The Season of Lists! (I've been slacking a lot with the whole "proper punctuation" thing recently; sorry about that)

I have returned from my long Christmas break. I have come back to my compact, pleasant, and gnat-infested home after spending several weeks at my more expansive, comfortable, family-and-food-filled home. Thus begins the next season of academia, abstract education, and filling my mind with only semi-practical but simultaneously extremely interesting and thought-provoking nonsense. This marks the end of this rather short season of lights, family time, gift time, Jesus time, lots of food time, and lists. Time.

Now I’m going to delve more deeply into this last thought: the season of lists. Time.

This is because I have a very unpredictable attention span and I often venture off on long tangents in my thought processes without explaining or watching to make sure that my companion observers are close behind as I jump between trains of thought mid-journey on a whim, as if the Native American outlaw train-robber savages had me cornered, diving onto the roof of the train to Pasalacqua in a desperate attempt to escape peril. Ten-gallon Stetson hat in one hand and my six-shooter in the other, I try to provide some cover fire for them/you/the companions as I roll across the top of the neighboring train and deftly hang off the side in order to give the Indian criminal steam-engine burglar vermin less surface area to fire their blow-dart rifle knives at. I mourn the loss of any followers of mine who may’ve been blown gunned stabbed down by the Iroquois bandit railroad hijacker thief barbarians or their superfluously gratuitous nonsensical analogy about train robberies.

I should hyphenate more. That sounds like hydrate. I will do one of those two things.

So with that botched segue behind us, I will now smoothly return to what is presumably the main topic of this weirdly and overly narrated blog post.

So we just ended what is essentially the season of lists. Christmas lists, Naughty lists; the list goes on and on ( I assume). If you have not yet guessed, this is simply a poorly conceived and even more poorly executed narrative device set up to allow me to make some lists. I will now do that.

Lists about my Christmas break!

List of cool nifty things I got for or around Christmas (That was some confusing preposition action right thur.)

• Pickpunch (IT LITERALLY PUNCHES GUITAR PICKS OUT OF WHATEVER I PUT IN IT. SURPRISINGLY ENOUGH, THERE HAVE YET TO BE ANY [SERIOUS] INJURIES)
• A scarf (yay! Also an awesome jacket but only “scarf” sounds exotic enough to make it on the list.) (Maybe I don’t use “exotic” the same way other people do…)
• Snuggie! (I don’t… I can’t… um… yeah.)
• Coffeecoffeecoffeecoffeecoffeecoffee mugs.
• A zombie survival kit! (pressing concern)
• A lot of other things that I don’t have comments about but were nonetheless amazing gifts that I appreciated very much. I promise

List of things I forgot to do

• A lot of things, including sanding a guitar in preparation for painting, a project that I’ve been putting off for literally probably quite possibly three years.

List of things I said I wouldn’t do but did!

• Play video games/watch tv for more than an hour a day. (Ohhhhhhhh man I said I’d do that?)

List of movies I saw!

• The Adventures of Tintin (awesome and nostalgia! Adjectival suffix!)
• Source Code (yay inter-dimensional theory!)
• Cowboys and Aliens (YAY DANIEL CRAIG YAY HARRISON FORD YAY OLIVIA WILDE YAY YAY YAY)

List of movies I didn’t see

• Probs lots.

List of videogames I played

• Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood (I played an Italian assassin who kept speaking in Spanish and had English subtitles [I may’ve messed with the language settings a little])
• Civilization V (I created a grammar-themed civilization and proceeded to impose stern totalitarian and theocratic rule over the entire world. This is only a little bit of a big exaggeration.)

List of videogames I didn’t play

• Anything Lego-themed (except for 15 minutes of Lego Harry Potter at a friend’s house but that doesn’t count.)

List of snuggies I got!

• I may have covered this already.

List of nostalgic old tv show dvds that I gave to a sibling

• Sheep in the Big City!  A very ridiculous old show about a sheep named sheep. Sadly no real dvds exist so I had to buy a homemade Chinese dvd version. Is this illegal? If so, then it was 10 years ago that I bought it. Statute of Limitations! (That’s probably not how that works.) (Either way, whatever punishment I would receive for such a crime would be more than worth it for the laughter and tears I brought to a child’s face. [Actually he just chuckled and pointed out that they’re recorded really badly and inconveniently.])

List of Lego-themed video games I didn’t play

• Did I cover this?

List of Lego-themed video games (created by Traveler’s Tales) that exist

• Lego Harry Potter
• Lego Star Wars
• Lego Pirates of the Carribean
• Lego Indiana Jones
• Lego Batman

List of Lego-themed video games created that I wish existed

• Lego Lord of the Rings =(

Yay lists!

Wait, what’s this, you get one more surprise??? You get a bonus analogy-allegory! I’d call it an “analogegory,” but that sounds gross.

So we’re talking about the Nuremberg Trials in my philosophy class, and it looks like what was really going on in World War II was that America and Europe were trying to get their house under control. They had a new roof and had spent a long time trying to make it strong and stable. (At first the roof was really more of a thatch weave, but Germany kept climbing on top and mussing it up.) Then the roof was more tile-y or whatever roofs are.  So Europe and America thought the roof was fine, and they didn’t worry much either because Germany was in bed with a lot of broken bones and a really bad toothache and he had lost his wallet and his phone so he couldn’t call or get a ride to his friend Austria’s house. 

(Austria had helped mess up the thatch roof earlier but then England called his angry authoritarian Austrian mama and he had to go home.)

So England and France are out eating lemonade in their sunroom when they hear a noise above them. They look out the window and they see Germany running all over the roof! He’s cackling and hopping around and ripping up the tile-y roof pieces and throwing them off at people like Poland, but they don’t know how he got up there because his new room had been in the basement and they’d thought all his bones were broken anyway. Then they saw Italy and Japan climb up on the roof too. 

(They were mean neighborhood friends of Germany. Italy was at that weird age where he was cool when he hung out with England and France, but as soon as he was with Germany he was an awkward and anti-semitic hooligan.)

Germany was throwing tiles at all kinds of people and England and France didn’t know what to do. They waffled around for a while and eventually started throwing stuff at him from the window. Then Japan threw a rock at America who was just walking by, so America joined up with Europe and France and their group of friends who’d gathered to get Germany and *his* friends off the roof.  Well they went to all the windows and threw everything they could at Germany.  The roof was getting weaker and Germany was sore, so eventually he stopped throwing stuff, but he still refused to get off the roof.

They had no idea how to get him off, so America, England, France, and 21 other neutral or allied nations (including Belgium, The Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Czechoslovakia, Luxembourg, Poland, Greece, Yugoslavia, Ethiopia, Australia, Haiti, Honduras, Panama, New Zealand, Venezuela, and India) sat down to think and come up with a way to get Germany off the roof.

(At some point in the struggle Italy had fallen off the roof and Japan had exploded, so Germany was the only one left to deal with.)

After months of deliberation, America tentatively made a suggestion: “What if…” he began, “what if we went out on the roof too? Then we could take him back inside!”

A lot of other countries got pissed. What the crap was America talking about? If we went out on the roof then we’d be no better than Germany.

But America was all like “No way, we’re going on the roof for totally different reasons; the way we’re doing it, it’s not even really going on the roof.”

The other nations all said, “wat?”

“Yeah man,” America said, “Germany is already on the roof, so any going onto the roof we do to get them isn't actually going out onto the roof anymore, we’re just going out onto the roof to bring Germany back in.”

The other nations were still confused, but they went with it anyway. They went out onto the roof, grabbed Germany, pulled him back in, and then created a new roof. They called it the United Nations.