The Pants Issue

      There is truly no more awful moment in the experience of a man than awakening to a lack of pants. You wake up, bathe yourself in soap and hot water, fix your hair, shave, brush your teeth, arrange your thoughts, plan out your day, and then one failed trip to the closet scuttles the entire voyage. Answer me this, dear reader, what amount of stunning physical beauty, world-wise confidence, or encyclopedic knowledge of anything will allow the civilized world to forgive you for having no pants?

       The answer, of course, is that the sin of no pants is unforgivable. We simply do not get past it. You can cure cancer, but they’ll still arrest you for it in public or fire you for it in the workplace. And there is no forgiveness, either; no one is going to laugh it off and say “everyone forgets to put on pants sometimes.” Walk into the office without the expected cloth coverings hanging from your waist , you’ll be lucky if anyone looks you in the eyes ever again. It is simply not acceptable.

       Why do I go on about this? Because this morning, as I sleepily stumbled my way about the apartment, readying myself for work, it became clear to me that I had entered into this Twilight Zone of horrors. My pants were gone. To say that they were, and still are, “lost” is not fully accurate, because in a living space so small this phenomenon just can’t happen. Things are normally “lost” when there’s too many places they could be, but in a living space as small as ours, tearing the entire place apart (which I did) is not only possible, it’s a reasonably quick activity. My pants are not lost, they are…truly disappeared (not a typo, I like the sound of it). The extent of my frantic search for them this morning, and its failure to yield fruit, means that the only places left for them to be would require some kind of horseshoe-esque “throw the pants” game, and that game would have had to take place outdoors. I don’t have the best memory in the world, but no such game rings a bell. Maybe Cor has hobbies I don’t know about.

      Of course, this pants catastrophe was not orchestrated by the night-time escape of one pair, but the perfect aligning of stars so that every pair of work-aproppriate pants I own was either gone or not wearable. What does a man do in this situation, with t-minus five minutes to leave before being late to work? Even if there was a clothing store open at that time other than Wal-Mart, a lack of pants begets an inability to venture into the world to acquire more. My eventual solution was a pair of grey slacks which did not fit when I acquired them, and do not fit now, but they are on me, and society would appear to be appeased. How exactly their cruel, unfeeling dimensions are in some kind of aesthetic harmony with my body is one of those mysteries one doesn’t ponder in much the same way that Wile E. Coyote does not look down once he has run off a cliff.

     Right. So enough about pants.

      One of the things that most people who have held temp jobs can probably tell you, and something I can now endorse as relentlessly true, is that it’s not to your advantage to get jobs done too quickly. There are a myriad of reasons for this, which I will now detail: 1) Your employer will begin to feel like they don’t know what to do with you, 2) It starts to sound like complaining when you’re always asking if anyone “needs anything at all,” 3) Your co-workers and superiors sometimes get kind of threatened if you’re too good at what you’re doing, 4) Ask for too many jobs, eventually they start “finding” things for you, and this means that they are digging down into the reserves of duties that everyone has been putting off. In other words, every time you ask for work, your tasks become that much more awful. I’ve already finished the filing I had to accomplish this morning before lunch, but I’m not saying a word, because the only place we can go from here is feeding an angry grizzly bear, or something equally horrific.

       Yesterday was a fun day, despite Cor’s efforts to the contrary (kidding). My wife and I have the same argument many times over, and it begins when she suggests (read: demands) that we produce a magical list of things “to get done today.” My reply is normally that I just got home from work, that we’ve been slaving like druids for the past week/month, and that we should do something fun. Cor’s reply is that we’ll do that once we’re done with the list, and it’ll be better anyway, because then she’ll be able to relax and focus on enjoying herself. For the first two years of our relationship I fell for this, but time, the wisest of teachers, has instructed me that “done” is a fool’s paradise; a mythical land that Corelyn prophesies about often, but will never actually be reached. She’s not *lying* to me, I think part of her clings to the idea that her incredible work ethic (it really is amazing) will ever be sated by the burnt offerings she sends to it, but the older we get the more she and I are realizing that this is a mirage. The reality of adult life seems to be that there is no “done.” There is a never-ending stream of things to do, all of them crucially important, and if you want to keep sane you just have to relax sometimes anyway.

       So, conceding to her a certain amount of rudimentary productivity (such as grocery shopping, check-depositing, etc), I then mandated a solid hour of “Mario Kart” on our Wii, followed by several episodes of “Scrubs,” one of our favorite TV shows. It did the trick, we both relaxed and found ourselves in a serious discussion of how the character of Catwoman has been handled through Batman’s comic book history.

Corelyn’s embrace of Batman, the Joker, and the universe they live in has been among the more magical events of my life. She has read and watched more Batman material, and fathoms it with greater focus and clarity, than any guy I know. The now-famous example of this occurred when Billy, Corelyn and I were watching an animated Bat-movie together, and the Joker winkingly intoned “pappa spank!” at Batman. This is an awkward and hilarious expression, and all three of us laughed, but as we did Cor glanced at me with a look of recognition. At first I didn’t understand why, and then I remembered: Batman had said “pappa spank” to the Joker in a comic book…from 1940. I dare any of my fellow Bat-fans to claim they would have caught that reference.

It occurs to me that I have not transcribed the events of our honeymoon cruise here, but you will have to wait awhile for that, dear reader, because…well I don’t feel like it right now. However, it bears mentioning that I acquired a terrible illness during that cruise, which has plagued me ever since. Food poisoning, you ask? Nope. Malaria? No. I have, instead, contracted “Enjoyement of Resident Evil Moviesitis.” I don’t know how it happened. I have publicly condemned them many times, having seen the first and written it off with great satisfaction. Fate, however, had diabolical plans for me. I was sitting in our luxurious room late one night near the end of our cruise, contently flipping channels and nursing a small sunburn, when I arrived on a “Resident Evil” marathon provided by TNT. I have long hated the writer/director of these endeavors, Paul W.S. Anderson, as he can be relied upon to produce garbage like “Alien Versus Predator” and “Mortal Kombat: The Movie,” but “Resident Evil” and its equally hilarious sequel “Resident Evil: Apocalypse” entertained me so thoroughly that I was embarassed by it. I have now rented “Resident Evil: Extinction” and, though I’m only half way through it, I can report with great shame that I’m absolutely loving it. It’s better than the second and at least as good as the first, all of which I’m constantly in the mood to watch. God help me. If that can be called a “recommendation,” then it’s my recommendation for today. It’s probably closer to an attempt to spread my contagion.

After work today, Cor and I are heading up to Alexandria to spend some time with the good folks there. We never get enough. I called Billy to let him know we were coming, and he replied that married life must be amazing. “Why’s that?” I replied, although I already agreed with him. “Well,” he continued, “When I told mom that you and Corelyn were coming to town, she thought for a second and then said, ‘Clean your room, you’re sleeping on the couch.’” I think I see his point.