I Don't Need Pants

Before I regale you with my next tale of complete embarrassment I feel that I need to make a little bit of a disclaimer. Parental units, if you are reading this I’m sorry for bringing shame upon the family. My bad.

When I was the young age of 23 I decided to explore this big world and participated in a study abroad program. My decision was completely last minute so it had to be somewhere that primarily spoke English. I originally thought Germany, I grew up there, was a native speaker when I was younger, and had family there. However since moving to the states when I was 12 my German was limited to “Ja,” nodding and smiling and eavesdropping on other German speakers. London was crazy expensive but just three hours away was a small country called Wales.

A few months into my new adventure my new friends and I made plans for my 24^th birthday. It involved seeing Beauty and the Beast by some touring company and then enjoying the bars on Wind Street. So, I’m going to skip the blah blah blah part. The play was awesome and a few peeps had to go because they were all responsible and had homework to do. The rest of us though, drank. And I mean we drank A LOT. By The time we decided to go home the bars were shutting down and we had to walk up this small hill to the taxi station. Since there were four of us we tried to find other students that lived in the student village so that we could save on the cab ride. And by find other students I mean drunkenly harass them. And by we, I mean me. It kind went something like this:

“HEY! HEY! HEY KID! Are you going to the village?” I’m also pointing at this kid even after my parents repeatedly told me that pointing was rude.

“Oh, uh, no,” He says as he’s ushering this tiny, skinny blonde chick into a cab.

“What?! You liar! I see you there ALL THE TIME!” Still pointing and now accusing someone I don’t know of lying.

“Oh, no you must have me confused with someone else.” Now he’s trying to get in the cab without me and friends.

“But duuuuuuuuuuuude! The cab ride will be soooooooo cheap if we share it! It’ll be split 6 ways!” I try to reason with him but instead I sound like a whiny baby. A drunk, cheap, whiny baby.

At this point he jumps in the cab and closes the door with such force I’m a tiny bit offended. One of the girls says “whatever” and that we can totally find more students from the village over at the taxi stand by that other club that’s a few streets over. We stumbled for what seemed like an eternity until we made it to the next taxi stand and guess what. There were NO STUDENTS. None! I bet that one guy texted everyone else to watch out for gaggle of drunk girls, 2 American, 1 British and 1 Welsh.

After we get a cab and make it the village we decided that we’re totally starving. Lucky for us there was a tiny fast food place right in the student village. Unfortunately for us it’s on top of the tiny convenience store with this stairs that are so steep that even sober people trip up and down them. I don’t remember the next part. Apparently I made it up the stairs, ordered food, took pictures with random kids I didn’t know, ate my food and made it safely down the stairs. This next part I do remember.

I made it back to my room and didn’t realize how loud I was muttering to myself until my dear, sweet roommate told me the next day. I walked into my room and was suddenly hit with Africa in the middle of summer heat because my bi-polar heater randomly turned on while I was gone. And here is a summarized version of the conversation I had with myself while stumbling from my door to the window.

“Oh my GAWD! It’s soooooooooooooo fucking hot in here! Why is it so damn hot?!?!”

Here is where I managed to open the window, turn the heater off and stumble back to the door, lean on it a little bit and realize I had my heavy pea coat on.

“WHY AM I STILL WEARING THIS?!!” I say this completely amazed as if it magically appeared on me out of nowhere.

I spend the next 5 minutes trying to unbutton my jacket only to become frustrated and pull it over like a hoodie and fling it across the room. Next, I kicked my shoes off and tore my shirt off. It was still Africa hot in there. I tried to take my jeans off but only ended up lying awkwardly on my side on my bed and kicking my legs in the air. Basically, I looked like I was riding an invisible bike when I was trying to take my jeans off. I eventually got them off and sat upright, in my underoos and tank top, hair a mess while loudly wondering, “Where are my fucking pants?” When I say pants I mean the yoga pants that I use to do yoga sleep in.

This then led me to kind of sort of stand up and throwing my blanket off my bed and still muttering, “What the hell. I need my pants!” I staggered around a little before leaning against my door and whining about how I couldn’t find my pants. 20 minutes later I gave and proclaimed, “Fuck it, I’ll sleep in my undies. I don’t need PANTS!”

Yeah, this was me.

     

When I woke up sometime that afternoon I looked around my room through squinted eyes and a painful headache and thought, “What the hell happened in here?” My window was open and half of my pea coat was hanging out of it, one sleeve blowing in the wind as if waving, hey! A drunken idiot lives here! One shoe had knocked my textbooks off my desk and the other shoe sitting was sitting on the window sill. Shirt was haphazardly on the floor; jeans crumbled by my bed and right next to them were my black yoga pants. It was then I heard the soft knocking on my door and my roommate quietly asking if I was ok, did I need some water and did I ever find my DAMN pants.

There’s another story, years later about me waking up to a bed covered in chicken nuggets but I’ll save that for another day.

Also, guys TOMORROW IS THE LAST DAY TO ENTER THE NERF GUN GIVEAWAY! I’ll announce the winner on Saturday and am totally stoked at all the responses and entries! If this is the first time you’re hearing about this mega amazing giveaway you can find the details right ovvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvver HERE!

We Have a Winner!!

First off, I want to thank every single person that helped with the Toys for Tots Fundraiser. My goal was to hit $100 and when I started this I figured I would get probably $20. Well, with everyone's help and contribution we made $109! How awesome is that?!!? After work, "Chris," "Sean" and I went to Wal-Mart to purchase brand new toys. To be honest, after doing a quick walk through of the toy aisle I felt a teeny bit overwhelmed. There were so many toys that I had no idea what to get. I had built up this lavish fantasy in my sleep deprived brain that "Walking on Sunshine" would play in the back ground while I ran all around the toy department just tossing everything that was on the shelves into the shopping cart. Instead, it was me holding up a mini Avenger's toy asking if boys like dollies and then promptly told, "it's an action figure!"

I bet you want to know what's in the bags??

Are you really that surprised to see Nerf guns?

I bet you're just DYING to know who the winner is? Well, before I tell you I need to explain the hiccup I experienced with the number generator. My plan was to let technology do the work for me. I would just plug in the numbers 1 and 500 and it would go ahead and pick the winner for me. While I had several numbers in play I did not take into consideration that there were 491 numbers that were unaccounted for. And here's what happened.

As you can see...It did not turn out the way I had planned. 

Then an idea came to me. A local radio station (Magic 95) and the Lawton Fire Fighters were going to be at the toy drop off site. So my plan was to go completely old school, write everyone's name and number on a piece of paper and ask one of the fire fighters to pick the winner. I can be such a genius sometimes. (Ignore the fact that this is the third time I'm typing this and hoping this will post).

So, mom (my special helper) and I went to the drop off site only to find an empty Magic 95 car parked in front of the store and the fire truck at the other end of the parking lot. We carried the toys over to the fire truck where the cutie pie fire fighters were just as confused as we were as to where the toys needed to be. Mom and I headed back to the Magic 95 car when mom decided she would ask someone in the store only to find the radio DJ in there buying a pair of pants. Toys were dropped off and one of our lovely fire fighters picked the winner. I guess NOW would be a good time for me to tell who won the FREE DINNER FOR TWO before I ramble on to another side story. So. Here. We. GO! THE WINNER IS....

CONGRATULATIONS SAM!!!!!

So there you have it. This experience was not only fun but pretty humbling as well. I thought maybe this would be something I would do every year but actually I may try to find other causes through out the year to help with as well. And since this blog post seems a bit on the picture heavy side, here are some more to distract you while mom and I accidentally set the house on fire and see if the cutie pie fire fighters show up.

Merry Christmas. I got you a Frankie cat.