The Parable of the White Pants

The parable of the white pants is one I've discussed with some of my closest friends and I want to share it with you now, because it will probably change your life, like all good parables can. I'm not yet sure that I've learned how to harness its full power (Maybe you can help enlighten me).

For those of you who do not yet know of the parable of the white pants, let me now relate it to you.

A few summers ago, when Transformers 2 came out in theatres, my family and I went down to the Gateway Mall and plunked down our seventy five dollars a ticket (or whatever it was they cost back then) and sat down with our ice cold sodas and buckets full of popcorn to watch the movie.

I don't expect too much from my rootin' tootin' knock 'em up blockbusters. I come to be entertained. I'm fine with a straight forward plot and a cheesy love story. These are the things I expect. But there are some things that I just can't stand for. And that's where our white pants come into the story.

Three quarters of the way through the film I knew something was off. Megan Fox's character (who made the poor fashion choice to begin with of wearing white pants on a day when aliens would try to take over the planet) was still sporting clean jeans after countless near death experiences.

At this point I stopped following the story all together and became consumed with those pants. Those glaring white pants. I was obsessed. How was it that Megan Fox could be blown up and chased by transforming aliens and still keep her pants pristine when I couldn't even run to pick up the kids from school without getting a huge chocolate stain on my butt?

Finally in the last scenes of the movie the directors must have noticed the perfect spotlessness of Megan's pants because they grubbied them up, smearing them with dirt so that they looked close (but not quite as bad) to the way I would have looked by dinnertime on a school day.

But by this point in the movie it was too late. I couldn't look past it. The movie was ruined for me.

So what's the moral of the parable of the white pants? Is it to wear dark colors when earth is being invaded? Is it to stay away from big summer blockbusters? or is it something more subtle?

Can you still find value in things even if there's a big glaring mistake staring at you? I hope that the answer is yes. I hope that I can learn not to dismiss everything just because I see some faults. Politics, religion, relationships, couldn't we use the parable of the white pants to learn to understand all these things better? And more importantly, next time I plunk down three hundred dollars to see a movie, maybe I'll learn to let those silly mistakes go and actually watch the film.

What do you think? (And don't tell me not to wear white after labor day. That doesn't count.)