Taking care of the little things

One of my wardrobe updates post-marriage was a pair of buttonfly khakis from J.Crew. These don't have near the rugged mystique of the classic Levi's 501 buttonfly pants, but they do present a similar challenge. Has anyone ever made sense of the five buttons versus the typical one and a zipper? For posing in a Levi's 501 ad (with the proverbial v-neck shirt and beads of perspiration), you only have to button the buttons one time, but under normal conditions of use, the daily buttoning total can run into the dozens. Now for the traditional build quality of the Levi's buttons, even the most inconvienent levels of use would not be enough to affect the sewing durability. I've never had a pair of Levi's that had the buttons come off or need the zipper resown. But wouldn't you know it, the fashion-concious J.Crew buttonfly khakis have not stood up to persistant use. Every single one of the buttons has loose thread flowing down the leg, and some of them are so loose you could pull them off with a generous tug.

Now I'm not upset about this. Buttons need resown from time to time. But the interesting thing is that I thought of writing a post on my loose buttonfly khakis a long while ago. The current button situation has been the same for several months. It actually is quite impressive that the frayed threads have held the buttons to the pants for so long. My first post was going to be a poll asking for opinions on when everyone thought the buttons actually would fall off. I was certain that if I did such a thing though, all I would get was an all caps response from my mother that read, "STOP COMMENTATING AND SEW YOUR BUTTONS BACK ON!"

But this makes me think though of the things in our lives that we leave for an extended period of time, even when they are out of place, even when fixing them isn't particularly hard. I can think of a couple:

• Not ironing a shirt/pants when they don't really need to be done, but would look a lot better if they were
• Placing a new toilet paper ream on top of the empty paper cylinder versus actually replacing it
• Getting new papers/mail/etc. and piling them on top of the old pile instead of cleaning out the pile

Any others you can think of?