New Pants

I got new pants this week. Five pairs of new pants, to be exact, and I wore them every day this week. Monday? New pants. Tuesday? New pants. Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday? If you answered, "New pants," then you are correct.

The new pants are exciting for two reasons:

First, I had to buy new pants because my old pants are too big. Remember that time that my shorts fell off in public? My pants started falling down, too. Not in public, mind you, because I always go out with a belt on, but if I got home and took my belt off and then tried to walk across my living room, the pants were on the floor. It didn't matter if they were still buttoned and zippered, either. As soon as the belt was gone and I wasn't standing perfectly still, BAM! PANTS ARE DOWN!

This stops being funny the first time they trip you.

I have a glass-topped coffee table, and I'm not Heather Chandler. I would prefer not to be the white whale that drank some bad plankton and splashed through a coffee table.

By the way, the pants I have on in the picture in that blog entry? They're too big. So are the jeans that I bought for Alternative Spring Break in 2013. I wore them today and had to belt the hell out of them.

With my brown belt.

Which now fits again.

That means that I can wear brown shoes to work again, with my new pants. I had to stop wearing brown shoes when I got a bigger black belt last year because I was raised properly, and understand that belts and shoes should match.

A couple of friends, who admitted that I desperately needed new pants, asked why I didn't just wear the ones that I've outgrown over the past few years, and I explained that I didn't have them anymore. I didn't explain that the reason that I don't have them anymore is that, over time, my thighs destroyed them. All of my old pants eventually wore out and were replaced because the friction caused by my thighs rubbing together made the inner thighs of the pants get thinner, and thinner, and thinner, and when you took them out of the dryer to fold them you could see light through them but most people couldn't tell when you had them on, because really, who looks at your inner thighs unless you're sitting across from them playing "Basic Instinct" games? Eventually, every single pair of pants I had surrendered to the unending stress and friction, and the inner thighs ripped out.

Usually this happened in the washer or dryer, but once it happened in my office. I was coming back from lunch, sat down, and heard the inner thigh of my pants split. I went home for the rest of the day, allegedly because I needed new pants but also because I was sad inside that I'd gotten so fat that my pants exploded when I sat down in them. I probably coped with that by laying on my couch without moving and eating a family-sized bag of Doritos, which didn't really solve the problem.

But now I have new pants.

The other reason why the new pants are exciting?

This is, by my estimate, the first time I have bought new pants that are not the same size I'm currently wearing or larger in over a decade.

Think about that. What were you doing ten years ago? The freshmen in the class that I teach on Wednesday nights this semester were looking forward to turning ten years old. Facebook went live. Seriously. I haven't bought smaller-sized pants since before Facebook was invented. I hadn't moved to Tennessee yet, or finished my master's degree. The last time I bought smaller-sized pants, Julia Child died.

I'm hoping there's no causality on that last one.

But now I have new pants, and I wore them with pride all week.