And the Lent is On...

So this morning I once again awoke depressed because I’m stuck in a land-locked, snow-covered, tofu-eating, hippie-hugging city. So you can imagine my surprise when I picked up the paper and discovered that according to a recent poll, I apparently live in the happiest city in America. That’s right; Boulder, Colorado was named as the happiest city in America. Of course when you consider the other lists that Boulder is near the top in (pot usage and party schools) this is not as surprising as it would seem.

What I want to know is how the hell they determine how happy people are. Do they just go up to them and ask which they do more during the week: contemplate suicide or write poems about birds? But whatever method they are using is clearly not correct, because Honolulu, Hawaii was only third on the list, behind some city in Michigan. That’s right; Hawaii was behind Michigan in happiness. Nothing against Michigan, but would you be happier jobless in the cold or sitting on a beach? Besides, I’m almost certain that Michigan is actually part of Canada, and is thus disqualified from this survey. And speaking of Canada, how about the US beating Canada in Olympic hockey? I hope that stung for those Canadians; I bet they all went home and needed to hug their moose and listen to Celine Dion to console themselves.

Anyway, even if Boulder is the happiest city in America, you wouldn’t guess that right now. Unfortunately, lent is underway. Now for those of you who know as little about religion as I do lent is a period of forty days where people often give up a vice for the entire 40 days. I think traditionally, they were supposed to fast for those 40 days. Supposedly it got them closer to heaven (in the sense that it killed them). I was at a party on Saturday and a girl there told me that you are actually supposed to give up alcohol, milk, cheese, and meat. This was ironic to me, since as she was telling me this I was working on a bottle of Jagermeister that was mysteriously empty by the end of the night and may or may not be related to me sitting in the snow wearing shorts for five minutes yelling at my cell phone. But anyway, most people just give up some sort of vice, which means that there are hundreds of people right now walking around without the very things that keep them going, which can be very dangerous.

Take my journalism class for instance. The professor gave out cookies, but several girls in the class had given up on treats, and so they looked at the cookies, started crying, yelled at me to take them away and then yelled at me for taking away the cookies and then yelled at me for giving them back to them and in general just yelled a lot. If any of them had also been PMSing at the same time, the pure hatred and anger would have left a large smoking crater where the class used to be and probably tear a hole in the universe. During all of this, the unstable guy was sharpening his pencil with a switch-blade because he apparently gave up his medication for lent. What’s even weirder is that he sharpens this pencil, but he writes with a pen.

Now, I personally give up Christian traditions for lent, so I don’t go through this. Either that or I choose to give up things that I don’t like or don’t do anyway, like eating turnips and doing homework. For one thing, I don’t have the will power to give up anything I like for longer than about five hours, particularly food and drinks. For instance, I watched a hockey game the other night and the puck instantly reminded me of Hostess Ding Dongs. Needless to say, about an hour later I had bought an entire box of Ding Dongs. But to my disappointment, I discovered that for some reason, Ding Dong’s in the Midwest don’t come wrapped in foil like everywhere else in the country. To my horror, my roommate did not even know that they came in foil, and I had to look it up on the internet to prove it to him. By the way, Googling “Ding Dong” is a really bad idea. I didn’t find a picture of what I was looking for until about the third page. Of course, because I said that, at least 75 percent of you are going to go and Google “Ding Dong.”

Anyway, the point is that when it comes to food and drinks, I am not good with temptation. It’s a good thing that I wasn’t in the Garden of Eden, or I would have eaten the apple before Eve, and then God would have punished men with painful childbirth and unstable emotions instead of women. So I applaud all of the brave souls that are undertaking this challenge, no matter how many people they kill in the process. And there will be death this lent. Just to be sure it’s not me, I’m going to stop going to my journalism class; because if the unstable guy doesn’t stab me, the chocolate deprived girls will.