About a year ago I was making a midnight trek to my girlfriend's place. Let's call her Sunrise. The Best Sunrise. Sunrise was staying with her sister Noble in Hyde Park, I was at home in Pilsen, and it was about 2 in the morning. Temperatures had been hovering between about freezing and 40 F, so decided to brave the lake shore bike path rather than try an eternal trip on the CTA.

But I hit a patch of ice and fell off my bike. Twice. Leaving two nice holes in my pants. Sunrise promised to patch my pants for me, but six months later she dumped me, and the pants still had their gaping wounds.


She did leave a pair of panties behind, and in the six months since our breakup she and I have not had any real contact, not even to swap the things we've left with each other. So now I'll use her abandoned clothing to undo the damage to my pants and make them wearable again.


It took me an awful long time to patch the first hole. My first problem was holding the material to the pants while I stitched it in place. I used scotch tape to solve this problem. The overall process still took several hours, about as long as installing Windows 7 on my laptop.

My current girlfriend Hellingly Hall offered to stitch in the other patch for me. She's quite good at these things, she assured me, and it wouldn't take her very long. Not wanting to spend another few hours on this, I gladly accepted her help.


She did the patch in less than half an hour and I was left with pants ready to wear.