My pants don't fit

12 June 2012

My pants don't fit.

Perhaps there are more appropriate ways to begin a blog, or more pressing issues to discuss in my second entry, but I don't think so.

The fact that my pants are so difficult to button, causing me to either rearrange my internal organs or surreptitiously zip up the fly then unbutton the top button behind the belt, is causing me great embarrassment, consternation, and physical discomfort. A generous person might attribute my continued tardiness to work in part to my need to iron a new pair of pants each morning in the hope of finding a better fit. One might call my attire situation quite unsustainable.

There are two major issues causing this problem. To not beat around the bush, I'll first note that I have gained weight. Not orca fat, not rivaling my 2001 days, but enough to draw comments from loved ones and make me consider changing my diet for the first time in my life. The other issue is that I haven't really bought new pants - or enough new slacks - to fully displace my old work clothes. This means that in many ways my work attire has remained essentially unchanged since 2004. Though I have not added any vertical inches since then, it would be quite an act of self-deception to ignore other inches I've added.

My solutions are parallel to the problems: I can either lose all the weight or upgrade to new, roomier confines. I'd really like to lose the weight, in part because it aligns with a planning principle I hold by. (Caution: entering planning geek territory) If you have too much of an undesirable thing - say, traffic - don't just changes the rules or expand highways to accommodate it. Make it inconvenient and expensive for this undesirable behavior to continue while creating or easing access to alternatives (i.e. public transit systems). Adding highway lanes will not solve traffic problems in the long run but only encourage more driving, and adding more loops to a belt or loosening the pants might do the same thing for weight. I'm not the first to liken adding freeway lanes to adding loops on a belt, so I'll give due credit... to whoever said it.

But maybe a compromise is in order. Especially since I won't be losing 20 pounds by next week, not with all this delicious food to sample (and wine of course). And I can't risk sitting in a meeting with everyone trying to explain to my untrained Spanish ears the phrase: "unbuttoned pants." It would be nice to have some new pants anyway, especially ones without stains...