welcher.
Time to sell out another one of my friends in one of these posts.
Well, not really. But John, this is about you.
Pretty much everyone knows that we are hetero life partners or BFFs or whatever you want to call it, so I’m not too worried when writing this. But John, there were quite a few agreements that you welched on throughout our college career, and I wanted to make a post for the ages to document a few of your outstanding agreements.
What brought this to mind were the recent final episodes of Season 18 of The Amazing Race—oddly enough, a show we used to watch together all the time. I won’t spoil anything for anyone who hasn’t seen it, but needless to say one of the tasks towards the end of the show involved both team members needing to endure fifteen minutes of a wax while in Brazil.
Many may know that I am quite a hairy individual. So hairy, in fact, that last weekend, while I was dining at a restaurant, a young kid walking by just quite openly exclaimed, in Chinese, “Wow! So hairy!” or something to that effect.
I don’t know how it came up, but at some point during university we were talking about me getting a wax. I think it was me comparing my chest hair to those of the eponymous main character of The 40-Year Old Virgin. I said I’d like to have my hairy chest rectified in the same way, even if it meant a very painful wax. But I would never have gone out of my way to spend my own money for something very superficial.
Well, you agreed to pay for the waxing if you could just witness the hilarity and document it in some form so that more people could enjoy me crying in pain as a billion hairs were ripped from my flesh. I was done, yet the money never materialized, man. What happened? As far as I’m concerned, my end of the offer is still in good standing. Let’s make it happen.
Another instance I remember was in the Fall of 2007, the beginning of our senior year. I had come back from Japan that summer and spent a little over three weeks on Kauai before moving back to campus. During that time, I decided not to shave my facial hair until the first day of the semester.
So when we all showed up at our apartment, I believe it was the first time you saw it. For some reason, you thought it was really cool. You made an outrageous claim, “That’s it! I’m not going to shave for the entire semester! This is going to be awesome!” No one believed you, but you swore you were going to stick to it.
I told you what kind of itchy hell I was in after just a few weeks, but you were adamant.
Well, when the first Monday rolled around, you better believe I enjoyed shaving that disgusting thing off. But you had a bit of stubble going. For a second, I might have believed that you were really going to pull it off.
Maybe about a week went by, but honestly I don’t even think it was that much. It was probably like Friday that week, I was talking to you in the apartment and I suddenly realized, “Dude, you shaved!”
I almost thought perhaps you had made a mistake, like you had forgotten that you had made this vow to not shave, and just accidentally did it out of routine or something. But you just shook your head.
“Yeah, I know. Man, it was getting really uncomfortable.”
And that was it. Like that made it understandable! Rightly so, I gave you shit about how you had gone back against these grandiose claims you had just made a few days ago. ”Come on man, you couldn’t go through with it like we all said, what am I getting out of this deal?!”
Truth be told, I remember you “paid” my share of the U-HAUL truck that we used to get our stuff out of storage. I say “paid” because actually you had already paid for it and I guess it was more like you were just forgetting my debt, which was pretty cool because I think it was like thirty bucks or something.
So I guess I got something from you reneging on that agreement, but still, it would have been cool to see you going through with a few month’s worth of facial hair.
The third and final instance of you welching that I shall write about tonight is perhaps the biggest one, in my eyes. The year was 2007. I had gotten all of us—well, you and Andy—into Formula One the season before, and for one reason or another, you had taken an affinity towards Kimi Raikkonen.
Well, in 2007, Kimi moved to Ferrari, and given that I am a lifelong Ferrari fan, it put us pretty much on the same side when it came to rooting for our favorites. But the year hadn’t looked the best for Raikkonen or Ferrari. It really looked like it was McLaren’s year, but Kimi had enough success throughout the season that he had an outside chance at the championship.
Still, it was just that, a very very outside chance. It was one of those things that was a mathematical possibility but would require some very unlikely events to occur. Well, a few races from the finish, you happily declared, “If Kimi Raikkonen wins the WDC, I’m going to get a huge tattoo of his face on my chest.” You were serious, it wasn’t a wager made in jest.
As the season ticked on, it didn’t necessarily look like it was all that probable that you’d end up under the needle, even at the final race of the season in Brazil. It would have required Kimi to win and his main rival, Hamilton, to end up pretty far back in the pack. Kimi only qualified P3, Hamilton was P2, it just wasn’t going to happen.
But, to make a long story short, it did. Barely, but it happened. We were so stoked. I remember being in disbelief that Ferrari won in a year that looked so likely to go to McLaren. We were up early and I was so amped I remember we went out to get some celebratory breakfast. We tried to go to the Original House of Pancakes (Dutch Baby, mm-mm) but it was too busy, so we ended up at Big City Diner at Ward.
I was in a state of euphoria and disbelief for some time, that I think it took me a while to remember that you had made your promise about what you would do if Kimi had won. But eventually, it came up. ”I’m going to do it,” you still said, pretty elated about Kimi’s win yourself.
This October will mark the fourth anniversary of Kimi’s win at Interlagos, yet, as far as I know, you are still without a Kimi Raikkonen tattoo on your chest. For some time, you held fast to the fact that you were going to get it done, but as time wore on, you seemed less sure. A month or two later, either Andy or I gave you some shit about it.
“I looked in to it, but do you know how fucking expensive a tattoo is? Just to get like a couple of square inches done will cost me hundreds of dollars. I don’t have that kind of money to blow.”
Come on. Okay, no, I didn’t know that, and no one would expect you to drop $400 or $500 on a dumb tattoo like that. But really, that wasn’t the thing holding you back, was it?
It was the fact that you didn’t want a huge tattoo of some dude’s face on your chest for the rest of your life.
Not that I blame you, I don’t think anyone really believed that you were actually going to do it, since something like that is crazy, and it’s the special kind of crazy that lives with you for the rest of your life.
It was just the fact that you were so adamant that you were actually going to do it. Maybe that’s what we can take from this. It’s not a big deal that you didn’t get a dumb as hell tattoo, or didn’t grow your beard for three months, or didn’t pay for me to get my chest waxed. It’s just that you’re too quick to make an often-crazy promise and then stick to your guns when someone doubts you.
I just realized that two out of these three involve body hair. Man, that’s weird.
