Take off your pants to fart

“Take off your pants to fart”

What? Did you just hear what I just heard?

Don't grab for the q-tips yet and please maintain your faith in my Chinese translation ability....this is actually a commonly used Chinese phrase. Now, because the Chinese have a weird way of both doing things and saying things, at first it's hard to know how to interpret this statement. For example, a child almost peed on my shoes as I stepped off the bus last week, and a man walked into our restaurant last night in full pajamas and slippers. As you can see, manners and decency aren't always high on the list around here. Therefore, imagining this expression in its literal sense doesn't seem like that big of a stretch.

Thankfully, this phrase is simply a way to express that a person is making things more complicated than they should be, and can be used in any context. For example: "Cab driver, why did you take off your pants to fart? You could've just taken the third ring road instead!" I would personally go with “making a mountain out of a molehill,” but that’s just me.