someday be talking about it to their therapists as an obstacle from their youth that they, well into adulthood, valiantly struggle to overcome.

I refused to let them wear sweatpants to school.

This last week, it finally got below 60 degrees in Athens, Georgia—remember fall? It was a full three months of the year in which you could wear a light jacket and have an occasional dalliance with a gourd—which meant, for the first time since school started down here in early August, it was too cold for the middle schoolers who live in my house to wear shorts. So the little shits tried to sneak sweatpants by me.

I suppose I am not against sweatpants as a general concept, though the only place anyone should be allowed to wear them is on the couch and I’m not sure their general purpose would not be better served by a blanket, or maybe a fluffy dog. But that one would choose to wear them in public, a place where other people can see you, is baffling to me. So when both of my sons tried to put on sweatpants on Tuesday morning, I told them no. You have several pairs of jeans, a couple of which you haven’t even outgrown in the last 20 minutes, I told them. Wear those.

“Jeans?” This was the first time, of several, that they gave me the look as if I had just told them that during today’s ride to school, I would be dragging them behind the car. “Everyone is going to make fun of us.”

“For not wearing sweatpants to school?” I asked.

“Yes!” one of them said, I’m not sure which, they kind of blend together when they’re whining. “Everybody wears sweatpants to school.”

“They know people can seem them, right?” I said. “Like, they don’t think the sweatpants make them invisible? They know people are aware they’re wearing sweatpants?”

“Yes!” the other one said, the smaller one, I think. “We’ll be the weird ones for wearing jeans.”

I stood up taller and cleared my throat, my way of asserting my authority as a dad, my strategy of reminding them that because they have not yet figured out a way to pay for their own food and shelter, they have to do what I tell them to do.

“Well, if you will be weird for having enough self-respect not to wear sweatpants to school, then you should be proud to be weird,” I said, tossing them a pair of jeans that I’m pretty sure were Amazon Essentials. “Now get dressed.”

They snorted and and sighed and come on’d and stomped their feet and grumbled terrible words about their father under the breath. But they put on the damned jeans.

It was warmer in Athens the rest of the week. They were grateful to get back to wearing shorts.

**************

My father used to make me get crewcuts every month. There was a guy with a barbershop by the junior high, he even had one of those red and blue barber poles out front, Dad would take me there the first Saturday of the month and I’d get my hair buzzed. My father is a military man, but he didn’t buzz my hair out of some sort of Great Santini discipline. I just think he just didn’t want me to look sloppy—that he truly believed having short hair would show the world that I respected myself, and, perhaps more important, that his parents were keeping a close eye on things. They weren’t gonna let anything get out of hand.

I hated it so much. But I accepted it, because I did not yet know how to make my own money to buy food and shelter. In high school, I would eventually rebel by growing a mullet. In college, still chafing from the crewcuts a decade earlier, I grew my hair as long as possible, past my shoulders, and let it hang down in my face like the grunge rocker I liked to pretend I was. They were all poses. I guess most haircuts are.

What mattered, I suspect, was not that I had a crewcut. What mattered is that my dad made me get a crewcut. It did not bother me that I had a crewcut until junior high school, which was when I began to first separate myself from my parents, when I developed a personality outside of the house that was different than the one inside it (or at least tried to), when what I wanted more than anything else was independence—to do what I wanted. The crewcut wasn’t what mattered; what mattered was that he was making me get it. I knew nothing about hair. I just knew I didn’t want to be a kid anymore.

Of course, most kids my age I knew at the time had crewcuts too. So it was really in my head more than anything else. Who cares what kind of haircut a kid in middle school has anyway? All middle school kids look awkward and insane.

*****************

Did you know that kids don’t wear jeans anymore? I had thought that the seemingly universal move to sweatpants—or leggings, or “athleisure”—would have come out of Covid, and while I’m sure that accelerated it, it apparently has been going on for more than a decade. Here’s a New York Times trend piece from 2015:

“They’re really tight, and I just don’t like how they fit on me,” said Jackson, who is 7½ and now in second grade. …

Jeans are too uncomfortable, these boys complain. They’re stiff, itchy and just too tight. Instead, as their parents wince, the boys demand pants that are baggy and easy to pull on.

I have tried very hard, as I have gotten older, with some but not total success, not to become one of those middle-aged people who believes that inconveniences we suffered when we were young should be revisited upon today’s youth as some sort of character-building exercise. Just because your boss was a prick to you doesn’t mean you’re somehow stronger because of it, and it doesn’t mean a young person somehow needs or deserves a prick boss today. That I had to buy compact discs to listen to music while a kid today grows up just being able to conjure up any song ever made, from the totality of human existence, from the sky, in milliseconds, this does not make me morally superior to them. It doesn’t mean I had it tougher than them either. It’s just different. The world is different in every possible way, from job markets to social mores to dating patterns to political engagement to our understanding of the basic tenets of being alive and what makes a person a person: The way I grew up is neither better nor worse than the way people grow up today. It’s just different. It’s my job, as an engaged and curious citizen of the world, not to get too stuck on anything, to grow, to evolve, to learn. To purposely stop learning, to insist that the way you grew to believe things is the only way things should be believed, is to wither and die: It’s a path to misanthropy, irrelevance and self-destruction. To give up on trying to improve and evolve and learn is to give up on life itself.

But it is also important to understand where your lines are drawn.

I do not know why the notion of my children wearing sweatpants to school is a redline for me. Perhaps it is merely sartorial; human beings should have shapes rather than being gormless globs. (Maybe they should just eliminated the middleman and wear slankets to school?) Perhaps it’s an aversion to being able to just crawl out of bed and roll their way into school (or a workplace) in whatever you happened to sleep in? Perhaps it’s a desire to move on from some of the bad habits I think infected much of the populace during Covid; the world’s open now, we can go out and engage in it again the way we did before, we don’t have to give up and shut ourselves out. Perhaps it’s just stubbornness; perhaps it is just me reaching the limits of my ability to be curious, to evolve.

But I wonder if it’s something more elemental, more basic than that. I wonder if I’m sticking to my guns on this because my children need their father to give something to rebel against—they need me to set these rules so that they may chafe against them, so that they assert their own independence, so that they may, in some part, develop their personality partly as a contrast to the constraints they’ve been given. Someday they will look back at these rules, their father’s generational picadillos, the things he was willing to continue to rage against the dying of the light—his repulsion with AI and the laziness and emptiness it creates exploits and feasts upon (they just got another lecture about this one this morning, actually), his insistence that texts and emails to him be written with proper grammar and punctuation, his unyielding, unrelenting battle against sweatpants—and they will find them silly, or irritating, or out of touch. But that will be the decision they have made, their decision, their assertion of who they are and what they value. And who knows? Maybe even someday they’ll end up agreeing with me. Either way: One of the most important things about drawing a line with your children is their giving them an understanding of when they should cross it. I hated having crewcuts. I think my dad knew that. I think that’s why he made me get them. I think, in the end, I’m glad he did.

Someday my kids can choose their own clothes. I’ll be a part of that choice—one way or another. But the choice will be theirs.

I do hope, when they make that choice though, that they remember they are in public, and that people can see them.

Here is a numerical breakdown of all the things I wrote this week, in order of what I believe to be their quality.

1. The Guardians Scandal Is a Big Deal, New York. A highlight of this was getting to make fun of that ridiculous Jay Caspian Kang piece in the New Yorker this week.

2. Did I Just … Cheer For Bill Belichick? The Athletic. Ack, I think I did.

3. Jennifer Lawrence Movies, Ranked, Vulture. Updated with Die My Love.

4. Stephen King Movies, Ranked, Vulture. Updated with The Running Man.

5. First Offseason Power Rankings, MLB.com. The last one until 2026.

6. The Worst Way to Lose the World Series, The Washington Post. Sorry, Jays fans, I brought it up again.

7. MVPs, Ranked, MLB.com. Updated with the new guys.

PODCASTS

Grierson & Leitch, big show, discussing “Die My Love,” “Predator: Badlands,” “Bugonia” and “The Mastermind.”

Morning Lineup, I did Friday’s show.

Waitin’ Since Last Saturday, we reviewed the game against Mississippi State and previewed the game against Texas.

LONG STORY YOU SHOULD READ THIS MORNING … OF THE WEEK

“Pluribus recap, Episode 1 & 2: ‘We Is Us’/’Pirate Lady,’” Alan Sepinwall, What’s Alan Watching? Consider me a Pluribus obsessive already, and this is a reminder that I’ve been typing “Sepinwall” “EPISODE TITLE OF SHOW I’M WATCHING” into Google immediately after watching it for more than a decade now and will surely keep going so the rest of my life.

ONGOING LETTER-WRITING PROJECT!

This is your reminder that if you write me a letter and put it in the mail, I will respond to it with a letter of my own, and send that letter right to you! It really happens! Hundreds of satisfied customers!

Write me at:

Will Leitch
P.O. Box 48
Athens GA 30603

CURRENTLY LISTENING TO

“Cowboy Nudes,” Geese. This band continues to drive me absolutely insane. They do things sometimes that make me think, “Uh, this might be the stupidest band on the planet,” and then I catch myself humming their songs to myself all day.

Off to the Georgia-Texas game tonight. I hope Arch does well! Really!

Have a great weekend, all.

Best,
Will