You'd think there would only be so many places on a human body that can store varying amounts of sand for more than 14 hours. Well, thanks to the never-ending foresight of the Ball State University scheduling system - which sends students on Spring Break more than two weeks before spring has officially even started - I became intimately familiar with each and every one of these places on my body while enduring the G-force winter winds of Clearwater Beach, Fla., in early March.
The good news is that every time I blow my nose, it's like getting a tiny souvenir of Florida for free - which really comes in handy while trying to cheer up friends who had to stay home over break. The bad news is that I gave up Kleenex for Lent.
For those of you who don't know, Lent is a 40-day holiday during which Catholics abstain from one arbitrary vice for a month and a half before Easter. They do this, of course, to modestly observe the trials and tribulations of Jesus when he gave up cheesecake for six weeks in Jerusalem.
Actually, like most religious holidays, the origin and meaning of Lent has become so obscure, disputed and Americanized that there is little certainty as to how the tradition really began. I even consulted several religious databases - including an online Catholic Encyclopedia which, believe it or not, was even more boring than looking in a regular encyclopedia - to try to find out what my friend's temporary abstinence from bubble gum had to do with anything in the Bible.
Unfortunately, the most concrete representation of the holiday I could find came in the form of the movie "40 Days and 40 Nights" starring Josh Hartnett. And it's not that I don't find humor in the premise of a male not allowing himself to screw anything that moves for a month and a half - we all know that's just preposterous. But it seems to me that in abstaining from promiscuous sex, the main character is merely giving up a practice that, according his religion, he should have never even started.
Thus, I remain confused. I mean, it seems to me that if what you are giving up is truly a vice, then giving it up for forty days isn't really that great of an act.
"I love God. In fact, I love Him so much that every year I give up being a whore for almost six weeks."
Now that's sacrifice.
But on the flip side, it's the people who give up the arbitrary things that make practicing Lent seem even more pointless. These are the Catholics who give up chocolate and table salt and sleeping in for 13 hours a day - the same ones who 20 days into Lent will invariably find some sort of Lent loophole for themselves:
"Well I know I gave up Playstation 2 for Jesus, but that doesn't mean I can't shimmy on up to the attic and dust off the Super Nintendo. Star Fox will ride again!"
I guess my point is that - Catholic or not - if you can identify something as a vice in your life, is it really all that beneficial to only give it up temporarily? If you can give up chocolate completely for six weeks, why not just eat less chocolate for the rest of your life?
But that's just my opinion, and maybe I've got a stick in my ass when it comes to things like this.
Oh, wait. That's not a stick. It's more sand from Spring Break.
I better go take care of that.
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