Today is a special day. Today, the sun shines a little brighter, the air smells sweeter, the Diet Coke tastes colder.

Today, I rekindled my love affair with pants.

Oh, sweet pants. (Not to be confused with "sweetpants," an epithet for a different occasion.) I love the word. "Pants." Say it out loud. Feel the crisp consonants. Roll it around. Pants. It owns itself. There’s no sensible anagram of "pants," no songworthy pronunciation games, no identity crisis to rattle Pants to its core. Is Evian just "naïve" spelled backwards, or is "naïve" just the reversal of Evian? Potato, po-tah-to? Which came first, the chicken or the pants? The answer is clear.

Pants breathes life into crass vernacular. I love swearing with Pants. The other day, I noticed mold sprouting on a new loaf of bread. "Oh, PANTS!" I yelled in my tizzy. Julie taught me this trick. Try it. It’s cussing for a PG audience. "Pants" might be the "shit" of the new millennium. Forgot that presentation at home? Agitated about the coffee stain you just deposited on a new white shirt? Fear not -- just Pants it.

In life, be wary of synonyms for Pants. I can accept "trousers," of course, and "pantaloons," but only when both are used in the proper jocular context. But I refuse to reverse my stance on slacks.

I’m not keen on slacks. I cannot stress this enough. On the basest level, it’s a vocabulary problem: one can drop trou, one can pants another person, but one can’t unslack, or deslack, or drop slack, or even slacks somebody. Saying "slack off" just breeds confusion. Don’t even start with the epithet problem; there is no equal to "trouser beef" that doesn’t imply some sort of male deficiency. When used in place of "pants," however, the very word "slacks" implies an unsatisfactory bagginess, a Bea Arthur fashion statement I can’t quite get behind. There’s an age bracket for slacks, and it isn’t mine. Literally speaking, "slacks" hints at a pair of trousers sadly failing to perform its job at an acceptable level, and I don’t take kindly to those who malign blessed pants.

Of course, in addition to thriving on other levels, pants also succeed at their most basic function. Pants, when chosen correctly, remove the pressure of perfection. Pants hide my legs. I don’t have to shave all the time, I don’t have to lift weights, I don’t have to get goosebumps. That’s what pants are for, bless them. Today I’m wearing a new pair of jeans, crisp but not uncomfortable, fresh and clean and virgin to any world outside a few curious fumblings from patrons searching shelves at The Gap. Crisp pants. Pure pants. I like wearing these pants. I feel decent in these pants.

All my shirts look good with these pants. They are non-partisan pants. I have a few pairs of jeans, three of which are currently in circulation, a decision I base entirely on the size of my ass in a given month. But the cuts of these three pairs are vastly different, meaning only certain tops pair with each bottom. When it’s four days past Laundry Day, this calls for creative clothing options indeed. But my new pants do not discriminate; theirs is a love no boundary can ever contain. They’ll take t-shirts and tighter shirts, short-sleeve and long; they’ll take shirts that hang perfectly and shirts that are wrong; they’ll take shirts with fandibulars, thigjers and sprongs.

One such pair of Old Navy denim pants serves a dual purpose in my small life: they fit, and they’re also completely comfortable to wear when lounging around on my fiendishly cozy couch. In apparent abettance of my lethargic tendencies, these pants flatly refuse to find a position of sprawl in which they become an uncomfortable fit.

But after a few years of fighting the good fight, my Old Navy jeans are going kaput. There’s a tiny tear in the middle of the left-thigh area, and the cuffs a month ago graduated from trendy-frayed into tattered. The usual tears at back-pocket corners are also developing. They even look like a cotton slouch, stretched and washed into submission and finally starting to hang without logic. The right-rear belt loop, already loosening at the seams, was tugged adrift by Doug when he jokingly grabbed me by my pants (he’ll be punished for his lack of reverence) and that poisonous rrrrrip sound pierced the air. Those pants are now peekaboo pants, only to be worn with saucy undergarments.

In sum, my Old Navy jeans are dying, which meant a trip to the mall was in order. This is usually a depressing experience, as my numerical size is not what it once was, and retailers aren’t helping by conspiring to make each size smaller and smaller until size eight is more like a two. But, accepting this, I managed to locate a flattering pair of pants that rebels against its neatly stitched blue tag.

So here I am, pants-clad and brimming with attitude. My pants defiantly refuse to make me look the size that’s printed on the sticky tape I yanked from the leg this morning. They even make dressing simpler – because of the tears in my old jeans, donning and doffing them each day became a gentle exercise in restraint and basic physics. Applying too much pressure to the wrong area will widen the existing holes, rendering me pantsless, sans pants, the cruelest of all fates. Now, I can whip these new babies on and off like they’re velcro. Granted, that doesn’t come in terribly handy with my line of work, but if it did, I would be prepared. Ready. At the edge of my pants.

Oh, lovely, beautiful pants. Long may you wear.

reading pants of justice, by theodore trousenheimer watching "pants of our lives" and "all my pants" singing "pants pants pants," by *NPANTS wearing the mighty pants hanging and folding mein pants what it all means praise to you, thy holy pantaloon