Anyone who knows me from 8th grade will remember that I was obsessed from afar with a certain specific pair of Adidas track pants.  

The kind that were knit (not the crinkly nylon kind), with the three white stripes running down the sides.  In burgundy.  I don’t know why I was so obsessed.  

Did I even own a pair?  No!  Why?  Probably due to the thing that holds you back in middle school from many things … thinking, “Those pants are for the cool kids.”  Then again, it may just have been the fact that they were hard to find?  Poughkeepsie being what it was, and internet shopping still a couple years off, it could be that I wasn’t so excited about pawing through all the thrift shops in the area to find a pristine pair of what were essentially gym pants.

Whatever it was, I do remember that it was 8th grade because that same year, we went to Quebec for a French class trip and I vividly remember that when we were at the Sugar Shack, we saw a boy from another school wearing THE burgundy Adidas trackies that I thought were so amazing.  

It’s such a funny feeling when you see someone else who has exactly, but exactly, the thing that you want so bad.