Verbal High Fives

It is less than 1 week until Christmas; that curious time of year in which most humans of the masculine gender have yet to dedicate much mental activity to the topic “Christmas shopping.” The alarming spike in women receiving shower caps, air fresheners, or car windscreen wiper blades for Christmas can be traced back to modern man's last-minute approach to Christmas shopping - when, at around 10.30pm on Christmas Eve, many men initiate their shopping experience by driving to the nearest chemist or petrol station to purchase items that they think qualify as Christmas gifts women actually want . Ladies across the globe are already working themselves up into an advanced state of ire over the situation as they feverishly wrap the 72.5 Christmas gifts they bought (way back in October) for family, friends, neighbours, work colleagues, the postman, the cat, the dog, and gifts from the cat and dog too.  Women don’t understand why so many men seem to be unable to commence their Christm...

New Year - the time of year when we, fuelled by expired Christmas leftovers, look within and make some substantial life-altering goals such as electing to submit our unsuspecting body to surprising bouts of unsolicited exercise and resolving to forgo delightfully staple food groups like carbohydrates, chocolates, and KFC in a quest to determine whether we truly can trim our waistline by consuming a mere lettuce leaf and 2 rice cakes daily without gnawing off our own arms out of sheer hunger.  We humans take this job of setting New Year’s Resolutions very, very seriously; after all we fully intend to stick to them for the rest of the calendar year (I am using the term “calendar year” here in the sense of “for at least the first 5 days of January”). Previously I made the rookie mistake of severely over-estimating my ability to rise to the challenge of a multi-pronged New Year’s Resolutions list, therefore this year I have made only one. In 201...

Last night I must have set a new land speed record for “The Swiftest Semi-Asleep Human Exiting a Bed at 2.49am.” I was fast asleep when a belligerent Christmas Beetle landed on my cheek with a resounding thump and proceeded to raucously lounge around on my face, buzzing loudly in such a manner as to convey the message “Wakey, wakey sleepy head!” This startling Christmas beetle encounter could only mean that right now ~ and just brace yourself for this acutely unsettling thought ~ somewhere in the world David Hasselhoff could be creating a Christmas cd. (Oh the unspeakable horror!!!!!!!!!!!) But let’s not dwell too long on the nightmarish implications of that, lest we all lose the will to live. Rather let’s focus on the task at hand which is festive procrastination; the annual job of ushering in the holidays by putting off doing our Christmas gift shopping until the very last minute. Q) Why do we do this to ourselves year after year? A) Because it is the only way to guarantee tha...