24 Days of Disappointment

Usually I’m a jolly bastard around Christmas time. There’s snow everywhere, I eat double my body weight daily, and I get presents just for being me. To the untrained eye this scenario seems perfect, but there’s one little thing that just spoiled my holiday: advent calendars.

I used to love advent calendars. A chocolate a day for 25 days. What could possibly go wrong? It’s usually a lot of fun, ’cause each day I get to peel open one of those cardboard doors and pry out a chocolate of any miscellaneous Christmas shape. Up until this year I’ve been stoked with this ritual, but I’m a little sour about the whole thing right now.

My favourite thing about advent calendars was that there would be one day where the chocolate shape was a train, and this elated me. As a young man, I was quite fond of trains. They enchanted me, and it was as simple as that. Needless to say, each year my Mom gets my brother, sister and myself an advent calendar, and they’ve usually been quite pleasing, but this year I’m irate. There wasn’t a chocolate train behind any of the doors.

Preposterous? Yes. I mean, come on. There are 25 days, one that’s usually a Santa chocolate, so that leaves 24 other chocolates that could be any Christmas shape. I’m not a fan of math, but I thought probability was on my side, like it’s always been, but no, not this year. I’ll tally up what I’ve had to deal with:
 
• 3 Stars
• 1 Shooting Star
• 1 Rocking Horse
• 1 Angel
• 1 Duck (Are you kidding me?)
• 1 Heart
• 1 Horseshoe
• 1 Candle
• 2 Unidentifiable Objects
• 1 Squirrel
• 1 Santa
• 1 Elephant (Everyone knows about Jesus’ elephant, right?)
• 1 Elf or Wise Man
• 2 Trees
• 2 Sleighs
• 1 Set of Mushrooms (That’s just silly)
• 1 Boot
• 1 Sheep
• 1 Snowman
• 1 Crescent Moon 

No train, and guess what? The santa wasn’t even on the 24th! Instead we have the moon. What a disappointment. I’m thinking even Jesus would be mad if he were in my shoes. Either way, I hope you all have a merry Christmas, or whatever you celebrate, and I hope you got a train in your advent Calendar. That, or a sweater as pretty as this:

Floyd: The Greatest Man That Ever Lived

Last night my friends and I congregated at my buddy Newton’s house to watch NBC’s The Office, and 30 Rock. This is a little tradition we’ve been upholding for a few months now, and it’s something I quite enjoy. Last night’s episodes were hilarious, but it was the conversation that followed these shows that made me laugh harder than the two shows combined. In order for me to attempt to explain how hilarious this conversation was, I’ll have to explain what happened the night before.

It was the last day of the semester, and my friends and I wanted to get our drink on. No big deal, right? I think everybody drinks on their last day of classes. It just seems like a universal reality to me. Anyways, we had a little pre-drink get together in my basement where I forced to make my friends watch me play Mario Kart Wii and listen to You, Me, And Everyone We Know. It was awesome, and after a couple of hours of nonsense we decided it was time to roll deep to the bars.

What would make this trip so memorable though was that our friend Floyd is not of legal age to drink, so he acquired a fake I.D. of which he was having an enormously difficult time memorizing. Floyd remembered the name and address, but it was the postal code that evaded him, and Floyd just couldn’t keep it straight. We gave him hell the whole ride down, and I was positive that he wouldn’t make it into the bar. The notion of Floyd breaching the outer defenses of this bar were as preposterous as the notion that Luke Skywalker could single-handedly take down an AT-AT by using only a grappling hook, thermal detonator, and a light saber. It’s all just ludicrous!

Well, we approached the line to get into the bar, and I looked back at Floyd and said “Hopefully we’ll see you on the inside, buddy.” Floyd looked at me like he was about to face a firing squad. He was nervous, and we could all tell. So, I flashed my I.D., got in for free, and stepped aside to see what would become of Floyd.

Floyd offered the bouncer his I.D., and the bouncer glanced down at it, looked at Floyd’s face, and handed it back. I could not believe it. Floyd was going to make it in, and his mood did a complete 180 degree flip. Floyd didn’t just walk towards me, that goofy bastard strode towards me with a grin so wide it almost wrapped around his head.

“Unbelievable, Floyd. Unbelievable.” 
“He didn’t even quiz me!”
“I saw that. Good job, man!”
 
Floyd was proud, and I was proud of him, so I snapped this picture of him and my buddies to commemorate the moment:

“How do you feel, Floyd?”

“Amazing! But I have to take a huge shit!”

Only Floyd would say that in public, and only Floyd would do that in a bar. I just laughed at him, and was stoked that he made it in with us. We had an amazing night at the bar, and this leads us to the conversation we had last night.

Floyd began to go into graphic detail about his adventure into the bathroom stalls at the bar, and he said that the stall doors had a really low top, so people could look into the stalls if they wanted to. Gross? Yes, of course. So, Floyd said that as he was taking care of business, he stood up and said “hi” to some dude using a urinal. I laughed at the mere fact that Floyd greeted dudes as he, you know… And it was at that moment that what Floyd said to me struck me as odd.

“Floyd, did you just say that you stand up when you ‘finish’?”
“Yeah? I always do.”
“Are you serious?”
“Yeah man, I always stand up when I wipe my ass.”

I’ve known Floyd for almost 14 years, and in that time I’ve never known this about him. I could not believe what he had said to me. I was in shock, but I was also impressed that Floyd has gone against conventions and reinvented something that I had never even considered to be done in any other way. 

My hat is off to you, Floyd. You are the man.