Eric and The Ripped Pants²

            It’s Monday, and I know it’s quite a cliché to hate on Mondays but there’s a reason for that hatred (not that I’m all that fond of Tuesday through Saturday either).  It never fails that I’ll stay up late on Sunday night watching television, something horrible that probably grates on my soul (last night was the season premiere of The Walking Dead [I guess it depends on where you fall on whether or not zombies are evil if you think that’s horrible] the week before it was Dexter and I don’t even think I should mention how many Sunday nights were taken up with True Blood).  Sunday, is the only day of the week that I get to sleep in, and by sleep in I mean 8:00am because I have church obviously, so I’m not that tired at my normal bedtime.  This always gets me on Monday morning but I never learn.  That alarm on my iPhone goes off at 5:25am and I groggily fall to my feet and stumble around the house trying to get ready in about 15 minutes (so yeah it’s a bit rushed, and it’s better than coffee to snap you out of that stupor).

            Today has been extra special though because I was in my office talking to the safety manager about something work related (I’m sure), and I sat down and felt something tear.  I panicked, “maybe, it was my shirt, I could have sat on it” I thought “could have been the chair?”  “Just sit here and pretend like everything’s okay”.  So I slowly reached down and felt the back of myself and there it was, a tear from the top of my pants down to my upper right thigh.  This is awesome; I looked at the clock, 10 minutes to go until the regular Monday production meeting.  “They won’t care if I’m not there this once, right?”  I called my wife and asked her to go to the store and buy me a pair of pants and bring them to me, why do I need her to buy me a pair of pants? You ask.  Well, I only buy one pair of pants at a time because I’m always planning on losing weight and then I won’t need those pants anymore.  It is a motivational tool that I have used for the last seven years and it has not worked even once.  It is the very definition of insanity.

            I called my boss to let him know that I wouldn’t be making the meeting and told him that I didn’t want to tell him why because he would make fun of me.  He assured me he was going to make fun of me anyway so I told him and he laughed and I laughed and it’s all great.  Charlotte showed up in less than 20 minutes with a brand new pair of pants (so at least I know I have an awesome wife who loves me even when my ass is so big it tears my clothing like a cartoon character).  The worst part of this whole thing is that it’s not the first time that I’ve ripped my pants; it’s not even the first time this year.

            Back in June I was an usher at my brother’s wedding.  We were leaving the YWCA after setting up for the reception and I sat down in the car and I felt the tear.  The wedding was going to start in an hour, we were ten minutes away and I didn’t have any other pants.  We drove to the nearest store, Charlotte ran into a Target, Ross, and Marshall’s, there was nothing suitable in any of the stores and time was running out.  I was live tweeting this entire event (it’s how I’ve learned to own embarrassing situations).  We drove from that shopping center to a Men’s Wearhouse two blocks from the chapel.  Charlotte ran in and gave the guy my size, he said it would be $135 (What!? For pants?!) and he would need me to come inside so he could measure me for hemming purposes.  There was no way I was getting out of the car and walking across the parking lot with a giant hole in my pants, especially since I was going commando (What? They don’t seem to make underwear in my size).  Besides, we only had 25 minutes until the wedding was going to start and I was supposed to be seating people already.  She told him to just hem them the most generic way possible and paid him the insane price (don’t feel too bad for us though, my parents paid us back for the pants plus some).  We got the pants and rushed to the wedding with about 5 minutes to spare.  There’s probably a lesson in these stories somewhere.

            This is either a sign that I should lose some weight or that the small slave children who make the pants should take some more sewing lessons (there, right there, that’s where I crossed the line).

Eric Anderson

P.S.  I would like to thank my wife for going out of her way on many many occasions for me and my neediness.  I love you Charlotte and thank you for everything