Christmas Meltdown

I am not a big fan of Christmas, and don’t really ever plan on being a big fan of Christmas. Most of the time, I am too busy being a scrooge about people starting the holidays too soon, and the next thing I know, Christmas is two days away and I still have five people to shop for. This completely ruins my holiday, and I usually just give up on shopping, settling with a DVD box set for my father that he will never watch. My general rules for Christmas are simple: don’t play Christmas songs until two weeks before Christmas, don’t ask me to go caroling, and don’t sing Christmas songs at me. I don’t think I am asking too much with these rules, but of course I am labeled “Scrooge” the day after Thanksgiving when I say, “It’s not Christmas yet.”

But this year, I was off to a better start, mostly because I was given an advent calendar. I never had one before, and the daily shot of cheap, molded chocolate made it so that I was less likely to snap at a rule breaker when he or she decided to sing “Jingle Bell Rock” in my general direction. I kept the calendar propped up against the wall on my stove, and each day, I would wake up, open the door on my calendar, eat my crappy chocolate, and leave for work, prepared to face the holidays. 

This went well enough for about ten days, until I got the biggest craving for tater tots I have ever had in my life. Back in Provo, I was lucky enough to have a roommate who was addicted to tater tots and fast food. And so every week or so, we would find ourselves at Sonic, where I could keep my cravings at bay. But since I don’t have roommates anymore, I don’t have an excuse to get fast food, so when I get a craving, it becomes the worst craving I have ever had in my life. So to satisfy my urges, I paced across the street to Target, grabbed the biggest bag of tater tots I could find, and then tromped back across the street to enjoy my bounty. Things were going well enough: I had my tots in the oven, Fargo on DVD, and I hadn’t seen a cockroach in days. But because I can’t have good things going for me for more than two minutes, tragedy struck.

Apparently, when the oven is on, the area surrounding the oven becomes hot as well. Not expecting this, I still had my advent calendar propped up against the wall, where it heated up and then preceded to melt. I didn’t realize what was happening at first, but I could smell something really sweet in the kitchen. My first thought was to blame the neighbors, but then I looked and found chocolate seeping through my cardboard calendar, onto my stove, and streaking down the wall. My first instinct was, “Oh no! I need to eat tomorrow’s chocolate!” So I propped open day eleven and started to lick the remaining droplets of chocolate that were still in the mold.

Few things in life gross me out; I work with sewage and I am a microbiologist, I have been desensitized to most things. But one thing in life that makes me queasy would be the sight of melted chocolate. Obviously, the adrenaline from the initial shock of my whole situation made me forget about my issues with melted chocolate, until, of course, after two licks in. I snapped back into reality and I felt like I should induce vomiting. Finally I gathered my senses and put the calendar in the freezer so that the chocolate could set.

The day after the incident, I went to my freezer to eat my daily chocolate. But lo and behold, when I opened up the cardboard window, I found that all of the chocolate had melted into each other, making a monsterish conglomerate of crappy chocolate. I couldn’t just not eat my daily chocolate, so I decided that the whole frozen, chocolate mess would be my gift for December 11^th , and I ate the whole thing in one sitting.

After eating the remnants of my advent calendar, I realized I had no more daily gifts for the countdown to Christmas, which must mean that Christmas is over and I can finally get regular music back on the radio.  This of course didn’t happen, and so I am back to being a “Scrooge.”

To Kill A Pekingese

It all started out with a sobbing girl: she was fat, she was crying, she was under my balcony, and she was up early in the morning. Every Saturday, I would wake up to the sobs of this small girl, and every Saturday, I would contemplate yelling at the beast of a girl. Apparently, a sane person would have assumed that the child was being beaten and needed to get assistance from CPS. I, on the other hand, assumed she was hungry, due to her girth. 

After a month went by, and the sobbing girl continued to sob, I decided one day that I would go and give her a granola bar, because granola bars make me happy, so maybe it would make her happy. I waited for a week with a granola bar on the ready for her to come by for a good wail, and when she finally did come, I was wrought with anticipation. So much so that I ran out to the balcony, yelled, “Hey little girl!” and then threw the granola bar right at her head. Now that I think back on my actions, I realize that I probably should’ve been a little less excited to throw down a granola bar to a strange child, but I choose to not dwell on the past.

The little girl stared up at me with her big, puffy, eyes; looked down at the granola bar that nearly hit her, with a serene glance; and then started bawling harder than she had ever bawled before. She sprinted away from my balcony and I never saw her again outside of my apartment; although, for a few weeks, I did see her peeking through her blinds into my apartment, where I was nowhere decent enough for a small child to look upon. Soon after, the little girl moved, and a new, childless tenant moved in, much to my relief. Unfortunately for me, he was an owner of a very spirited Pekingese.

The Pekingese went unnoticed until the owner started to put her out on the patio while he went of his morning workout. This usually lasts from about five to ten in the morning, which is plenty of time for a dog to become bored. So by five thirty, the dog is in a full, howling rage. The first incident in which the dog decided to howl all through the morning, I had barely slept the night before, and so going off of four hours of sleep, I decided to go out to the balcony and start screaming, “SHUT UP! SHUT UP! NOBODY LOVES YOU! YOU CAME FROM A PUPPY MILL!”  These words do not soothe any dog, especially not a Pekingese, and so the howling increased for the next couple of hours.

After two mornings of the howling, I was ready to roast the pup on a spit, ready to leave its carcass on the neighbor’s welcome mat. The most disturbing of my thoughts led me to kill the dog, skin it, and then fashion a bonnet out of its fur, where the head would rest lazily upon my forehead. Now that I look back, I realize that I was nowhere in my right mind and probably should have seeked out professional help.

Upon the third morning, I had lost all common sense, and when the dog started to bark at five, I decided to go out to my balcony, take a shoe that was missing its pair, and toss it at the dog to get it to finally shut up. My intentions were not to kill or injure the dog, mind you, but mostly to scare it, which I did accomplish. When the shoe hit the patio wall, the dog retreated back into its kennel and stayed there for a time. The only problem was that when the shoe hit the patio wall, there was an explosion of red, metallic wrappers that littered the back area of my apartment, and my neighbor’s patio.

Apparently, after losing the pair to this shoe, I had decided to stash away the wrappers of Dove chocolates that I had eaten during a fasting Sunday, and to hide the evidence from my roommates, I decided to squirrel them away within a shoe until I could throw them away without being shamed for not fasting. Unfortunately, I never got around to throwing the wrappers away, and now they were all within eating distance of the dog. And if eating tin foil didn’t kill this dog, the residue from the chocolate would have. So I sprinted out to the back of my apartment, in my sweats and a sweater that has become a midriff due to washing, trying to hide the evidence.

After getting my shoe and most of the wrappers, I noticed one gleaming, red, wrapper was left. And of course it was right at arm’s reach on the neighbor’s porch.  But when I leaned over to grab it, the Pekingese finally had a reason to bark, and it came after me like I was about to rob the place, which I’m sure it looked like I was going to rob the place. I needed to get a distraction for the dog before it would eat the tin foil, so I ran back to my apartment for some lunch meat.

I don’t know why I didn’t remember that I used the last of the lunch meat the previous night for my upcoming lunchbox, but I was out of lunch meat. So I made a sacrifice. I disassembled my sandwich, removed my lunch meat, sprinted to the backyard, and threw the MiracleWhip coated cold cuts to the far end of the patio: the dog ate, I got the wrapper, and my mission was done.