I am very tired of people wishing me “Happy New Year.” I find it to be completely insensitive, and highly indicative of the kind of ethnocentrism that runs rampant in American society. My cultural background does not lead me to acknowledge the typical calendar year, because my family bloodline can be traced back to ancient Sumeria, and also the Phoencian civilization, and also the Ixil tribe in Guatemala. Therefore, my family celebrates our new year not by watching Dick Clarke or wearing ridiculous and humiliating hats, but by paying honor to the ritual sacrifice of virgins as a way of giving thanks to our Gods.
We have updated that ritual for modern times, of course; instead of sacrificing the virgins, we simply find a virgin and send her text messages reading “r u 4 REALZ?” We also hack into her MySpace account and redo the layouts, and also stand outside her front porch and hurl pieces of bologna at the front door.
But again, our year is different from a typical calendar year; we actually perform this ceremony once every seven of your days. It begins on the day that the Judeo-Christian calendar often refers to as “hump day.” I am usually forced to spend a lot of my non-work hours buying bologna and researching virgin residences since our “New Years” happens much more frequently than our heathen counterparts. It has also forced me to ask my company’s I.T. department to remove the MySpace block from my work computer, although purely for religious reasons.
So the next time you wish “Happy New Year” to someone, please stop and ask yourself: are you imposing your cultural values on others? And if so, what’s up with that?
Happy New Year!
enjoy the irony
What if your cultural values consist solely of booze? What then?
Happy Hump Day.
This is what’s wrong with America today. Ben Franklin cage-fought Karl Marx to the death in Grenada just to protect your obligation to observe the holy period from the birth of our savior to the appearance of that little dude in the ‘08 diaper, by engaging in iced jagger shots, nog orgies, and sled rides in the shave-head portion of norelco razors. And this is the thanks he gets. All I can say is, when they replace “new year’s eve” with “Betty Freidan Day,” and her picture shows up everywhere instead of Dick Clark’s, don’t come whining to me. Or if you do, bring something to drink.
So that’s why I wake up on Thursday mornings with bologna litter all over my front porch…
Your ritual requires finding 52 virgins per calendar year. Everything about your post is totally credible except for this one point.
P.S. Unless you’re including male virgins, which as a non-sexist person, you should. That would be easy to accomplish at most engineering schools.
And I’m curious about the bologna hurling. Does that aspect of the ritual date back to the ancient Sumerian origins? If so, bologna has been around for much longer than I’d previously thought!
Courtesy of: http://ask.yahoo.com/20030707.html
A History of Bologna
American bologna sandwich meat got its name from the northern Italian town of Bologna. But this favorite of kid’s lunches is not the same as the distinctively spiced Italian original, called mortadella or mortadella bologna and made in the villages around Bologna, a major trading spot. Traders may have picked up the sausage in Bologna, and the town became identified with the sausage. By the late 19th century in England and America, “bologna” had become the generic name for any type of pork sausage from the Italian town.