If there's one thing I've learned during my vacation this week, it's that math can be really important. Especially when it means the difference between four beers and eight beers.
I'm spending my entire vacation attending Minnesota Twins baseball games. I'll go to six before the week is over. Every night I drink overpriced beer and stuff myself with hot dogs while shouting harsh and profane "your wife" comments at overpaid athletes. This might not sound very exciting to some people, but if there is such a thing as heaven, I'd like to think this is what its daily activities schedule is like. Well, this with 18-year-old pastors' daughters performing gymnastics routines on my lap.
At the first game Tuesday night, I sauntered up to the food counter in my classic style and ordered two beers, shelling out a cool $12. I assumed these tap beers were 16 ounces, just like the bottled beer they sell at the game. As it turns out, the unmarked cups were actually 22 ounces. I wish I had noticed that before I drank four of them.
After chucking my last empty beer cup at a group of schoolchildren a few rows below mine, I assumed I had drank roughly five beers. Oops. As it turns out, I had drank closer to eight. Nothing gets you going quite like 88 ounces of Summit Pale Ale in less than two hours. For the entire car ride home, my friend Adam had to deal with me bouncing all over the inside of his car like a four-year-old. I think he purposely turned on the air conditioning so I couldn't scream obscenities out the window.
Bastard.
Strangely enough, I didn't do anything embarrassing at the game. I didn't punch anyone, give a senior citizen the finger, or steal anyone's malt cup. Usually, I'll do all three of those things at a regular bar, sometimes traveling miles away on foot just to find elderly people eating malt cups.
The inner part of my being that controls embarrassing acts must have been backed up, because I did a number of stupid things before I even started drinking at Wednesday night's game. In the first five minutes inside the stadium, I sneered at a child, accidentally walked into the clearly-marked women's bathroom, and shouted, "YEAH? WELL LET ME TELL YOU SOMETHING ABOUT OSTEOPOROSIS!" at my friend while walking in a large crowd.
I'm not sure if people turned their heads because I was shouting, or because they were interested in hearing "something about osteoporosis". Hopefully it was because of the shouting, because I don't know much about osteoporosis. I don't want people coming up to me in the next few days, badgering me about bone diseases and curvy spines.
My vacation week is only part-way through, but if I had to list a favorite lesson learned, besides knowing your cup size before you drink (take that as you will, perverts), I'd say the true lesson is that people at sporting events will take any amount of crap drunkards give them, whether it's calling Oakland Athletics third baseman Eric Chavez a "lousy, dick sucking stooge" in front of an entire group of impressionable YMCA campers, or telling a guy trying to start the wave to "fuck off".
In light of what I've learned, I might even take steps to ensure that Monday's column discusses how I drank 110 ounces of Summit at Friday night's game on purpose. Such research is a difficult job, but someone has to do it. I work during my vacations so everyone else doesn't have to.
