Sneezy and Dopey and STUPID

This morning I pulled my one pair of clean but excessively wrinkled jeans off the hangar and resigned myself to the ten extra minutes I was going to have to spend ironing out the crazy diagonal creases that the dryer should have removed, but didn’t. Because while this is our monthly Jeans Day, it’s not our monthly Homeless Lady Staggers In Building With Wrinkled Jeans And Wet Hair Day. For whatever reason I rationalize that if one presses their clothing, others are less likely to judge for walking in bare-faced and soppy-haired.

While the iron was heating up I decided that I would even go so far as to put pretty creases in my jeans. These are not the scary creases that people make on regular generic jeans or the really baggy kind with three cans of starch. These jeans are cut like nice trousers, only made of denim, obviously, because I just called them jeans. So basically I’ve got on the same kind of outfit I wear every other day, it’s just that this material happens to be outlawed during the majority of my work month.

Once I was satisfied with the nice clean lines down the front of my denim trousers I looked at the clock on my phone and realized it was time to get the fear of god and put my ass in gear. So as I’m putting on my pants and hopping around with one shoe and grabbing keys from the dresser and unplugging the iron, I’m also attempting to hook my pants. Like many ladies trousers, the maker has eschewed the button and the snap, going instead for a flat front look with two wide slider hooks and a zipper. I keep grabbing and pulling and attempting to find the hook catching things on the opposite side of the hook part and the thought crosses my mind that maybe I’ve gained some weight since I wore these pants last month. Maybe I need to cinch them tighter.

I pull so tight my belly button recoils in fear, telling me that it will not accept pants that will have to be worn so tight. Finally I put down my purse and keys myriad other accoutrements and look down, exasperated with the length of time it’s taken an adult woman to hook her pants.

It’s then that I notice that while the pants have the two wide hooks on the right tab, they are missing the hook homes on the left. Where is the hook to go, I think? What has happened here?

I give up completely at this point and just take the pants off, staring at the little tabs in confusion, still thinking that these pants are just more complicated than I remembered and everything will resolve itself in just a few moments. But when I bring the tabs under the microscope of my non-microscope eye, I realize there are four wee little holes on the left. Four wee little holes that at some point would have housed the hook homes, BUT WHERE ARE THEY NOW?

Ultimately I had to scrounge around in my junk drawer for a mini snap and some needle and thread. It wasn’t pretty, but I spent three and a half minutes whipping it on because heaven forbid I have a safety pin. Granted, I could have just found some other pants but this is JEANS DAY, people. It comes around once a month, sometimes twice if you’re lucky. We can’t just waste it because of a little thing like keeping your pants closed.