My Cynical View on Holidays

Well it’s almost Valentine’s Day and that just means another opportunity to throw money away. I’ve had a beef with this holiday forever. Actually most holidays I think are a complete load. Well, some more than others…

Valentine’s Day - A day where, for whatever reason, you are obligated to reassert the presence of the love you possess for significant others. Well that’s all well and good for people that are loved but for everyone else it’s a punch in the face. And another thing; I don’t want The Man brainwashing my significant others into believing they’re absolutely entitled to receiving flowers and candy every single year on February 14th.

St. Patrick’s Day - Another holiday with “St.” in the title. What, are we all Catholic? That’s bullshit. If the government wanted to make a Vishnu or a Quetzalcoatl day, it would get picketed and/or voted down. But if you staple an excuse for alcoholism onto it, the public can probably overlook whatever random deity or saint is attached. Does anyone even know who St. Pat was? Well no they don’t, but they *do* like being plastered-ass drunk. If people were required to go to mass to drink on St. Patrick’s day, do you think it would still have the same amount of observance? It’s a mockery. Maybe if I’m lucky enough, some bitchy atheists will complain about the name and get it changed to something more appropriate like Alcohol Awareness Day or Get Wasted Day.

Easter - I don’t really know what the point of Easter is. It has something to do with the resurrection of Christ, bunnies, and hiding shit in the backyard. Makes perfect sense. I’ll admit it has a quirk factor in that you’re hiding eggs that you may or may not see again. Then one day you’re mowing the lawn and there’s a thud followed by a fountain of shredded multicolored plastic and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups.

I only have one clear Easter memory and it involves an Easter egg hunt orchestrated by my dad. Instead of hiding a bunch of little eggs all around, he had put one big Easter basket cache somewhere for me to find. I looked around for like half an hour without finding anything. After being highly demoralized from this, I inevitably looked up at some point and found that the basket was in a damn tree. It wasn’t even below eye-level let alone within my reach. Ever since then I couldn’t wait to have kids so I could do the exact same thing to them.

Independence Day - Well how could I have anything against something that feeds my lust for unchecked pyro madness?

Halloween - Halloween used to be a big thing for me. I used to carve like half a dozen pumpkins, decorate the house, watch The Nightmare Before Christmas, and go trick-or-treating. Looking back I have to ask the question; what was I thinking? You see I’ve lived out in the country for most of my life, in a community with houses that were an average of 50 yards apart and then the driveways themselves would be like another 50 yards to the actual house. When you’re 8, the promise of free candy can easily cloud your judgment, (what little there is.) Is it more economical to walk through rural hickville for four hours to get two pounds of saltwater taffy and pennies, or to just go to Costco and get an $8 box of Milkyway bars? The decorations and whatnot I put out every year never got seen by anyone not living in the house because it’s the most secluded house in the neighborhood. It’s down a hill surrounded by a poison oak grove. You can’t even see it from the road. On the rare occasion that a trick-or-treater passed by, do you think they would go down the creepy road going God-knows-where in the woods? Fuck that, that’s where Michael Myers hangs out. I can seriously only recall one party of kids ever visiting the house for
Halloween. Jehovah’s Witnesses show up more often.

Eventually I wised up and started trick-or-treating at subdivisions in town. But I still decorated the house for some reason. One time I was going to go with my friend in his neighborhood but he got his hand slammed in a car door and decided not to go. It wasn’t broken. It wasn’t even sprained. He just got hurt and skipped out on trick-or-treating. Oh, I felt pain in my hand an hour ago so I don’t want an ass-load of candy now. Boo-fucking-hoo. What are you, a communist? I ended up going with his little sister who I never talked to. Thanks a lot.

The last time I went was when I was about fourteen. I went with friends and I swear every other house we went to had an occupant that would make some comment to me like “Aren’t you too old for this?” No, I’m the same age as my damn friends you fucker, I’m just tall. After that shit, I never went trick-or-treating again. I didn’t decorate either.

Thanksgiving - I’ve heard my mom say that Thanksgiving is her favorite holiday. I used to not really care about it but it seems that the older I get, the more I enjoy it. I like Fall. I like having a break from school. You get to see family you like that you haven’t seen in a while. You get to eat lots of good food. And you don’t have to fucking buy shit for anyone. This is funny because three seconds after Halloween is over, all of the stores are decorated for Christmas and it’s almost another two months to Christmas. Thanksgiving isn’t a consumer holiday and therefore unimportant to stores. For me, any holiday not developed and administrated by Hallmark, and Macy’s is worth celebrating. The down side is the school break is ruined because my school feels it necessary to completely encompass any sort of free time you might have by giving you extra homework. God forbid I actually get to interact with my family on Thanksgiving. The suffering is multiplied exponentially because the kind of homework I get involves thousand dollar 3d modeling programs, table saws, drill presses, compressed air generators, and disk sanders. Needless to say, I don’t have any of that shit so it makes it a little difficult. This alone makes me want to stay at school. The other thing is that with the people that you want to see come the people that you *don’t* want to see. Then the drama. Oh hell, the drama.

Christmas - Every time someone asks me what I want for Christmas I draw a blank. I can never come up with anything I actually want that someone will buy me. I hate trying to figure out what to buy people and who to buy for. It’s just highly aggravating for me. Come to think of it, Christmas is like a holiday built upon layer after layer of chores. Go get a tree. Set up the tree. Decorate the tree. Decorate the house. Find a parking space. Buy X number of presents for X number of friends and family. Now wrap all of those presents. Etc. Etc. But gift procuring is what really bothers me. What if they hate my presents? What if I hate there’s? What the hell am I even going to get them? This may sound silly but wouldn’t it make more sense for everyone to use their money to buy themselves presents that they want? Then everyone could wrap their own presents and put them under the tree. And all December people would wonder what you got for yourself. Then when Christmas comes everyone opens their presents and acts very surprised and elated over what they got themselves. They will turn to one another and brag about what they received and whoever gets the most expensive presents wins Christmas.

New Years - St. Patrick’s day with pointy hats and half-hearted promises to yourself to change in some way. Definitely not cause for celebratory fanfare.

iPods

Ipod is still an unbelievable phenomenon even after being released like seven years ago. I haven’t even gotten to my main point yet and I’ve already found another thing about iPods that annoys me. The Way you’re supposed to write the word iPod is “iPod.” What is that “i” even for anyway? Is it supposed to be referring to “you” in first person like the pronoun? If that’s the case then it should never be in lower-case. Then after that, the P in “pod” is capitalized. Have you ever seen a word with only the second letter capitalized? And then if you use it as the first word in a sentence like I did, what happens? Does the P remain capitalized creating two capitalized letters in a row? i.e. IPod is still an unbelievable… Do you make the P lower-case so that, that doesn’t happen? i.e. Ipod is still an unbelievable… Or are the laws of basic grammar overridden to correctly state the word? i.e. iPod is still an unbelievable… Oh God, it’s horrible! I can’t look at it!

Anyway, what I was really going to talk about was how iPod has a monopoly on the portable mp3 player market. It has such a large presence you’d seriously think it was the only mp3 player in existence. Why is that? I’m 99% sure it’s the advertising because if it’s the quality then the rest of the market must be lightyears away from creating a functional product.

When I first got my iPod mini, (in ‘04 I think), I thought I just got a defective one or something. The battery’s lifespan was drastically short, (about 45 minutes.) It also had a tendency to freeze. I wouldn’t even be able to turn it off. Sometimes plugging it in to my computer would reboot it but not always. A couple of times I had to wait for the battery to die so it would shut off. Also sometimes when I paused it and tried to turn it off it wouldn’t turn off. I’d have to wait like 10 seconds for it to get ready or something and then it would let me turn it off. I got a Nano for Christmas over a year ago. I thought this would be the end to all the problems. Well… the battery actually worked which was more than I could say for my cousin’s. His Nano’s battery was defective and had to be sent in to get a new one. The rest of the problems however, remained. It still freezes and still has that 10 second delay shit that drives me crazy. My old iPod mini became a mass storage device for a while until it decided that it didn‘t want me to have any of my files back. So now it’s a useless piece of junk. I guess I did get a defective one. They’re all defective.

My roommate came in a while ago and said his Nano was frozen and it was. The backlight was stuck on and everything. It stayed like that for a couple of hours and then just turned off by it’s self. What the hell? Why is this such a big problem still? Is it just so damn popular you don’t even have to fix the problems? How much more simple does it need to be for it to not do this. It has one function; play music, and it freezes. It’s not rocket science.