"You, Alright?! I Learned by Watching You!" (The first in what will no doubt be an ongoing series of Public Service Announcements)

I have a Public Service Announcement for, well, the public.

To get you in the right frame of mind, please watch this first:

Man, that never gets old. Anyway, on with the announcement:

I'm here today to talk to you about a very important matter. If you or someone you know is a 60-something year old overly-tanned-to-the-point-of-resembling-an-overripe-butternut-squash woman who frequents a large transit hub in New York City, please note that you are, in fact, 60-something years old. I should not have to see your gonzagas* merrily peering out from atop your wee and seasonally-inappropriate tube top, not unlike two tiny, curious kangaroo babies** in their mama’s pouch, eager to see the world. It makes me uncomfortable. As does the view of your equally over-tanned baked muffin top (well…it worked with the muffin analogy!), by the way, and the crack of your middle-aged bottom. Furthermore, you are not of a small size, and that is totally OKAY. What is not totally okay is pouring yourself into jeans that are. Which brings me to the second half of this PSA...

...If you or someone you love obsessively buys expensive jeans, I have an important message for you. And it is NOT that purchasing many many pairs of such jeans is allegedly a waste of money because you can’t wear jeans to work (according to a certain person to whom I am married). No, they are pretty, make you look awesome, and are a perfectly sensible thing to (repeatedly) buy, J!

However. There is one brand that I must now go on the record as saying that you should NEVER buy. I hesitate to identify the brand outright, so instead, I’ll call it by something that sounds like the very opposite of its name--False Atheism. People, do NOT buy False Atheism jeans. They may cost upwards of $200, but they are as shoddy as the counterfeit jeans in Homer Simpson’s car hole (Stefanie and Darren, that was for you). The aforementioned inappropriately-garbed old lady was actually wearing a pair of these bad boys; she dropped her train pass, and bent down to pick it up. Here’s what I should have seen:

This is what I did see:

That orange you see by the back pocket? THAT IS LEATHERY, TANNED, OLD LADY ARSE! The False Atheism jeans ripped wide open along the pocket line when she bent down. The whole image is disturbing in and of itself, but truly exacerbated by the fact that I did, in fact, see actual skin, and not, say, these peeking through:

It should also be noted that this is the second time I’ve seen this happen with False Atheism jeans--The other time was on the plane coming back from Vegas. It was a younger woman, though, and the jeans actually fit her, thus it was marginally less disconcerting. Oh, also? She was wearing underwear.

A man tapped the lady on the shoulder to inform her of what had happened, but she just smiled and said “Okay, thanks.” It’s difficult to convey her inflection and attitude in writing, but I’ll try. It was not a "THANKS!,” followed by a grateful smile and mad scramble to find something to cover it up. No, this was accompanied by a backwards glance at the damage, followed by a shrug. She didn’t even break her stride; just kept on walking. (TOTAL Blanche move, by the way.)

Awesome.

At that, I totally loved her and immediately wanted to hang out with her. I imagined that she would regale me with tales of her irrepressible spirit and misbegotten youth. (Sure, she might take things too far, get drunk and start dancing on a bar, or attempt to introduce me to some highly questionable sailor "friends" of hers, but that's not to say we wouldn't have fun up until then.)

None of that, however, changes the fact that she shouldn’t have been wearing the suckers in the first place. And nor (now that I've told you about them) should you.

Only you can prevent Backside Area Ripping of False Atheism jeans (or BARF, so named for the reaction it ellicits)...by not buying them.

This has been your Public Service Announcement.

* Add "gonazagas" to my rapidly-expanding Metalia lexicon—it’s my personal euphemism for blouse bunnies. (Which is in and of itself an awesome euphemism, but it being March Madness and all, gonzagas it is.)

** Note— While the proper name for a kangaroo baby is “joey,” when I wrote “joeys” up there, I kept envisioning two Joey Tribbiani-faced kangaroos. It was mildly disturbing, to say the least. I didn’t want to inflict the same on you, so please pardon my inaccurate classification related thereto.