The Older I Get

You know, more and more these days those sucky holidays from when I was a kid are becoming my favorites.

Today (or actually at this time of night it was yesterday), for example, was Cinco de Mayo. When I was a kid all I knew was I had to bring Mexican cookies or chips or salsa to school and maybe if I was lucky I'd get to beat the shit out of a piece of plaster filled with hard candy. Now as an adult, or big kid I might say, I get an excuse to leave work early, go to a mexican restaurant, drink on a weeknight, and if I'm lucky I still might get to beat the shit out of a piece of plaster filled with hard candy. Hey, it's a great holiday when there really is no point. No presents, no mucky mucky stuff, no cards, just an excuse for fun.

Holiday number two: St. Patty's Day. Again, when you were a kid it sucked. You got pinched all day long by the most annoying kids that actually remembered to wear green. You brought dyed-green food to school, wore green, had to endure annoying little pictures of leprechauns all day, and were forced to do a book report about Ireland. Once again, as an adult the holiday is much better. Instead of green food it's green beer, that is if you're too weak to drink Guiness, and then it's green - ok, it's still black, but you pretend. And once again it is another excuse to leave work early, go to a pub, and drink beer in public on a weeknight.

Valentine's day absolutely sucked as a kid. You keep putting it off and putting it off until it is the 13th of the coldest most gray and disgusting month of the year. Then you realize you don't want to be the putz who forgot to make a Valentine's day box. Remember those? You spend about an hour cutting out construction paper to tape/glue on the sides of a shoebox. Then you spend another hour taping all those damn lollipops to the Valentine's cards you're giving to every single person in the freakin' class. To make it worse, you have to give away your hard candy. Now, as an adult, well, I need not explain why it is a good holiday. I must admit though, instead of free shoeboxes taped with construction paper it's hundreds of dollars posted to a credit card bill. Ok...I guess this holiday is a bad example b/c it still can suck pretty bad.

And last but not least there's New Year's. Let's face it, if you're not 21 this holiday is nothing more than the end of your Christmas break. You sit at home with some babysitter that's just as pissed as you are about having to babysit on New Year's. You watch a damn ball lit up with a bjillion lights fall from the sky - and you don't even get to see it break. What's more, you watch tons of people having a blast that seem to be laughing at all those morons who aren't on TV with them, yourself included. Now, as an adult, it's not only an excuse to leave work early, it's an excuse not to work at all. And, you get to drink in public on what may just be a weekday - or maybe it isn't - but you could care less because you didn't have to work whatever day it was. You get kisses...from strangers. And you get to laught at all those morons sitting at home with babysitters, and the babysitters. Oh, and you learn all the new backroads in the town you moved to for the job you didn't have to go to that day to avoid all the checkpoints. As if there were more sober people on the roads that night. Yeah right - just be careful. At any rate, it's another sucky kid holiday that rocks as a big kid.

Beginning to get the picture? Mundane holidays rock! The only problem is that as an adult Christmas, Thanksgiving, Easter, they're all just big FUBARS when you have to be the ones responsible for buying presents, cooking turkey, sharing Santa's cookies with him, and helping the bunny lay eggs. And to top it all off...that damn bunny you swore you'd beat the shit out of for hiding your hard candy all those years turns out to be...well...you.

Now I know why the plaster on Cinco de Mayo is always in the shape of a bunny!