Fa La Freakin' La

Well, it’s my final day at work before Christmas, though, for the first time ever, next week I’ll be working between Christmas and New Year’s. Unlike this week, which while shortened, has provided as much drama as “The O.C.” does before the credits. Translation: a LOT of drama. I need Dramamine, that’s how much drama. Get it? God, I kill me. Try the venison.

I think I’ve said I’m sick of my job once too often, cuz lo, my job has gone and made me sick. Nothing too terrible yet, but the old “don’t inhale too much or I’ll make you pay like my prison bitch” type of way. So slow, shallow breaths. It worked for me when I was buried alive on “Fear Factor”, so it can work for me now.

Here’s how you get Ryan sick, in case you were curious. You give him (and by proxy, his department) a small amount of work. You make him think he’s got a fairly easy ride into Christmas break, and even though only two of three people will be in, you think it’s manageable. Then you convince a client to call up three hours before that person and your boss leave for the holidays to say they suddenly need something to go to press on Monday, and they won’t give us the text until Friday am. By doing so, you cut down the normal process from 6 to 1.5 days. You then play a fun trick where, overnight, you double the length of the text promised.

Rinse, lather, repeat.

So, around 2 pm yesterday, I get that bad boy out the door. Nominally it had something to do with drug reimbursement, but for all I know I could have laid out a book of “Archie” comics. Quality controls? Surely ye jest! But don’t savor your miracle, in that you have two more books that need to go out by Tuesday at 5, and only 15% of the company is even work today.

Cough, sniffle, hack.

So here I is, a lonely cowboy, if by “cowboy” you mean “work peon”. In medieval times, I’d be a serf. In terms of corporate America, I’m as invisible as Clay Aiken. (That song, by the way, is creepy, but not in the cool creepy of the “Cry Me a River” video…more in terms of “keep your kids away from this man” scary. I mean, “If I was invisible/Then I could just watch you in your room…” Eeek! Didn’t Kevin Bacon make a movie about this? Didn’t turn out too well there, either.) But I’m also getting’ my blog on in the eye of the storm, which is the most defiant I’ve been since I kicked that Jehovah’s Witness in the teeth and told him to witness me pullin’ a can of whup ass on him.

OK, that didn’t happen. I only gently nudged him down the concrete steps leading up to my apartment. ‘Tis the season, and so forth.

One day to go, and then I travel to the ‘rents place for a few days of Christmas cheer. In case you’re wondering how the McGees celebrate Christmas, here’s the quick breakdown.

• You start by bringing home an amazing amount of undone laundry. You’ve spent the entire month carefully plotting out your wardrobe to make sure you time the last pair of underwear precisely with the day you go home. It’s an art form. If my brother and I put a tenth of the mental energy into our gifts as we did into this laundry business, Mom wouldn’t have gotten a bowling ball for Christmas.
• While you’re at it, bring home a bunch of unwrapped gifts. You at least bought some this year, which is a good thing, but you forgot to think ahead, and as such, you spend Christmas Eve using the gift wrap that your Mom remembered to buy because she’s Mom and has magical powers. (Casey only.)
• You complain loudly that Mom didn’t buy any good beer, even though your cheap ass self drove right by about six liquor stores on the way from Boston to Lowell. She’ll cry, you’ll be too drunk from the box of wine to apologize, and Dad once again wonders why he didn’t have the "operation" earlier.
• You hone your acting skills by pretending to have actually bought the gifts for extended relatives that your Mom bought for you, because again, she has magical powers. The most fun is when you have the combination of “not knowing what you bought the person” and “not knowing Mom even bought something for you in their name” and you pray it doesn’t suck, even though, once again, you’re an idiot and should be happy Mom saved your butt once again. “Oh, yea, Nana, when I saw that sweater, I totally thought of you!” Give me a break. Nana knows, you know, and you know that Nana knows. Merry Freakin’ Christmas.
• You make consistent references to “behind the bar” gifts. Back when we had money, along with the rest of America, and weren’t those awesome times, and I’m digressing, so I’ll continue…back in the day, we’d have the tree in the basement, which featured a built-in bar. (And you wonder why I’m drunk all the time.) Anyways, every year it would be the same. It’d be Christmas Eve, we’d be ready for bed, I’d tell my brother that Santa sometimes missed roofs and crashed into little kids’ bedrooms, and he’d cry, and Mom would scold me, and I’d play dumb, and then Casey would be a quivering mass of jelly in the corner, but eventually we’d get to sleep, and we’d wake up at like 3:30 am, and had to lie there still til 6 am, and then we’d get our poor, exhausted parents up, and run downstairs, and YEA SANTA CAME, and we’d open our gifts quickly, all because we wanted to get to what was BEHIND THE BAR. That’s where they stashed the final, too-large-to-be-seen-or-wrapped gift. One year it was a bike, another year one of those way-the-frig-too-impossible-to-assemble racing track kits where ostensibly you can remote control the cars on the tracks that go up walls, but c’mon, these worked about as well as a Yugo, another year it was a llama…big gifts. And now you make these references because we’re all too financially strapped to buy anything big enough to put behind the bar, and isn’t poverty freakin’ hysterical?

So yea, that’s a snapshot of Christmas with the McGee’s. Of course I’m leaving out the warm family fuzzies and the good times and the sense that, amid the chaos of life, some things never change…but none of those things are funny, so they get left on the editing room floor.

If I don’t get the chance later…Happy Holidays everyone.

Posted by Ryan McGee at December 23, 2003 09:19 AM