The World According to Chuck

I’ve been getting a fair amount of crap about my goal of wearing these damn pants. Encouragement? No. Sympathy for letting myself get a little lax in the personal inventory habit? Not so much. Derision? A little bit, yeah.

Fine. BRING IT ON.

I deserve it. Whether it’s right and proper for me to eke so much public sharing mileage out of excess adipose tissue is debatable; I made a choice, is all, partly because that’s an established way to help one stick to goals, and mostly because I’m a joyful, life-loving kind of guy who has a good time shrugging his shoulders and wearing a goofy grin.

But some of the derision hurts. I don’t know what to say.

Still, like the boy in the Irish folk tale who throws his hat over the high wall because now he HAS to climb it, that’s where I’m at.

I might have made a mistake, too. These are pants that really should be worn by someone who dresses well, and that person is not me. Secondly, they’re not made to be forgiving, with “giving” being operative. There’s no stretching or manipulating; these pants are designed for a very specific waistline, like your ATM PIN; you can’t be off by one digit and get away with it.

Finally, they just may be made for a leaner man than I am meant to be.

But I said it so I’ll do it, and then we can discuss. I altered my habits this week, tried to get more active, ate carefully, drank plenty of water, increased my mileage, kept moving. The gap between closing and MUWAHAHAHA is smaller. Maybe aiming for the end of February was unrealistic; I’m pretty clueless when it comes to sizes and how clothes fit and what it takes to make them fit. Just trying to keep myself honest here, and enjoying having some sort of goal in the distance. The wall is not that high, I keep telling myself, and besides, as everyone knows by now, I really like my hat.

INCHES TO GO UNTIL CLOSURE: 3.