It's about my pants. Specifically, one of my three pairs of jeans. I was feeling lazy and indulgent a couple days ago (a rarity for me, given my propensity for spartan, nay, ascetic living) and thought, what the hay, I'll drop off my laundry and pay roughly three times what laundry should cost and in a day I'll have it all back, clean and nicely folded in that way you can only learn in foreign prison camps.

I sent two of my three pairs of jeans (well, the jeans I can fit into right now, ha ha) off to the laundromat, and only got one pair back. I tore the contents of my laundry bag apart (it has a stick figure that says "ONE MORE DAY AND I'LL BE NAKED!" on it and I bought it before I left for college, ca. 1993 and the irony of it all is that I still HAVE this bag but the slim fit dark blue jeans I bought three months ago and put inside the bag have joined the bleedin' choir invisible), thus rendering the prison camp folding job moot, and no, I didn't find those jeans. Le sigh.

So I though, optimistically, let me go back to the laundromat and see if they have my jeans.

When I got there, I realized an unforseen obstacle: the laundromat attendant and I did not share a common language. Not even Esperanto! (Damn you, Bennington academic adviser!)

"Hi there," I began. "I dropped off my laundry a couple days ago. [Pause] When I picked it up, my pants were missing. [OK, I know that the non-specificity of that statement is not only misleading but a bit pornographic, but I was going for economy of verse.] Have you seen my pants?" I smiled, and allowed my voice to go up at the end. See, we're good friends, you and I. Good friends don't hide each others' pants!

The wizened Central American gnome behind the counter returned my smile. "PANTS!" she exclaimed.

"Si! Yes, pants! Have you...ah...seen them?"

Her smile disappeared.

"I lost my pants. Do you have them?"

Blinking.

"Pantalones...perdo?" (I briefly thought of myself in college, sitting at a desk, translating medieval French nuns' diary entries. My, but THAT came in handy.)

A glimmer of recognition. "Ah! Uno momento."

She stepped off of the footstool she'd been standing on, making her six inches shorter...making her, oh, 4 feet and a couple inches. I was beginning to feel bad.

It's funny, because on the train home that night, I'd been psyching myself up into a Rowdy Roddy Piper-style confrontational mood, ready to karate-chop the detergent dispenser if they didn't produce my pants right away. But I realized, as I watched the washerwoman struggling with a Rubbermaid tub of Lost Pants, shouting down a human shorter than a copy of Infinite Jest would have been a pyrric victory.

She produced a few pairs of jeans for my perusal. I am devastated to report that although I really fancied the 42x28 Rustlers with the acid-washed iron-on patches I knew that taking someone else's pants would be Wrong. "Come back tomorrow!" she said, shrugging. I imagined her thinking, "What, you're too good for these pants?

I went home, defeated.

Now my work wardrobe is reduced by 33%.

Unless I choose to slide down that slippery slope into the realm of Pants Without Waistbands.

Which heretofore were reserved for Date Nights.