Apologies are in order to my many adoring fans, those obnoxious academic roadblocks affectionately known as “exams” decided to ruin my fun this week. Professors tell me that the purpose of these exercises is to see how much we as students have “learned”, but all I seem to do accomplish is to cram a massive amount of information into my head for a very short duration in order to cynically manipulate the masses of educational institution personnel into believing that I am intelligent. The joke is on them because I’ve made an adamant pact with myself about not learning anything useful.
Anywho, since this past week as well as my past few posts have been largely (edit: completely) about justifiably bitching about stuff that sucks, I’m here to change my tune a little bit. Despite my best efforts to find aspects of life to ridicule, there are just those activities and instances that, while seeming like nothing more than a blip on the radar in our daily routine, are so completely awesome that I need to gush extensively about them. Here they are, in no particular order.
1.) Putting on Laundry FRESH out of the Dryer
Anyone who is from the Northeast or has lived here the past year understands that winter (which is fast on its way, god damn it) isn’t just a season up here. It’s a 6 month long masochistic ritual of Mother Nature’s, comprised of bitter environmental conditions marked by piercing winds, frosted car windshields, and a collectively pissed off population. However, a great silver lining is that when you find sources of warmth during this desolate time, it feels SO good relative to the freezing abyss that envelops our very existence. Enter warm clothes from the dryer. You shuffle into the kitchen, shivering slightly while looking for something for breakfast when you hear the buzzer go off from that wonderful piece of home appliance machinery. As you run over over and slip on that pair of perfect heated jeans, it feels like you have slipped into a denim based Jacuzzi. Throw on a shirt and you’ve got a brief but full body feeling of all encompassing warmth, like you found some sort of heated caccoon of pure happiness and utter contentment. Good shit, especially when it becomes too fucking cold to do anything fun. (Note: One time I was a little overzealous and put on my dryer warm jeans too quickly and got a zipper burn WAY high up on my inner thigh. It was in such a terrible spot that whenever my baby creating beanbag brushed against the affliction, it felt like someone was viciously dragging sandpaper across it. Just a warning to handle this simple pleasure with caution.)
2.) Taking The “Bladder Almost Bursting” Piss
I’m not talking about a time where you had to hold it a little longer because you were bound by some sort of social deocorum and entertain lame ass relatives/family friends instead of leaving the table. I’m talking the times you guzzled a 64 ounce Blue Raspberry Slurpee from 7/11 or just had to pound those last 3 Bud Lights before leaving the bar. All is well with the world until you get that feelling like an overfilled water balloon has just entered your lower stomach and the painful clenching mechanism you have to implement to prevent yourself from going Niagara Falls all over your under garments. You desperately search for the nearest restroom, typically coming up empty because let’s face it, there is never a bathroom around when you ABSOLUTELY need one. So you suck it up, duck and cover behind some grimy dumpster while a homeless guy sleeps nearby, and you unload. Like, with roughly the same water pressure of a fire hydrant getting it’s cap wrenched off. The absolute torrent of repressed liquid waste comes out in a deluge….and when you are done, it’s the most gratifying, relieving feeling possible. Like you are somehow 5 pounds lighter and that you accomplished something significant, when in all reality you probably just urinated all over the structure that homeless guy uses as his refrigerator. (Yes, I’m being an insensitive asshole. No, I’m not sorry for it.)
3.) Childhood Games Turned into a Good Drinking Game
We all had our favorite board games or retro video games that, back in the day, we played entirely for their entertainment value or social bonding that they promoted (unless you were the overly competitive dickhead who flipped the board if he lost at “Sorry”. You probably didn’t have many friends after that) But if college has taught me anything, it’s that a majority of undergraduates, while very bland and unmotivated with regards to academic pursuits, suddently become fucking McGivor when it comes to drinking games. I’ve already seen a number of excellent renditions that achieve the dual purpose of achieving fun AND reckless inebriation. Beer-io Cart is such an example; one simply combines a game of Mario Kart 64 and drankin’ a burr. BUT you can only do one at a time; you are either driving or drinking. See, who says our generation isn’t condoning civic responsibility? Whoever they are, they can kiss my ass, because even with our drinking games, we don’t mix driving and drinking. They just occur in a competitive, non-inclusive fashion, which is a delicious combination of nostalgia and drunkenness that always goes down smooth. What was briefly a favorite of mine was Drunken Jenga (or Jrunken Jenga if you prefer that aesthetic set-up for whatever reason.) This entailed the usual activities of locating the loose block, using finger dexterity to pry it loose, and place it top of the pile. Only in this “adult” version, if you succeed at getting a block out, you designate a drink for someone and if you knock it over, you finish your current beverage. I’ve since soured on this specific game because a “friend” of mine suggested the loser of the game needed to do a keg stand. Being already very far removed from the state of sober and engaging in a game that requires concentration and coordination was the worst possible outcome for this guy. I knocked the damned tower over 4 fucking times, the final one coming on the SECOND TURN of the game. Just threw my hand out, backhanding the bile into a big heap of wooden block based failure. The lesson here: I no longer find Jenga fun and whoever suggested that mind destroying, blackout inducing policy, I owe you a punch square in the dick.
