I was running yesterday with my friend and co-Kilimanjaro-explorer Mike when he performed an impression of the look one gives a room of people when a certain set of criteria are met.

First, let me explain the look. I am calling it The Squint. Here are the steps:
1. Squint.
2. Peer furtively around the room.
3. Appear to be weighing your options.

Now that you have that down, let’s discuss the criteria under which The Squint should be performed.
1. It is New Year’s Eve.
2. It is Eleven o’clock or just after. Midnight is approaching.
3. You’re sure you want to make out with someone at midnight.
4. You aren’t sure who it will be.

Time to make some decisions, muchacho!

In truth, The Squint can be performed on any night. It doesn’t have to be New Year’s Eve. It could just be that the bar is about to close and you intend to sleep with someone but haven’t worked out who it will be. Or maybe you’ve worked out who it will be but haven’t broached the subject with them yet.

My advice in the latter case is just to go for it. Don’t ask what they think about it, just plant a kiss on them and see what happens. It’s better to be bold and potentially awkward than timid and polite, I believe.

My only goal this year is to enter 2010 with some semblance of my dignity. The last time anyone remembers seeing me in the first hours of 2009 was on a sidewalk in the entertainment district slap-fighting one of my closest friends with my butt crack peeking out just above my dress pants. The first time I remember being me is in my hallway not five feet from my bathroom performing a full evacuation of my stomach.

As an aside, I’ve also been broken up with while standing in that particular section of hallway. That plus the vomiting episode means I step widely around it in my day to day trips to the bathroom. I consider that section of hardwood a disaster area. I even moved my electric piano so I wouldn’t have to sit in said disaster area to play it.

My plans for this evening are to avoid drinking as many shots as I can, to perform a rap with the Sam Thacker Band, to prance around in a feather boa and top hat, and to enjoy myself with my ridiculous friends… in the suburbs.

If you happen to be there with me and midnight is approaching, look for The Squint. I’m not saying it will happen or it won’t.

I’m just saying look for it.

Happy New Year!

As you know if you read my post about Christmas day, I was the happy recipient of a Snuggie on Christmas morning. I couldn’t wait to lounge around in it.

When I first heard about the Snuggie, I was appalled that anyone would be lazy enough to need sleeves in their lounging blanket. The only reasons I can imagine that one might need their arms free when lounging are to shovel food into one’s mouth or operate a remote control. In terms of the seven deadly sins, that’s Sloth and Gluttony at least. I think adding the Snuggie constitutes Extravagance and possibly Acedia as well, so it’s nearly the full set of deadly sins.

When I actually received one as a gift, however, I knew I was in love with it. I immediately put it on and posed for a photo, seven deadly sins be damned.

Similarly, when I first heard about the MTV reality show the Jersey Shore, I was appalled. But then I watched the show and loved every second of it. Let it not be said that I am too smug to enjoy myself… even if it happens to sometimes be true.

So it was that last night I settled down with a frosty beverage, my trusty Meerschaum pipe and my Snuggie to watch a movie. I was ready to be extremely comfortable and very entertained, but my bubble of comfort burst when I realized the awful truth: I am too tall for the Snuggie! At six feet one inches tall, I am beyond the comfortable range for which it was apparently designed. My feet poke out the end, exposed to the chill air. Blast!

I decided I would just make do and enjoy the movie anyway, but that also was not to be.

Despite a famous cast and director, I found the film weird and disappointing like a date with a depressed clown. After it was over, I sauntered over to the internet and checked out what the critics had to say about it. They nearly universally loved it. I guess that just goes to show that I don’t know nearly as much about movies as I do about courting depressed clowns.

Did you know that a female clown is called a “clowness”?

My tastes in movies are easy to list. I like it when there are naked ladies, explosions, car chases, and bad guys getting killed in every imaginable way. This movie had some bad people getting shot in it, which is good, but I don’t remember a single naked lady or big fiery explosion. There was also some artistic introspection and some commentary on the state of the human experience, which tends to slow things down very much.

Attention directors: Bring on the hot chicks and the big explosions!

Well, the holidays are nearly over. Yes, just one more night of hoopla and we can put this whole wretched business of enjoying ourselves behind us. At last!

This year I have decided to leave the safe confines of my walled city of Atlanta on New Year’s Eve and sally forth into the suburbs. I have chosen to do this even though I like looking at girls in dresses. Girls who live outside the perimeter of the city, you see, wear jeans — never a dress. Still, that’s where my closest friends (or “Team Hodgson” as I call them) will be.

So, I will don my top hat and feather boa, drive out of the northwestern gate of my city, sip sherry from a small glass, and mingle among whatever gentleman and ladies should be there. I may or may not also dance, or talk loudly in the manner of a buffoon. Time will tell.

Driving is really the only remaining way to effectively travel long distances without having to come under the scrutiny of the TSA.

My preferred means of travel are, in order:
1. On a sedan chair supported by scantily clad women.
2. On a bicycle.
3. In a very fine car.
4. On horseback.
5. Naked except for a suit of stinging insects inside a wheeled cage containing every land predator known to science who are all in an extremely foul mood due to starvation…

…and a distant last..
6. The airlines.

I guess someone blew up his underwear over the holiday and now we’re not allowed to use the internet on flights or go to the bathroom. It makes perfect sense. Thank god no one brought an exploding iguana on board or we’d all have to sit on piles of bananas. I think that’s in the TSA handbook. Or was it “must be tickled by a sloth in leiderhosen”? Oh well, I forget.

To give you an idea of how bad things have gotten in air travel, here’s a recent photo of a TSA official screening a gate:

Occasionally though, I am embarrassed to admit, I’m unable to find a team of scantily clad women to shoulder my sedan chair. The ASPCA has also had some strong words to say about my wheeled menagerie of death. Much as I favor these methods in addition to bike riding, they are best suited for trips under 100 miles or so. Any more than that and you’re going to need something a touch faster.

Hoping to avoid air travel at all costs, I even looked into renting a car for the return journey from my upcoming trip out to California. I thought I might be able to mitigate the inhuman pain of flying by only flying one way, but driving a rental car across the country is prohibitively expensive. It would have cost nearly $1000 just to rent the car, plus another few hundred in gas, and that’s not to mention food and lodging along the way.

At least this time on the plane I will have my brand new Snuggie to wear during the flight. Just wait until my fellow travelers see me in it!

Oh, how they will envy me!

As I recall, I had no problem waking up at the crack of dawn on Christmas morning when I was a kid. Now that I have grown into an irresponsible adult, I cherish much more dearly my sleep time. Even so, I stayed up late on Chrismas Eve reading my Krakauer book and woke up early Christmas day, before my niece, feeling very sleepy.

I walked downstairs and locked my eyes onto a plate of muffins which were artfully arranged in the shape of a Christmas tree. I ate the one in the position of the tree trunk. This provoked heavy fire from my sister for eating before breakfast and for disturbing the artful muffin placement.

We have known each other for over thirty years now. My sister should be aware by this stage that if I am conscious, I am almost certainly hungry. Also, I feel that the right and just place of any delicious muffin is in my stomach, and that I’m only doing what’s best for them by devouring them.

Sometimes it seems that as a nutritionist, it is her opinion that people should be fed entirely on soy milk (or as my brother in law Chuck calls it, “bean squeezings”) and rope fibers.

Breakfast was an hour and a half away, I was informed, so I began a surreptitious assault on a plate of chocolate covered pretzel things in order to survive. Soon I got the call to go into action and collect my niece from her room.

“Do you want to change her diaper?” my sister asked.

“Nope!”

I love my niece. She is the most beautiful little person, with an excellent disposition. I believe her to be intrinsically superior to every other child ever born. I like throwing her into the air and zerberting her face, not to mention singing songs with her. Diapers, however, are parent territory (or “Parentorry”). I have so far avoided every single diaper change of hers and I intend to avoid them all.

Here you can see us expressing as a team my opinion of diaper changing.

On the way out to my sister’s home on Christmas Eve, I passed a bank offering a free Snuggie with each new account. I sent a text message to my friend and fellow blogger Hess to inform her of such as I know she’s a great fan of the Snuggie. Little did I know that the following day I would myself be the happy recipient of my very own Snuggie. It is impossible to overstate my delight.

Later, after a highly necessary nap, we all drove to my cousin’s house. On the way, Chuck spotted a prodigious spiky mullet atop the passenger in an adjacent vehicle, which I tried to photograph.

Once at my cousin’s house, we joined with a dozen or so other family members in laughing and exchanging gifts. All joking aside, I am blessed with a truly great family. I can’t wait to be with them whenever I can. Those who are married have had the excellent presence of mind to marry remarkable people and to have good kids with them. So, our group gets bigger every year, but stays awesome.

Cousin Mike, as a great example of the impressive personal awesomeness of my family, was in the kitchen preparing a huge pot of jambalaya. Anyone who has eaten jambalaya knows that the ingredients list is actually just a list of some very tasty foods. Just like the Spice Girls, each member is individually incredible but even better as a spicy whole.

Spice Girls, the jambalaya of the music industry.

Dinner eaten and gifts exchanged, I was pressed into service to install a battery in my cousin’s fart machine. I’m not sure who gave her the fart machine for Christmas, but I gathered that it was a recent gift. It consisted of a speaker unit and a remote control to trigger the farts. Clearly, as someone who runs a business vaguely associated with computers and spends a lot of time on the internet, I am an excellent choice to install a battery in a fart machine.

As the cousin in question is best friends with my dad and of the generation ahead of mine, however, it’s not for me to question her motives. We’re southerners, after all, which means that we eat jamabalaya, we respect our forebears, and that we are unerringly polite.

Fart machine powered up in the kitchen, my cousin and I snuck back into the living room to put it into action. She carefully placed it behind my dad’s boyfriend Steve’s head, on top of the cushions in his chair. I was still holding the fart remote. She gave me a look that said “hit it”.

I hit the button, and Steve yelled good-naturedly and got out of his chair to reveal the fart machine. Everyone laughed. I hit the button a few more times for effect.

Soon the kids took over the fart machine and it found its way into cousin Mike’s back pocket. He pretended not to notice it being jammed there. The kids hit the button, and peals of farts erupted. Mike made a great show of embarrassment to the delight of all, and the adults laughed at least as much as the kids.

Looking at the above photo of the women in my family, it occurs to me how lucky I am to have them as examples of what women should be like. They’re well read, highly educated, stylish, graceful, beautiful, and (I suspect) in charge. This doesn’t mean that they’re above having a laugh at a fart machine, however. You’re the best, ladies.

Between spending time with them and with my niece, getting a Snuggie, eating Jambalaya and the fart machine, I can’t imagine a better Christmas.

I hope yours was as good as mine!

A few days ago, I ran outside my windowless underground bunker and leaped into my vehicle at top speed. I slammed the car door behind me and fired ‘er up.

I do this to make it seem to my neighbors as though I’m continually being called to go handle an emergency of some kind. This, combined with the distant stare I affect in the hallway, gives me an air of harried professionalism. Like a cop in a crime drama, or Bo and Luke Duke.

This time when I slammed my door, instead of going “thunk!” and being closed it went “Slosh!”.

“Slosh?” I thought. I turned up the radio and rewound the song my stereo (Wayne Newton’s “Danke Schoen”) a bit to see if what I’d heard was a part of the background, but it wasn’t on the track. Then I opened the door and shut it again.

“Slosh!” my door repeated. It was definitely full of a liquid of some kind. Setting my mind weasels to the task, I deduced that it could be water. This was based on nature’s recent habit of dumping as much water as possible on the city of Atlanta at all times. It rains like a hot quilted sumbitch here lately… which is a lot.

I made a short video of the sloshing so everyone could enjoy it.

Now, I am not an engineer. Engineers are people who have spent a great deal of time learning how to understand the mechanical inner workings of the universe so that they don’t have to learn how to be easy to work with or well groomed. They are highly skilled and highly educated, and they can fix things.

They also moan a lot about not making as much money as salespeople, because they haven’t worked out that a working product is nice, but a selling product is better. The two are not necessarily the same thing. Microsoft has made a great heaping pile of money based on this principle.

So, not being as skilled or as educated as engineers, I just take things apart and put them back together about 80% as good as they were before, thereby introducing new, smaller problems into whatever I’ve just “fixed”. I set to the task of taking apart my door to investigate the sloshing.

You can see here that I jammed a dish towel down into the water to soak it up. I then removed and wrung out the water one towel’s worth at a time. It took a while, but I congratulated myself on an ingenious solution.

If I am ever crowned King of America, I will knight myself for this. I’m highly jealous of the British for being eligible for knighthood, like my personal hero Sir Ranulph Fiennes or the soon-to-be-knighted Patrick Stewart.

At any rate, I got my door back together mostly, which is good because I am driving to see my family today and I can’t have water sloshing all the way there. I don’t want it drowning out Wayne Newton.

That just wouldn’t be like Christmas.