I’m a big believer in decadence. So after spending an entire day largely either naked or in my PJ’s watching my West WIng dvd set, I decided to fix a double cup of hot chocolate while watching Celebrity Poker while my oven self-cleans.

We’ll divert here for a moment because I think it’s a great thing that my oven self cleans. I have no ability to self-censor, and barely the ability to shower, so this is an impressive feature of my oven to say the least. I press a button, the door locks and three hours later, the chocolate chip cookie that has melded itself into the bottom of the teflon coating is miraculously gone…while I’m watching Mekhi Phifer kick some fat guy’s ass in Celebrity Poker Showdown.

In the middle of it all, a commercial comes on. Perhaps you’ve seen this commercial. A little boy is standing there with his painfully obviously single mother, trying to learn football. He’s inept at football. “Maybe baseball is your game,” she offers. Next we see the poor little boy, who looks like the lost love child of Mattie Stepanik and Jonathan Lipnicki, throw a baseball. He misses his mother but manages to nail a milk bottle almost thirty feet behind her. The poor misguided mother, who fails to recognize the boy’s inate talent for Olympic Shot Putting, suggests that Golf might be his game. Alas, no, as he succeeds only in digging a hole in the fairway at a course that makes Pebble Beach look like your local Muny course. Finally, we get resolve when the sadistic, sexist bitch of an overbearing mother is seated in an auditorium where little Mattie Lipnicki has joined the glee club. (Elementary schools have glee clubs, now, didn’t you get the memo? Me neither.) Yay! We can finally find a place where he can succeed and belong! No wait! It’s better than that. He’s a *soloist*! And there, in the crowd, as he sings to his mommy an ode to single parenthood, sits the mother, crying like one of those evil women from Star Kid. And at the end of it, “Parenthood…yada yada…brought to you by the Foundation for a Better Life.”

Yeah. That’s what I need. Right in the middle of my lament about lacking Irish Whiskey to go into the hot chocoloate, interrupting my concentration during Celebrity Poker, they put this commercial. Hey! You want me to have a better life? Then let me watch Mekhi kick the fat guy’s ass and bring me a bottle of Jameson to spike my cocoa. Or better yet, develop a button that I can press outside my front door where, when I leave, I press it and my house cleans itself. Yeah. A self cleaning house! *That’s* what I call a foundation for a better life.

I have a friend that, in the past month, has made my week twice–simply by sharing with me a bit of humor she found in the oddest places. I’m not talking about irony. I refer instead to genuine humor. Things people created to be funny that are actually, surprisingly, funny.

The first came two days before Christmas. I was sharing with her the horrors of family Christmas and she said, “Well, then, you probably need to see this card.” Out she brings a nice, fun card with Santa Clause on the front. “You’d better not pout, you’d better not cry. You’d better watch out, I’m telling you why,” Santa says on the cover in a chipper, smiling manner. You open the card to find him screaming “Because Santa doesn’t want to fucking hear about it, okay?!”

I cannot overstate how much joy I got from reading that card. In 23 words, forever engraved into my memory, a card-writer captured my sentiments of the holiday season. (Thank the lord it’s gone.)

So tonight, I’m over at her house, helping her rescue her emails from her old computer and import them onto the new computer, a task that MicroLimp has done very little to make easy. We’re talking and she starts laughing. Says to me “you’ve got to see this. I gave it as a gift at a ladies party for Christmas.” She produces a plastic reindeer. Complete with a movable tail, antlers. I’m like, “okay?” Then she presses it down.

The tail raises up and out of its ass falls a rootbeer jelly bean. Pressing it again, the reindeer produces a cola flavored been. Both are a particular shade of brown that was slightly disturbing.

Lucky for me, she had an extra. I’m going to keep it on my desk in my study at home for those special moments when life gets me down. I’ll reach up, press him down, and out will pop a poop-colored jelly bean, the prefect reminder that shit comes from the most unlikely of places and isn’t always shit.