THE HOLIDAYS

Ah, another holiday over with¹ . You all know what that means don't you? It's time to clean out the refrigerator and get rid of all the leftovers from the last holiday that you didn't eat, so that you can put in this holiday's leftovers which you aren't going to eat either ² . The worst part of it is that you have to wash all the dishes that had all the moldy food in them by hand. The leftovers from Thanksgiving aren't that bad because they have only been allowed to sit for a month, but with some of those other holidays, you really get to see what the science teachers were talking about when they lectured on starting biospheres in the refrigerator. Now Arthur Dent (If you don't catch this reference, don't panic, although you should do whatever you can to figure out who this person is. But if you don't want to put the effort into it just treat it as you would those parts in Jane Eyre when they speak in French and you are in the bathroom ³ and have no translator or a handy French-English dictionary around, so you just skip over it and act like you know what they are talking about.) would have been able to make quite a meal out of these goodies and saved many lives while doing it, but few of us have lived lives like Arthur. So the rest of us are stuck trying to wash out the dishes that smell tremendously because they have contained all those wonderful creations that you couldn't dare throw away just after the holiday because they were much too good. And there you are washing them by hand because you know that no matter how much power your dishwasher has, it can't get out the stench which has invaded and conquered your Tupperware, so you throw in the dirty dishes from the gathering you had at your place which started this whole mess in the first place. While washing one of the wine glasses, you realize that when glass is covered with soap suds it becomes extremely slippery, and no matter what you do, you can't catch it before it falls to the ground and shatters ⁴ into tiny pieces of unseen glass that will later cut your feet no matter how carefully you clean up and sweep. That wonderful four piece setting that you were once so proud of is now broken up ⁵ . So, in order to make sure that the rest of the set matches, you have to come up with some creative way of shattering the remaining dishes without making it overly obvious that you are wanting to shatter the dishes (Many people just don't understand the value of having matching sets with matching numbers). There are, of course many ways to go about your dish shattering, some more socially acceptable than others. One of the best goes to the people who lived during the old west and would use the non-matching dishes for target practice. Then, not only were they performing a necessary duty, they were also getting time in with their gun and (most importantly) having a good time with it. Once time starts to move at regular speed again, and you are able to finish the dishes, between mutterings about how dumb it is that you are standing there at the sink washing these dishes by hand when you have a perfectly good functioning dishwasher right next to the sink that could be washing them for you with little worry about breakage, you promptly sit down to eat something to settle your stomach. This, of course, creates at least one dirty dish which now must be washed. You will curse yourself for using a plate to rest your leftover pizza on, when you could have just let the grease drop onto the newspaper that you were reading ⁶ , until you remember that you have a dishwasher and can just place it in there and it will come out clean sometime later. Of course, before you can place it in the dishwasher, you must first remove all the dishes, which had, by some miracle, become clean while you were standing over the sink wishing for some modern invention to come along and make your life easier. So when you see that the dishwasher is full of clean dishes, you immediately close it and place your dirty dish in the sink, hoping that someone else in your family will come along and empty out the dishwasher so that they can put their dirty dishes in there. Of course, right before the door shuts you realize that the reason that you haven't been able to find your coffee mug that says: "Please fill this mug three times before speaking to me and we'll get along just fine ⁷ " for the last six months is because it has been sitting in the dishwasher waiting for someone else to empty it out, which of course no one is forced to do because you have hand washed all the dishes since then because of the steady stream of holidays and special events which have caused you to clean out your refrigerator.

¹Why is it that people live from one holiday to another? It seems to be quite a trend these days to live from Halloween to Thanksgiving to Christmas to New Years... In fact there is always one reason or another to buy candy for most of the year, which makes it rather difficult for those people who plan to lose weight after the holiday season ends because it is just one continuous loop. To make matters worse, they are adding new holidays all the time. Sweetest Day came out of nowhere to be yet another time when you have to find some way of making your sweetheart happy without making them fat. Go back to the main text

²Why is it that people have this obsession of trying to save foods that they are never going to eat? When you are at a restaurant and you don't really like a dish, of course you don't finish it, then you complain because the box the waitress gave you isn't big enough to fit in all the leftovers. This is all silly seeing as how you didn't like it the first time so chances are you wouldn't like it the second time. The only reason to take it home is so that hopefully someone who you are upset with in the family will try and find out how bad the food was. Go back to the main text

³Why is it that the bathroom is such a comfortable place to read? You know that many people have read many a good book while in the bathroom. It is a sad statement on our society that people:

Spend so much time in the bathroom.
Find the toilet seat comfortable enough to read an entire novel upon.
Get one of the most enlightening experiences of their day while in a room that most people are not proud of letting others know they actually visit on a regular basis.

But then again with the way that society is moving, maybe the one room where we flush our waste is a good place to find society's highlights. Go back to the main text

⁴Why is it that only the dreaded moments in your life go by in slow motion? Never does it go in slow motion when you finally get to slide behind the wheel of the Porsche that you had been wanting to drive since you were too young to drive (That could say something about the speed of the car, but usually one of those slow motion moments happen because of the speed of the car and the slowness of trees), or when you have been waiting for a table for the better part of an eon, and you finally get to sit down and start enjoying the free chips and salsa, which are put there for the sole purpose of ruining your appetite so that you must take food home and clutter your refrigerator. Go back to the main text

⁵Why do people buy settings in fours? Is it because the average family contains four people (Rounded to the smallest whole number)? But then again, how many families are actually average? For every average family there are two families that are inversely unaverage so that they average out to being average. Which means that the average family is substandard in that it is the minority because it is average. So now that you have three wine glasses, you have an unaverage wine glass set, but it now belongs to the majority. Therefore you should not be thought of as being odd in the least way. Go back to the main text

⁶Why is it that newspapers are to be read while eating or drinking? Is it because they are much too large and noisy to read in the bathroom and therefore forcing people to read books in the bathroom? Is it too hard to shovel food into your mouth with one hand (If you have good manners, two if you don't (or were just seated at a table in a restaurant which has free munchies)), and hold the book open with the other so that you can read that hard to see spot where the pages connect to the spine without breaking the back of the book and therefore setting all the pages free from the binding? Go back to the main text

⁷Why is it that people seem to think that they must have a coffee cup that says something cute on it? Do people really go around reading each other's mugs and forming opinions about them? Then again, this could be a great thing for single people in the workplace. You could customize your own mug so that you could then leave it out for that special someone to come along. The possibilities are as unlimited with coffee mugs as they are with the singles ads in the arty, big city newspapers:
Single male coffee drinker looking for single female coffee drinker who likes to live on one cream and no sugar.
-or-
Black coffee drinker looking for something to sweeten her coffee. Must equal two sugars and like their coffee steaming hot.
This way not only do you get to learn something about the person who holds the mug, but you can decide if it is worth it to try that new pick-up like you read about the day before in the bathroom when you didn't have a dictionary handy. You want to find out just what that last word is, and if people feel like they can trust you if you call yourself a waghalter. Go back to the main text

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