Popping A Button

Last night I had a very good Italian meal. Some fine ravioli for an appetizer, a veal entree, a little wine, and a cup of black coffee. In a nod to notions of physical fitness, I even skipped dessert and walked a number of blocks from the restaurant back to my hotel.

Yet, when I returned to my room, I popped a button on my trousers — and all illusions of trim physical fitness vanished.

Let’s face it. Popping a button on your pants is a tangible, irrefutable demonstration that you need to hit the gym, and hit it hard. It tells you that pants that fit properly once really don’t fit any longer.

The humble button will remain comfortably attached to its binding threads, happy to permanently serve its designated function of keeping items of apparel attached. Buttons become uncomfortable and call attention to themselves only when they are put under enormous tensile strain by expanding human girth. They feel their threads loosening with growing trepidation. The final snap and pop is a button’s last, desperate bid to get the pants wearer to pay attention to the truth about his personal circumstances.

Sigh. A button is telling me it’s time to think about a workout regimen.

#SuitFail

Yesterday I was deciding what to wear to work.  After careful consideration, I selected an old favorite — a camel-colored, nail head-patterned suit.

As I was removed the suit from its hanger I noticed some wear and tear along the seams . . . and then I saw, to my horror, that the fabric of the pants had worn through, at about the point the keys in my pocket would occupy when I sit.  Apparently, during my last wearing of the suit — at least, I hope it was the last wearing, and I haven’t been walking around oblivious to a hole in my trousers for months — the fabric had endured all the keychain and wallet-induced tension it could stand.

I’m sorry to lose this suit.  I’ve had it for at least 15 years, and it’s been a faithful member of the Webner suit rotation, hauled out and donned every week or so, winter, spring, summer, and fall.  I knew which shirts and ties and belts and shoes “went” with it.  That helped make getting dressed in the morning into more of a comfortable routine, where I could let my lower brain make the familiar shirt and tie selections as my higher brain focused on the day ahead.

A good suit becomes like an old friend, capable of gently giving you important guidance.  This suit fit well, and if it started to feel a bit snug I knew it was time to push myself away from the table and work to lose a few pounds.  Now I’ll need to find another suit to fill the not-gray, not-blue spot in my closet — and to let me know when I should start that diet.

Squeezing Into “Skinny Clothes”

Conventional wisdom dictates that, if you haven’t worn an article of clothing for a year, you should just get rid of it.  If twelve months have passed without it being taken off the hanger, the reasoning goes, issues of style or fit make it highly unlikely that you will ever put it on again.

I disagree with the conventional wisdom for two reasons.  First, I’m cheap.  Second, I think that, if you haven’t worn that jacket or pair of pants for a year due to weight gain, you should keep them around as a tangible reminder of how far you’ve let yourself slide.  Stepping on a scale, unpleasant as it might be, is an abstract exercise.  What difference does six pounds make, really?  But if you try to put on trousers that you haven’t worn since last fall and you realize the waistline now cuts off your circulation, you’ve got a powerful, concrete, and embarrassing indication of where you stand.

I have a sport coat that is about 30 years old.  I know this because I have a picture of me, UJ, and Dad taken in 1986, and I’m wearing it.  It’s been hanging in my closet since, donned with decreasing frequency until all wear stopped during the 1990-2010 interregnum.  At that point, my packed on poundage made any effort to struggle into the jacket look like the scene from Tommy Boy where Chris Farley rips David Spade’s jacket to shreds.  It was humiliating — but I resolved to keep the sport coat, anyway, as a reminder and a goal.

At the start of 2012, I decided the time had come to get back into “jacket shape.”  Nothing extraordinary — just trying to eat a little less, drink a little less, and exercise a little more.  I’ve made progress, and recently I took the plunge and tried on the jacket.  Happily, I was able to put it on without spraining a shoulder or sending a button rocketing into the bathroom mirror.  It’s still a tad snug, but I felt a real sense of accomplishment.  I’m glad I’ve kept it around.