Paycheck and Biracial Christmas

This particular author has been gone for a while, and these changes you see are all brand new to me. It's as sterile as a virgin's vagina in here. Seems more like the website of an up-and-coming business consulting firm. Here at LTS, Inc., we work for you...big thumbs up.

Speaking of work, the staff at this here blog just got our paycheck. For 54 blogs, over 2000 hits, and at least several dozens hours of labor....we have received 34 dollars and 50 cents. BYAH! I should explain. This cash flow has come from our recently estranged partners of Google Adsense, who's hilarious sponsors have given me many an idea for a blog when I just wasn't feeling very creative (Et tù, Cleanbutt.com?). They wrongfully (rightfully) accused us of encouraging readers to click repeatedly on our sponsors without any intention of purchase. Why? Cash. We got a quarter for every click. Eventually our corporate masters caught wind of this, threatened civil suit (not really), and so we dropped them so that we could better fill three columns with completely pointless stuff.

Sidenote: In the Author's Picks, Joe put more of his blogs than mine. And I have no idea how to change it. Damn you co-author! You've won this round only because you know everything the "control" and "alt" keys do in conjunction with other keys.....I don't know what "alt" stands for.

But somehow, probably due to an unknowing intern, we still got paid for all those bogus clicks. So....$34.50. I am unsure what to do with this new found cash, and so I went to Google and typed in "$34.50". One of the first things to pop up were these Bentstorm.com Pirates of the Caribbean Pirate Skull and Crossbones Adult Slippers:

Joe, I think we should go for it. We can each have one. It'll be like the mirrors in Harry Potter...we'll be able to speak to each other in this life....and the next.

But all this is a moot point.

What I really wanted to talk about was my Christmas, in which I experienced two big events: Christmas Eve with my Girlfriend's Family and Going to Church

Christmas Eve with the Girlfriend

As me and Joe have mostly realized by now is the fact that the people who read this blog are people who know us. Therefore, many of you probably know my girlfriend. For those Austrians, I mean readers, who don't actually know us, my girlfriend is Asian. For the most part, this has not really influenced our relationship. We're both intelligent college students in America, she just happens to have slightly less vertical peripheral vision, as they say.

This dynamic changes with the family. Point number one, her father, a Vietnamese chef, is not very fluent in English. I have yet to talk with the man. The first time I met him, I tried to shake his hand, and he walked away. I think he likes me.

I come from an Irish family. I have around 20 cousins from 8 sets of aunts and uncles, and I thought this was commendable. How sadly mistaken I was. When my girlfriend and I got to dinner, I swiftly realized that her joke about making flashcards was not a joke. The cousins (all 30 or more of them) I learned at a good pace. The aunts, however, were a whole other story. A small grouping of these were Nimba-Wei, Nimba-Lei, E-Khon, E-Phom, E-Hun, and E-Hùn. Thats right people, Hun and Hùn. Notice the accent mark! World of difference. Now, I'm pretty sure my girlfriend doesn't read this crap, so I feel fairly comfortable with saying this right now.....They all looked the same! I didn't learn their faces. I learned their shirts. I'm screwed at the next reunion.

And then there's the food. I've never had Lo Mein and Spring Rolls Christmas Eve before. Actually the big story occurred the night prior, when I had gone with her immediate family to a restaurant where they served FU. To pronounce it, take a well-known word, drop the -CK, and there you have it. It's a type of soup. I ordered the thing that had the prettiest combination of hieroglyphics. And literally twenty seconds later, a bowl the size of a baby hippo's head appeared before me. Now, the best part of the night was our waiter. To a blind man, he would appear to have been a perfectly average Asian server, bit of a heavy accent, a little unable to grasp the L sound, and my high school English teacher would have ripped his grammar apart. "Herro. How many ou want? For o fi?"

Translation Sidenote: Hello. How many chairs will be required? Four or five, pray tell?

The problem was that our waiter looked exactly like this:

For those of you don't know, this is Rob Schneider. A white man. A man who doesn't belong in a Fu Restaurant..... much like me.

Going to Church

I am what one would call sacrilegious. Churches don't really invoke me to maintain an aura of solemn reverence. I crack jokes, I provoke my family, and I generally shout to the world that I don't want to talk to their imaginary friend. No offense to my devout Catholic of a co-author. He has to go to confession every time he talks to me. It's the only way this friendship works.

But this mass that I attended with my family was the most entertaining I have ever attended. We had never gone to this particular church before. It was an extremely nice Catholic church that had all been built from one generous donation. Must have been a massive kidney stone.

Hanging in the church was a cross with (you guessed it) Jesus Christ on it. The figure was actually hanging over the pews...the very pews that we sat at. So...when I looked up..... Let's just say the sculptor was fairly generous.

Before the mass started there was an alter boy lighting some candles. There were 8 candles in all, and he got seven of them lit. But that damn eighth one. And this wasn't just a normal eye-level candle. This thing was twenty feet up there. This kid was on his tippy-toes reaching with that long stick with a Zippo at the end for ten minutes trying to light this thing. I know I wasn't the only one to think, 'Man, we need a Jew, a Jew would know how to keep eight candles going through the night.'

Sidenote: That was a weak Hanukkah joke. Menorah, get it? Fuck you.

Before mass started, there was the strangest event. I had never really gone to a traditional Catholic mass before. Apparently, on Christmas they did a reading that was kind of like a countdown to the birth of Jesus. "1300 years since Moses left Egypt. 1100 years since the time of David, 300 years since the start of the Roman Empire"...and so on. There were like twenty of these things. I kept expecting the guy from Conan O'Brien to start going "In the year two thousand....In the year two thousaaaaaaaand!"

Quick little story that occurred during "the Peace". This is where everybody shakes hands and say "Peace" as if they were finishing up the Treaty of Versailles. My father, in his earnestness to shake as many hands as he could, knocked my sister over her seat.

And then there's Communion. There have been wars fought over this thing. Transubstantiation. True body or metaphor. The spiritual transformation of God into this host or merely a ceremony demonstrating the sacrifice. Despite all this, I still get Jesus stuck in my teeth every time.

As I finish up this blog, I would like to say that I hope everyone had a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year's, but I hope your Martin Luther King Day sucks balls.

Byah!

Rob