“A Pair of Paste Pants”

Remember that Friends episode where Ross’s New Year’s Resolution is to do something new every day? He looks absolutely ridiculous in those leather pants, but he can’t help himself, and he goes on the date that will turn out to be disastrous.

Long story short, the pants are making him sweat something furious, and he goes into the woman’s bathroom to air out, but he can’t get the pants back on afterwards. In that bathroom scene, when he’s regretting the pants decision, he calls Chandler but gets Joey, who tells him:

“If the paste matches the pants, you can make yourself a
pair of paste pants and she won’t know the difference!”

It’s an easy joke, one to remind us just how vapid Joey is (or at least how vapid he was to that point in the series), but when I watched it again, I thought about a larger message that might also hold true.

What if Joey was right? What if it’s not about the pants themselves, but instead about the way society judges and ridicules when we don’t live up to its expectations for us? Can we truly understand who we are through a lens of one instead of always trying to see ourselves the way everyone else sees us?

I find myself doing just this in my life sometimes–the whole “forest for the trees” mentality. I have something I’m excited about, but when I share it with others they are dismissive or don’t understand why it’s so big for me, then I push it down and stop sharing going forward. Why should I? It’s clearly not something anyone else is interested in.

But–and that’s a big but–what about me? Why can’t it just be something for me? Why can’t they just be a pair of paste pants that I can wear out and not worry about how others judge me for them? I just think it’s so funny that the idea of “cool” to Ross (and his son) is wearing leather pants, even though they just don’t seem comfortable at all. Then they ultimately thwart his attempt to use them for the coolness factor, so they’re really garbage in the end.

Maybe the idea of cool should be revisited and reviewed. It’s cool to be yourself, to do what you want, to enjoy what you enjoy, to just BE, and not worry about the detractors, the judges, the others who really are extraneous in the end. Do what makes you happy, what brings you joy. That’s all that really matters, right?

So, Happy New Year. Wear those paste pants proudly!

Sam