Inventions

Years and years ago now, Jennifer Fulwiler wrote a blog post in which she described a conversation with her husband. She was thinking about developing a sort of dress that you could throw on over your regular clothes while you were cooking and cleaning, and then remove when you were done with the messy stuff. "That way you'd get the dress-thing spotted and greasy but your regular clothes would still look nice!" she explained. 

Her husband blinked. "Did you just invent...the apron?" he asked her.

Last summer we were talking about cooking at dinner and Joe was opining about the difficulty of getting food cooked evenly on the stove. "What if you could have an omnidirectional heat source?" he said.

Elwood blinked. "You mean, like, an oven?" he said. (We still joke about putting things in the omnidirectional heat source.)

Earlier this week I was thinking about bras, about the way that a bra snug enough to provide antigravity action will often produce some unhappy bulging above and below the band. I thought to myself, "What if you had something that was, like, an adjustable stretchy cylinder of fabric that extended below your bra and smoothed everything out nicely?"

I blinked at myself. "A girdle," I said to myself. "You just invented the girdle. Or perhaps the corset?"

As a kid watching old sitcoms I thought girdles were the exclusive property of aging ladies from long ago. They were like orthopedic shoes, or perhaps aspic -- unpleasant relics of the forgotten past. And yet here I am, living in the future: an aging lady whose brain spontaneously burps out a wish for a girdle of her very own.