aerodynamics ovenbird At dinner last night my husband caught wind of the fact that my teenager is refusing to change into shorts for gym class. Apparently none of the kids are changing out of their street clothes for gym and my son refuses to be the only kid putting on shorts. My arguments against this silliness (you’ll stink, you’ll ruin your good clothes, you’ll overheat) failed miserably but my husband thought he would take a stab at it, with hilarious results. Since the most obvious arguments had already failed to sway my stubborn teen, my husband thought he would lean on the performance aspect of clothing. “Jeans are going to slow you down due to wind resistance! They’re practically a parachute,” my husband insisted. Both my children started laughing, like this was the stupidest thing they’d ever heard. They both believed that jeans would be negligible in terms of drag. So my husband started looking up stats. “It probably slows you down by 20-30 percent,” he announced after some frantic Googling. Which got my son laughing so hard he almost aspirated his dinner. The kids continued to deny the truth of the “jeans cause you to be slower” argument no matter how much evidence my husband provided. He started to get frustrated. “Which person at this table has an engineering degree? Which person actually STUDIED aerodynamics!?” he sputtered. To which my son replied, “Did you study the aerodynamics of jeans?” (This is where I started laughing). And my son was off and running. “I should cut off my ears. The wind gets into the crevices and really slows you down. I’ll bet that causes at least a one percent reduction in speed. Also, NO BELLY BUTTONS! Those things cause serious drag. But I guess there are some advantages. If there’s a house fire and I have to jump out the third story window I’ll just put on my jeans and float to safety. I’m practically the Mary Poppins of jeans!” The more exasperated my husband got the more my son dug in. And I couldn’t defend him because I was laughing too hard to speak. Finally everyone calmed down and the topic was abandoned. Later my husband called my daughter to come practice her piano. She took a really long time coming downstairs. When she finally showed up she said, “Sorry! I’m wearing my baggy jeans today, and they really slowed me down!” For any of you who will have teenagers one day, this is what you have to look forward to. 260914 what's it to you? who go blather from