Mood Underwear

If you can't tell from the title of this post that you're going to be subjected to too much information -- more than you probably ever needed, wanted, or begged never to hear -- about my choice of underwear, then let me warn you now: you will.

The age-old question about men's underwear -- "boxers or briefs?" -- doesn't strike anywhere close to the heart of the matter, because the important question isn't about preferred cut, of which there are surprisingly many.

For instance, there are boxers, briefs, boxer-briefs for those men incapable of choosing between the two, sports briefs, bikini briefs, Latin briefs, long johns, trunks, Army trunks, lace-up trunks, front-enhancing padded pouch trunks for men with extra-small winkies, thongs, classic thongs, show me thongs for men who are extra proud of their winkies, g-strings, jock straps, cotton jock straps for men who want to feel like they're suited up for sports without actually having any real protection for their winkies, and swimmer jock straps.

Swimmer jock straps? Seriously, aren't most pools cold enough that you don't have to worry about that thing sticking out like a rudder and steering you off course?

Regardless of the preferred style, whether it be a low-rise trunk or no-show briefs, once a style is chosen the truly difficult decision is which brand to buy. It might surprise you to learn that more than one company caters to men who wear hot pink, see-through, crotchless, edible man panties, but I'm fairly certain I spotted three during my research for this post. (Anyone care to guess how much gay porn spam I'll be receiving in the next few weeks?) I guarantee any man who does wear hot pink, see-through, crotchless, edible man panties knows which brand makes the best and buys only from that brand.

Think of me what you will, I prefer a simple brief -- the classic tighty whitie, as it is known. Apart from a few crazy daring times in my life when I experimented with boxers, the brief has been my mainstay as far back as I can recall. Without them, I might as well crawl back under the covers certain in the knowledge it will be a bad day.

When it come to briefs, there really are only two brands that have provided consistency through the decades. They are Fruit of the Loom and Hanes. Now, Hanes are okay, but, much like Lee jeans, they feel like they were designed for a species of creature with a significantly different body type from mine. The rear is too baggy; the hips ride too high. It's like wearing borrowed underwear, which is every bit as unnerving and creepy as it sounds.

Fruit of the Loom, on the other hand, seems to understand me in the same way Levi jeans do. It's as if they stitched their fabrics together on a mannequin shaped like a short-torsoed, slightly overweight man with long legs and said: "These would fit Feggeler perfectly!" And the best part is my size, style and color (or lack thereof) have always been available.

Until recently.

I have struggled in vain since Christmas to locate my tighty whities in the stores. (Okay, maybe just one store, but I have an $8 credit to Walmart and that's what I planned to spend it on.) At the risk of going commando, and for the first time in nearly forty-seven years, I veered from tighty whities and bought a different kind of underwear. Sure, they're still the same cut and size of Fruit of the Looms briefs. The big difference is the color. Yes, I am now the proud owner of a multi-color pack of briefs.

Need I explain how uncomfortable the thought of wearing colored underwear made me feel? And it had nothing to do with issues of masculinity. I gave up pretending to be masculine somewhere back in high school when most guys were heavy into sports and I was honing my God-given shopping skills. My issue was more of an OCD-related one brought on by this sudden change in a rock solid, lifelong, unbending pattern in my life. After a slight hesitation that first morning, I decided it was best to leap in with both feet and embrace the change, so I grabbed the red briefs.

About one month deep into the underwear experiment, I've realized there's a perverse joy in breaking from the old routine. In the past, the first important task of the day was digging through a sea of tighty whities to find a pair new enough that the elastic band hadn't lost its snap. Some were so worn out they made me wonder if I have a diagnosble attachment disorder. These days, it's more like a game of match the underwear to my mood.

Is it a red day? Light blue, or maybe dark blue day? Perhaps today feels more like a gray day. What about green, you ask? Honestly, I've yet to figure out what kind of day green is good for.



© 2015 Mark Feggeler

Thanks a Lot, Victoria...

Years ago, I was searching for something special to give My Lovely Wife for Christmas. It was a stage in our relationship when I hadn't yet learned not to waste time buying her clothes.

Word to the wise, if you're considering buying your wife clothes you should hand her instead the money you would have spent and a set of car keys. She's going to bring it back to the store no matter how hard you tried to match her size and style, and you'd better hope she gets a full refund instead of store credit so she can pocket the cash and get herself something from a store she actually likes.

Anyway, several years of togetherness had emboldened me enough to venture into Victoria's Secret to scout for a present. Why Victoria's Secret? Because Frederick's of Hollywood scared the crap out of me. Everything on display at Frederick's of Hollywood looked like Tim Curry's spare wardrobe from Rocky Horror Picture Show. There might be a few corners of Victoria's Secret that, even now, I shy away from to avoid feeling like the resident middle-age perve, but at least Victoria's Secret doesn't stock every shelf with fur-lined, crotchless, black lace panties. If that's your thing, God bless you, they just seem rather impractical to me.

So, there I was, wandering aimlessly among racks of ladies' delicates and bras, lingerie and lacy undergarments, when a sign announcing five pairs of panties for just twenty-five dollars presented itself.

I normally fret over buying underwear even for myself, so don't ask me why the notion of purchasing panties for my wife suddenly struck me as a stroke of genius. It's the kind of thing that could end in tears, reproach, and recriminations, being a meaningless Christmas gift similar in sentimental value to an ironing board or a skillet.

"Here, I thought you needed new drawers. Don't worry, they were on sale."

See what I mean? The only way to make it potentially more creepy and less heartfelt would have been if I had bought used panties from Goodwill and wrapped them with a free sample pouch of detergent.

And what if I bought the wrong size?! That's a whole nother can of worms to be opening on Christmas morning. Nothing says "I love you" like giving your wife a present that suggests you thought she was a whole lot bigger than she really is, or implies you think she needs to lose weight.

On Christmas morning when she unwrapped the pretty pink box, My Lovely Wife gave me the pitying, unenthusiastic look I should have expected. But her opinion of the gift quickly changed once she tried them on. Somehow, by the grace of some Christmas miracle that must have missed its intended target and veered off into Victoria's Secret during my visit to the mall, I managed to bring home the exact right size and style. Each Christmas since then, a box in pink wrappings has appeared under the tree.

Until now.

Because the geniuses at Victoria's Secret decided to alter the shape and fabric of one of their best selling undergarments, that perfectly proportioned panty now exists only in name, a fact we discovered last year only after the box was opened.

And so ends an annual tradition. Thanks a lot, Victoria's Secret. Where am I supposed to buy my panties now?



© 2011 Mark Feggeler

Bra Shopping in the Laundry Room

So, I'm stepping into clean underwear after taking a shower. Almost immediately, it becomes apparent this simple first step of dressing myself will not end successfully.

My foot barely makes it through the leg hole and all progress stops halfway up my thigh. A fleeting sensation of disorientation leaves me wondering if the world is shrinking, or if I've suddenly ballooned out of my wardrobe.

Then I notice the lettering across the waistband does not match that of the brand I typically wear. These are Hanes, whereas the looms I prefer yield fruit. Clearly, I am attempting to wear my son's underwear. About time, too.

Not that I enjoy stress testing the elastic in other people's clothing, but it's reassuring to know I'm not the only one who mistakenly sends the wrong under garments to the wrong members of the family. Even though the boys stand far below my height, their clothes are entering that gray zone of no longer being so radically different from mine that they are easily distinguishable as children's clothes. What this means is I can soon look forward to the wrong socks, wrong jeans, wrong shoes, and even the wrong Disney t-shirts cluttering up my closet and dresser.

Over the past few years, as Our Daughter inconveniently and deliberately matured into a variation of My Lovely Wife, it became difficult for me to determine which garments belonged to whom. I really did give it my best effort at first, but now I try not to waste too many brain cells on something I'm likely to get wrong anyway. When the only significant difference between two bras coming out of the laundry is color of material, it's a hopeless cause.

The best thing to come out of it has been the indirect reinforcement of an earlier mandate to stop placing bras in the dryer. Since my underwear has never been nearly so finicky about the drying process as theirs, I initially struggled to follow this rule.

These days, I search dilligently for brassieres before shifting wet clothes from the washing machine to the dryer. I hang them on pegs around the laundry room so they can air dry, leaving me free of the difficulties of sorting them later and allowing the ladies of the house to shop through the laundry for them at their leisure.

I just hope there's enough room for all our tidy whities once the boys get to be my size.



© 2011 Mark Feggeler

Drawers For Their Drawers

Our twins are different from each other in almost every way. Hair color, eye color, height, body shape, facial features, personality, favorite foods. You name it, they don't share it.

Even their clothing is unique. The Italian wears mostly blue and the German mostly green. I can't recall exactly why those colors, but it very likely has something to do with the way green goes so beautifully with the German's red hair and green eyes. Blue for the Italian? Well, blue is a good color for boys and green was already taken.

We've never subscribed to the notion of purposefully dressing the boys in matching outfits. Not that it hasn't happened. It has. We simply don't go out of our way to treat our children like life-size dress up dolls. As they age, their tastes in clothing are gradually diverging. For instance, the Italian loves tattered clothes -- the holier the better -- while the German would surely throw away all his torn jeans if we didn't force him to keep a pair for knocking around in.

Several years ago, my Lovely Wife read (or heard, or saw) an interview with older twins who said the one thing that bothered them when they were children was having to share a birthday cake. That year, I made two identical Spider Man birthday cakes. For one pirate-themed party, one cake was a pirate ship and the other a pirate hat. This year we had one big ice cream cake with the Mythbusters logo on it. Hey, nobody's perfect...

Despite our best efforts to ensure each boy is afforded every opportunity to develop his own distinct personality, we have failed miserably in one critically important area. In their closet is a dresser that has a drawer full of community underwear.

There has been no "left side mine/right side yours" practice put in place in the underwear drawer. Britches get pulled willy nilly each day from a single stack, potentially alternating wearers on a regular basis.

As a normally responsible parent, I can justify to myself that it's all in the family, so what's the big deal? But when I consider it from the perspective of someone whose brain has not been warped by years of parenting twins, the skeeve factor of sharing underwear is undeniable. As the youngest of three brothers, I honestly cannot recall being handed a stack of my brothers' old Fruit of the Looms in all the years of hand-me-downs I had to endure. Bell bottom corduroys maybe, but never underwear.

So, what do we do? Do we initiate a discussion about the sanctity of the individual's right to sole ownership of undergarments, or do we let the issue alone until one of them (probably the German) complains?

And if we do separate their drawers into separate drawers, I might go into laundry meltdown. I already can't tell the difference between my wife's and daughter's clothes. How in the heck would I tell the difference between one ten year-old boy's underwear and another's? Check for racing stripes?

I'm open to suggestions, but I wouldn't mind waiting a little while, like until they go to college, to get this issue sorted out.



© 2011 Mark Feggeler

A Sock In My Shorts

First of all, Ewwwwww.

Get your mind out of the gutter. I'm not talking about trying to impress anyone. I'm talking about self preservation.

A little over a week ago, my Lovely Wife asked if I would like to join her for a Saturday morning cycling class at our local fitness center. She has been going to these classes several times a week for many months now. In addition to being a great aerobic workout, they have done wonders for her back, which takes a beating from hours each day with her arms in the air cutting, coloring and styling people's hair.

It isn't as though I have been resisting her efforts in the past. When we first started dating almost twenty years ago, I joined her for step aerobic classes. The day after the first class I could barely walk. Muscles in places I never knew had room for muscles hurt. I had a choice to make: go back for another class or roll over and die like a big weenie. I went back and that's all it took. The soreness immediately disappeared and we regularly attended classes together.

Since then we have lived what I imagine is the typical life of a young American middle-class couple. House, marriage, dog, second house, first child, second and third children on the same day (twins maybe not so typical), second dog, third house, etc. Many of those listed items (by which I mean the children) have a way of eliminating time normally spent exercising. A decade or so of trial diets and dusty exercise equipment purchased with good intentions kept us from ballooning as we continuously fought the good fight to fit in our clothes.

In the last year or two, the growing self-sufficiency of our children has afforded my Lovely Wife and me some free time to reclaim our lives. For my Lovely Wife, this has translated into time at the fitness center. For me it has translated into time spent writing. Not that I haven't been getting my exercise. Each morning I (try to) get on the treadmill for a quick walk/run to burn off several hundred calories. This hasn't turned me into a GQ model, but it has kept me about five pounds lighter on average than I had been.

So, I agreed to join my Lovely Wife for a cycling class. I had my reservations.

First of all, I don't have a pair of cycling shoes that clip onto the pedals. This was easy to get over because, after all, I have ridden bikes since I was a young kid and never had these high-tech shoes. The lack of shoes that clip to the pedals never caused me harm on a moving bike, so not having them on a stationary bike should not be a problem.

My greatest concern, based on what everyone has told me, is how the bike seat will treat my nether region. My sweet cousin Betsy has likened cycling without the proper equipment to being educated on how it feels to be gang-raped. I have never had the need to feel what it might be like to be gang-raped, so I went into the class with inadequate padding and genuine fear.

I enjoyed the class. My Lovely Wife and her brother helped me select and set up my bike. We climbed on and warmed up, waiting patiently for the instructor to begin the class. When she did, she explained that the program would take us from comfortable, to breathless, to uncomfortable. To be honest, if uncomfortable were the goal of the class, it would have been achieved as soon as I saw my brother-in-law in his padded biking shorts.

Maybe my time on the treadmill has not been for nought because after the class and even the next day I did not experience rubber legs, aching calves, or severe chest pains. The only negative reaction came in that lower area, between the front and back, which is an area you really don't want hurting. It's amazing, considering how generally useless and private this area of the body is, how much involvement it has with everyday living. Sitting, standing, walking, crouching, climbing steps, they all seem to agitate this nether region when it is sore.

When this past Saturday rolled around, I was asked again if I would like to join in. I said yes and immediately started wondering how I would avoid another few days of posterior pain. While in Greensboro on Friday, we almost stopped at a cycling shop to purchase some padded pants for me, but even the idea of my pasty white butt crammed into tiny black sausage casings made me more uncomfortable than remembering how they looked on my brother-in-law.

As the time approached, I developed a plan. Adding a second pair of underpants would surely do the trick, I thought, so I pulled some on and then put on my gym shorts. I walked around for a few minutes. I sat and stood and crouched and climbed and tried in every possible way to test the effects. The end result fell short of my expectations.

Then I was struck by lightning!

There, floating in my underwear drawer, alone and useless, was the answer: a single, solitary white sock. I took the sock, folded it in two, and quite unceremoniously but with surgical precision inserted it directly over the very place that the week prior had felt violated. I immediately knew this would work. Who could have known that proper cycling protective gear could possibly involve a white sock and an extra pair of Fruit of the Looms?

Sure enough, I left the class later that morning feeling confident, energetic, healthy, and proud to tell the world about the sock in my shorts.