Christmas X (Holiday Blog Part 1)
Most college kids get a month or so off for the holidays. This is generally about three weeks longer than they'd like to spend with their families, so side trips with friends are common. For me, however, my three weeks of holiday break almost always breaks down like this: 1 week for debilitating illness, two weeks for an exceptionally exhausting whirlwind family vacation, 5 hours for packing/jet lag recovery/preparation for travel. This is absolutely draining (but fun and memorable, blah blah blah). This year's break was no exception-I got sick just as I put my luggage down in my bedroom (literally, my throat caught fire right after I got home, it was like magic. Really, really horrible magic). The next week or so was pretty tame, involving lots of How I Met Your Mother reruns, an attempt to get my parents to love Dr. Who at least a fraction of the amount that I do, Narnia in 3-D (FUCK 3-D, but I love Edmund. Can't help it. Peter is obviously the hot one and he's a bit older, but he's sort of boring and honorable and whatnot. Edmund is fun and sarcastic. Story of my dating preferences.), having Christmas early (I got a remote controlled airplane AND an Iron Man action figure that shoots out little plastic missiles! I have the present preferences of a five year old boy.), a failed attempt at seeing my first lunar eclipse that involved going to a cemetery at 3 AM alone and seeing only cloud cover, and garlic tea, which is the single most disgusting tea of all time.
We got underway around the 21st or so, heading to Atlanta for a night to stay with my grandmother before we all flew out to Vegas for Christmas. When my family goes to Vegas, we're generally partial to the Luxor, and this trip was no exception. Christmas Eve was spent with dinner at the Venetian, with an excessively garlicky spaghetti on my end, and a fabulously gay waiter named Gabriel. The busboy responsible for refilling our water took his job dead seriously, so I asked him if they beat him if our water glasses stood only half full for more than a few seconds and he responded that, in fact, they do. I don't really like going to expensive, pretentious restaurants and acting like the rich, pretentious clients who frequent the restaurant because (A) I'm not rich or pretentious, and (B) Everyone working at the restaurant makes fun of those people. We promised our new friend Gabriel that we'd come back and visit him on our return for New Year's (yeah we definitely didn't do that), and left the restaurant so I could meet up with one of my best friends from Yale who was visiting his grandmother for Christmas.
My time with Matthew is about 70% laughter, 20% scathing sarcasm, and 10% being violently offended. He's great. He's an unstoppable attention whore in groups of 5 or more, so most people don't get to see his tamer, nicer side, but I usually spend my time with him and his roommates so we get along great. Despite his over the top antics and propensity for discussing hentai (which I'm often guilty of as well), he has a wonderful girlfriend who most of us like more than we like him. His brother is a 16 year old delinquent with impressive intellect and comedic timing who I was convinced was a sociopath when he visited Yale my freshman year. He probably isn't. My Christmas Eve in Vegas was spent wandering around the strip with both of them, and somehow we attracted more crazies in two hours than I had seen in my previous time in Vegas (not counting Kotton Kandy, the worst drag queen I have ever seen).
The three of us left the Venetian and hadn't been off the walkway three seconds before a wide-eyed young woman positioned herself right in front of me and announced to me, "I'm pregnant." Okay. I go to school in New Haven, we've got our fair share of ghetto. Before the Have I lived in Atlanta until I was 8, and my old neighborhood ended up becoming a bastion of sin and crack dens basically right after we left for the hills of Tennessee. I'm used to crazy homeless people, but this woman was different. Most of the ones who assault you try to tell you a sad story to solicit money (which is very effective for poor saps like my mother), but this girl didn't ask for money one time. After I responded to her random announcement concerning the "No Vacancy" sign on her uterus by telling her I was sorry (hey, no one wants to be pregnant if they're homeless), she started following us and telling us more about her imminent progeny. "His name is Mimi. He's an animal." Oookay. First of all, Mimi is a girly-ass name. The only recognizable Mimis of our generation are this one, from the Drew Carey show (enough said, really), and this one, from Rent (who was a heroin-addicted stripper). Mimi is a horrible name for a girl, if our pop culture references have anything to say about it, but for a guy it's just appalling. Second of all, what the hell did she mean by "He's an animal?" Was she going all The Omen and saying that her fetus was in fact a jackal and the coming Antichrist? Was she trying to scare me into following her as some sort of prophet or alien hybrid or human and animal? Did she honestly think her baby was an animal, or did she mean animal as in party animal because it kicked a lot and made her drink booze for two? OR was she referring to it as an animal in the proper scientific sense, as in, all humans are animals?
Okay no one really cares. This girl was just absolutely nuts.
She kept following us until finally Matthew put an arm around my shoulders and told the crazy lady that we had to be on our way, then we ran across several lanes of traffic to escape from her, politely holding in our hysterical laughter until after we had disappeared into the crowd. We then found joy in taking the prostitution pamphlets from the scores of men forcing them on innocent passersby (yeah I had to look up the plural form for that one and it still looks stupid but whatever), and loudly assessing each offer. One girl was only $45 an hour, so we determined that she must give excruciatingly painful oral sex, etc. We passed a homeless man who had a sign that read "All I want for Christmas is a hooker," which has to be given points for honestly. At another point, a man came up to us to ask us what our plans were for the night because he was lonely and wanted to hang out. The strange thing about this encounter (other than the fact that it happened in general) was that he didn't seem to be hitting on any of us and he didn't seem to be on crystal meth. He legitimately seemed like a big loser who had no one to hang out with, so he thought the proper protocol was to approach random people and solicit their company. We ran away from him as politely as we could.
As the night wound down and we waited on a street corner to get picked up (like prostitutes, but Matthew's mother and grandmother were the Johns), a creepy voice from behind me said, "You look like you could use a hat." I whirled around to find a horrifying sight: a CLOWN in a wheelchair handing out balloon hats. I'm not afraid of too many things. I am, however, absolutely terrified of clowns. They're NEVER FUNNY and they're the only children's character to be repeatedly used as the stuff of horror movies. I understand that this particular evil being was in a wheelchair and therefore supposedly less intimidating, but honestly that's exactly the sort of trickery employed by these dastardly creatures to keep you unaware. I refrained from openly weeping and waited for Matthew to assure me that the doer of evil had vacated my vicinity, shocked that we had escaped unscathed. Merry Christmas, the clowns won't get you THIS time.
We got underway around the 21st or so, heading to Atlanta for a night to stay with my grandmother before we all flew out to Vegas for Christmas. When my family goes to Vegas, we're generally partial to the Luxor, and this trip was no exception. Christmas Eve was spent with dinner at the Venetian, with an excessively garlicky spaghetti on my end, and a fabulously gay waiter named Gabriel. The busboy responsible for refilling our water took his job dead seriously, so I asked him if they beat him if our water glasses stood only half full for more than a few seconds and he responded that, in fact, they do. I don't really like going to expensive, pretentious restaurants and acting like the rich, pretentious clients who frequent the restaurant because (A) I'm not rich or pretentious, and (B) Everyone working at the restaurant makes fun of those people. We promised our new friend Gabriel that we'd come back and visit him on our return for New Year's (yeah we definitely didn't do that), and left the restaurant so I could meet up with one of my best friends from Yale who was visiting his grandmother for Christmas.
My time with Matthew is about 70% laughter, 20% scathing sarcasm, and 10% being violently offended. He's great. He's an unstoppable attention whore in groups of 5 or more, so most people don't get to see his tamer, nicer side, but I usually spend my time with him and his roommates so we get along great. Despite his over the top antics and propensity for discussing hentai (which I'm often guilty of as well), he has a wonderful girlfriend who most of us like more than we like him. His brother is a 16 year old delinquent with impressive intellect and comedic timing who I was convinced was a sociopath when he visited Yale my freshman year. He probably isn't. My Christmas Eve in Vegas was spent wandering around the strip with both of them, and somehow we attracted more crazies in two hours than I had seen in my previous time in Vegas (not counting Kotton Kandy, the worst drag queen I have ever seen).
The three of us left the Venetian and hadn't been off the walkway three seconds before a wide-eyed young woman positioned herself right in front of me and announced to me, "I'm pregnant." Okay. I go to school in New Haven, we've got our fair share of ghetto. Before the Have I lived in Atlanta until I was 8, and my old neighborhood ended up becoming a bastion of sin and crack dens basically right after we left for the hills of Tennessee. I'm used to crazy homeless people, but this woman was different. Most of the ones who assault you try to tell you a sad story to solicit money (which is very effective for poor saps like my mother), but this girl didn't ask for money one time. After I responded to her random announcement concerning the "No Vacancy" sign on her uterus by telling her I was sorry (hey, no one wants to be pregnant if they're homeless), she started following us and telling us more about her imminent progeny. "His name is Mimi. He's an animal." Oookay. First of all, Mimi is a girly-ass name. The only recognizable Mimis of our generation are this one, from the Drew Carey show (enough said, really), and this one, from Rent (who was a heroin-addicted stripper). Mimi is a horrible name for a girl, if our pop culture references have anything to say about it, but for a guy it's just appalling. Second of all, what the hell did she mean by "He's an animal?" Was she going all The Omen and saying that her fetus was in fact a jackal and the coming Antichrist? Was she trying to scare me into following her as some sort of prophet or alien hybrid or human and animal? Did she honestly think her baby was an animal, or did she mean animal as in party animal because it kicked a lot and made her drink booze for two? OR was she referring to it as an animal in the proper scientific sense, as in, all humans are animals?
Okay no one really cares. This girl was just absolutely nuts.
She kept following us until finally Matthew put an arm around my shoulders and told the crazy lady that we had to be on our way, then we ran across several lanes of traffic to escape from her, politely holding in our hysterical laughter until after we had disappeared into the crowd. We then found joy in taking the prostitution pamphlets from the scores of men forcing them on innocent passersby (yeah I had to look up the plural form for that one and it still looks stupid but whatever), and loudly assessing each offer. One girl was only $45 an hour, so we determined that she must give excruciatingly painful oral sex, etc. We passed a homeless man who had a sign that read "All I want for Christmas is a hooker," which has to be given points for honestly. At another point, a man came up to us to ask us what our plans were for the night because he was lonely and wanted to hang out. The strange thing about this encounter (other than the fact that it happened in general) was that he didn't seem to be hitting on any of us and he didn't seem to be on crystal meth. He legitimately seemed like a big loser who had no one to hang out with, so he thought the proper protocol was to approach random people and solicit their company. We ran away from him as politely as we could.
As the night wound down and we waited on a street corner to get picked up (like prostitutes, but Matthew's mother and grandmother were the Johns), a creepy voice from behind me said, "You look like you could use a hat." I whirled around to find a horrifying sight: a CLOWN in a wheelchair handing out balloon hats. I'm not afraid of too many things. I am, however, absolutely terrified of clowns. They're NEVER FUNNY and they're the only children's character to be repeatedly used as the stuff of horror movies. I understand that this particular evil being was in a wheelchair and therefore supposedly less intimidating, but honestly that's exactly the sort of trickery employed by these dastardly creatures to keep you unaware. I refrained from openly weeping and waited for Matthew to assure me that the doer of evil had vacated my vicinity, shocked that we had escaped unscathed. Merry Christmas, the clowns won't get you THIS time.
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