St. Patrick’s Day is my favorite holiday of the year. But, it has nothing to do with Catholicism, Irish pride, or the color green. I love St. Patty’s Day because it’s the only holiday that we as Americans haven’t figured out how to ruin with ridiculous requirements that strain your budget and your energy. Valentine’s Day, for example, requires that you spend lots of cash in order to prove your love to someone that you may or may not have ever loved, may or may not still love, or the worst, to prove love to someone that you think you want to love, because the holiday has pressured you to think that you need to be in love in order to be happy. But St. Patty’s Day? The only rules are: wear green, and get drunk. And this year, I actually failed to do the former, but man oh man, did I succeed in the latter!
Here are some of my most memorable St. Patty’s days:
A couple of years ago I got so hammered on St. Patty’s Day that I puked really close to a cop, and some of it landed on his shoe. He didn’t care, because he was hitting on some chic, and furthermore, I’m pretty sure he was drunk too. On a different year, I attempted to do an Irish car bomb with every person who came into my house as a token of my appreciation for them attending my party. Since my Mom reads all of these, I should probably explain that an “Irish Car Bomb” is when you drop half an ounce of Bailey’s Irish Cream (side note: why is ounce abbreviated “OZ”?) with half an oz. of Jameson Irish Whisky, into a pint of Guinness, and then you slug it all down in one swift move. Doing a Car Bomb is a thing of beauty. Just like shifting a car into first gear, the Car Bomb is a gentle maneuver that requires a natural ability to relax and not over think things. And when you’re done, you feel relaxed, and you don’t over think things. I think therapists should prescribe car bombs to their nervous patients more often than they probably do. If I ever apply to Grad School for Psychology, I’ll be sure to include this excerpt in my application. Anyway, that night, I had about fifteen Car Bombs in about one and a half hours, and I called it a real early night, and then woke up the next day next to my trash can and a really, really awful smell. I said it was a memorable St. Patty’s Day, not a great one.
But the point is, I like any holiday where society says: “Hey man, take it easy, grab some beer and some whisky, and let it all loose, ‘cause in about a month we’re going to guilt you into buying your mother flowers, and then after that, we’re going to guilt you into wasting more of your hard earned money buying your dad another gift that he probably never wanted in the first place, so you better get drunk tonight, and try and puke NEXT to the Cop this time.”
Recently, I’ve been trying to figure out how my neurotic idiosyncrasies came into fruition. For example, I have no fear of flying, and I don’t fear most heights. I mean, I’ve jumped off 30-foot cliffs into lakes, I’ve run full speed along the cliffs of Mohr in Ireland, and I’ve gone to the top of the CN tower in Toronto. But here’s where I get all neurotic: I’m afraid of climbing past the second rung of any ladder. Seriously, the other day at work, I had to ask my co-worker to change all the light bulbs, because as I climbed up a ladder to change them, I became utterly convinced that I was going to somehow fall and die. So how is it that I can be that pathetic, and yet as I sit here drinking coffee and writing, I’m totally excited to fly to Phoenix to see my parents this week? Getting to Phoenix requires entrusting my life to a 90-ton hunk of metal made by a bunch of “Ordinary Joe’s” in Detroit. And some of those engineers and technicians may have actually helped to design and build the jet I will fly on while experiencing a hang over not too different from the one I have today (which is pretty god damn awful). Now personally, when I come to work with a hangover, I know that I’m extra lazy, I’m extra stupid, I don’t double check anything that I do, and I fuck up a lot more than normal, so I really should be more scared of flying than climbing a ladder. Falling ten feet can’t be worse than falling 40,000 feet – right?
I think that adults who claim to still have ADD are pretty annoying. With kids, it’s different, because our society mandates compulsory education, and let’s face it, school can be really, really boring, and when I’ve been bored in the past, I’ve taken drugs, and when I did, boring things suddenly became more interesting! So giving kids drugs in exchange for competing in the sham that is American Public Education actually makes sense! (Score another point for our government in the contest for ultimate hypocrisy).
But, if you’re an adult, and your job requires that you do something that bores you, instead of taking drugs, maybe you should quit your job. There’s a law here in America; you can’t quit high school until you’re sixteen, but there is no law out there that says that you can’t just quit your lousy job. I’m seriously tired of meeting overly complacent working class drones (and they’ve permeated the white collar class too!). If you don’t love what you do in your life, then, guess what…you don’t love your life. Too many people my age are accepting jobs that they don’t actually want to do, because they think that some carrot at the end of a rope will be worth the forty hours of misery that they put themselves through each week. If you’re miserable forty hours a week, then you are miserable 23.8% of the time, and if you subtract six hours a night for sleep, then technically, you’re miserable 31.7% of your waking life. There, now I’ve done some math for you, so you can use these statistics to explain to your invasive parents why you just quit your high paying, but misery invoking career!
Look, to be fair and honest, my attention span sucks sometimes too. But it’s also really good at other times. It just depends on if I’m interested in the topic at hand or not. So it seems to me that using your lack of discipline and care for a job you’ve committed to as an excuse to get prescription cocaine is just kind of, well, lame. Just because your attention span can benefit from taking Ritalin does not mean that you have an attention deficiency. I mean, let’s face it: If math bores you, it bores you because it’s boring, and you obviously don’t really want to spend your life surrounded by mathematics. When people start saying stupid and boring things to me, I usually tune them out, and I like to think that this is an evolutionary advantage that most humans have developed – the ability to not pay attention! It’s the same technique that they teach soldiers to use if they’re ever being tortured in a prison camp!
Not paying attention is a skill that I enjoy honing. Why? Because ultimately, we’re each alone in our own heads all of the time, and we can only hope to derive entertainment from the world that’s outside of our own heads, but there are no guarantees. We seek this outside entertainment because it’s exciting, interesting, and out of our immediate control, but when we go to sleep each night, we’re back to ourselves, all alone in our own heads again, so if you can’t entertain yourself, then the way I see it, you’re kind of screwed, and you’re going to be bored – a lot! I suggest writing a stupid column like this each Sunday, and then sending it out to your friends to see if they’re as screwed up in the head as you are!
And speaking of things that remind me of Ireland, (just seeing if you were still paying attention after that long rant), it dawned on me this week that finding a four-leaf clover is really hard. As a matter of fact, I’ve never found one! Granted, I’ve never really looked that hard before, but when I stop to think about it, it’s a bit odd that I haven’t found one. Does this mean that I’m really unlucky, and that my life is never going to take off like I always thought it would? Or does this mean that I am naturally lucky, everything in my life is just fine, and our good green Mother Earth doesn’t feel the need to boost my already inflated ego with one of its most rare treasures? I don’t really know what it means, since I don’t really believe in any meaning besides the one I make up and decide to use, but nonetheless, I think I’d like to find a four leaf clover, because then I’d feel lucky. And I just know that I’d tuck it away in my wallet, and then it would be one of those cool things I could pull out at a bar, and I could brag to my friends, and strangers alike, “Hey, I found a four leaf clover. Want to see it? It’s right here in my wallet! Check it out!” Okay, actually that’s pretty lame. I think I’d actually rather find some gold, or treasure, and use it to buy my friends and myself a round of Irish Car Bombs.