The Muffin Top

Let me start out by admitting that I am no fashion mogul my any stretch of the imagination but I have seen things as of late that I cannot remain silent about any longer. Every decade has a few standout fashions: Leather jackets in the 50s, tie dyed clothes in the 60s, bellbottoms in the 70s, neon everything in the 80s, plaid shirts in the 90s, etc. Well now we have low-rise jeans. This really isn’t anything new as they had them in the 70s, but today we have a society of that is, on average, overweight. So if you put the low-rise jeans style together with overweight people you get a rather distasteful situation: The muffin top.

I'm not talking about the good kid of muffin top folks.

The muffin top occurs when a person, almost always a female, wears low-rise jeans but does not have the waist to pull off said jeans. The result is an overflow of chub that cascades over the top of the jeans like the Gulf of Mexico coming over the levies around New Orleans during hurricane Katrina. Everyone knows its going to burst and no one wants to be there when it does.

These jeans were not made for this kind of punishment ladies.

Listen ladies, just because the low-rise jean is the popular style does not mean you need to wear it.  If you cannot pull it off don't do it.  For the love of all that is good an holy do not do it.  If the Simon Cowell School of Fashion said that tight shirts were in you would not see me going out and getting one.  Why?  Because if I wore a tight shirt I would look like an injured porpoise trapped in discarded plastic desperately trying to get off the beach and back into the ocean.  People would walk by and throw water on me and yell, "Keep him wet!"

Yes.                                    NOOOOOO!

Pick a fashion that works for your body type.  Just like for women at the beach you should not wear a bikini if you are gravitationally challenged and for men if you are not on the swim team get out of those Speedos.   It's like trying to shove a round beg into a square hole.  Didn't we learn that didn't work at age 2? 

If a button pops off someone may die.

This isn't a dig against people who fall in the “Before” category of the weight loss pictures as I have lived in that category for a number of years now.  I am merely trying to get people to take an honest look at their bodies and then take an honest look at their clothes.  Honestly… do they go together?  If your midsection is desperately trying to escape over your low-rise jeans like prisoners over the walls of Sing Sing, the answer is a resounding NO. For the love of God… NO.

The Good Samaritan

I wouldn’t say that I hate mornings but mornings and I just do not get along very well. Mornings to me are like that one guy at work that has an office down the hall and every time he sees you he spends 30 minutes telling you about how the podiatrist removed his bunion. You don’t hate the guy but if you ever saw him again it would be too soon. In my humble opinion God should have made the sunrise around 10 am and anything earlier is just unpleasant. This becomes a problem every Sunday morning when, after going to sleep around 2 am, I must wake up at the crack of dawn and drag my self out of bed and make it to church by 8:30 am. This particular Sunday morning was especially delightful.

I have a "good morning" waiting for you in my diaper.

My wife leaves early for practice as she sings in the church praise team so it is up to me to get the kids fed, make sure they have clean underwear on and looking halfway presentable in the morning as to not embarrass my wife. Everything ran rather smoothly for a Sunday morning which should have been my first clue that trouble was about to rear its ugly head and bite my face off.

The greatest fear of every mother.

About a half a mile from the church the car engine died suddenly. I managed to steer the car into the median of street as there was no shoulder on the road. Since I know absolutely nothing about cars I didn’t bother lifting the hood and taking a look at the engine. What’s the point? I may as well have been looking at the wreckage of a Boeing 747 and trying to determine what part was defective. It isn’t like I would know what I was looking for anyway. I have noticed most men do the “Lift the hood and stare at the engine so people think I know what I’m doing” routine but I decided to just skip that step and move straight to the “start walking” step.

"I fail to see how 150 of us can fit in here."

I gathered up my two boys, who are 5 and 7 years of age, and started walking down the side of the road. It was a busy morning on this road as so many people are on their way to church. There must have been at least 50 cars pass us by before finally, as we were about a block away from church, a mother of one of my Sunday school students stopped to give us a ride the rest of the way. It was only a block but it was a wonderful gesture.

I believe this may be more reliable.

After Sunday school I had at least ten people come up to me and mention that they saw my car broken down in the street and they saw me walking with my boys along the side of the road. The comments ranged from, “What happened to your car?" to my favorite, "Hey, I saw you walking down the road!"  A few guys even tried to diagnose the problem with my car by asking me what had occurred before the engine quit.

"Well.. uh..I tell you what you got there... You have an issue with your...
uh... car's dumaflache.  I had that issue one time back in '83..."

Of course the only question I wanted to ask them was, “So you saw my broken down car and you saw me walking along the side of the road with a 5 and a 7 year old but you didn’t bother to stop and give us a ride on your way to church?” Let me repeat that last part, “on your way to church?” I decided to be friendly and just smile and nod.

This makes me think of the story of the Good Samaritan in the Bible. You all know the story of how a man was beat up and robbed and left for dead on the side of the road. Person after person, including a priest, passed by and no one helped him but finally one man, a lowly Samaritan, stopped and rendered aid to the injured man. What an amazing story of mercy and how we are to look out for each other in times of need.

All this has made me think of all the opportunities I have missed on the side of the road of life because I didn’t stop and assist someone. How many times have I been too busy to make time for someone else who may need my help? We all have to remember that we need to take time out of our busy days to stop and help those who are in need, even if that means sacrificing time and money. That is what a good neighbor would do and that is what Jesus would do.

Of course, then there are bad neighbors...

By the way my timing belt broke while I was driving and cause everything in my car’s engine to move at the wrong times and totally destroyed the valves in my engine.  It was like taking the teleprompter away from the news anchors... No one knew what do to next so ensued. On a side note if anyone wants to send me $1300 for car repairs let me know. After retelling this story I take it back… I hate mornings.

This guy seems legit.  I trust him.

The Great Cheeseburger Incident of 2010

Over the past few months I have noticed a very subtle change in my lunches that my lovely wife packs for me to take to work. At first it was just adding a nonfat yogurt but then, later, my chips were replaced by an apple and later, after a month or so, my cookies were replaced by a nonfat pudding cup. Finally my white sandwich bread was switched with some kind of conglomerate of nuts and twigs mixed into what appeared to be bread dough. I think my wife is trying to relay a message to me but I’m not sure what it is.

Slather some peanut-butter and jelly on this bread and we're in business!

Shortly after my delicious lunch was replaced with a less than tasty substitute my darling wife tried to sneak “healthy alternatives” into my meals. Instead of bacon or sausage, a tasteless patty made of an unknown substance showed up on my plate. It was greasy like a sausage but had no flavor and was spongy like I had taken a bite out of a Nerf football. I cannot believe this sort of thing was approved by the FDA.

Did someone drop this on the ground and forget to wash it off?

One fine evening I sat down to dinner and found that the butter for my rolls had been replaced with butter flavored spray. What is the point of this? I had to spray my roll 37 times and it still did not resemble anything like butter. Finally I resorted to taking the cap off and pouring the yellow substance on my roll but this only resulted in a soggy mash of dough.

I can believe it isn't butter.  What I can't believe is why anyone would buy this.

The straw the broke the camel's back was the Great Cheeseburger Incident of 2010. As my family settled down for the evening I fired up the grill and prepared to grill up some burgers. My sweet wife handed me the meat that she had already formed into delicious over sized patties. This was very nice of her as she is afraid to handle raw meat apparently believing that salmonella will kill you instantly upon contact. This should have been my first clue that something was a rye.

I'll take mine with small fries.  Don't want to get fat.

As I prepared my cheeseburger with all the fixings and condiments a little drool was forming on the corner of my mouth. I picked up what was easily a half-pound of cheeseburger I took a huge bite and… now let me pause here for a moment and remind my audience that cheeseburgers are the greatest food ever made, as I have talked about before. I believe that God had the Israelites in the Old Testament sacrifice bulls so that the priests would have the meat to make cheeseburgers.

"Who wants cheese on their burger?"

Anyway, back to the story. As I bit into my cheeseburger I immediately noticed that either my taste buds had died or there was something horribly wrong with my burger. It tasted like someone had replaced my beef with feet. I quickly opened my mouth, allowed the atrocity to plop onto the plate in front of me and then turned my gaze upon my wife. “It’s extra lean buffalo meat!” she tried to explain.

Excuse me, what's inside that burger sir?

I stood up, extended my index finger towards my wife, looked up towards the heavens and exclaimed, “Blasphemer!” half expecting the woman on the opposite side of the table to be turned into a pillar of salt. In unison both my boys emptied the contents of their mouths onto the table.

"Blasphemer!"

After I instructed the mother of my children on the essential components of a perfect cheeseburger, none of which includes extra lean anything let along buffalo, I tried to dispose of the left over "burger" by putting it in my dog's bowl.  He sniffed it, whimpered and walked away.  I love that dog.  I am quite certain that the woman that lives under my roof now understands that there are many things that I can let slide... tampering with my cheeseburger is not one of them.

By the way... I'm still not sure what she was trying to tell me.  I'm sure it will come to me soon.