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Holiday Activity

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It was Christmas vacation, and I had the plan of doing absolutely nothing. I enthusiastically sat on my ass for the better part of two days, hardly doing enough walking to get to the bathroom and back. Better yet, it being the holidays meant that my brother was doing the exact same thing. And the two of us enjoyed all the Nintendo games and movie watching our hearts could possibly desire.

For the first day, the Day of Nothing was blissful. Bags of potato chips littered the floor my parents' living room where we sat playing Mario Kart and Tetris and other beautiful classics. The movie Alladin was just as funny as we had remembered as children, and the games of Mah Jong were delightfully uneventful, just as we had intended our vacation to be. Slowly, the couch cushions molded to our exact buttock curves. It was the perfect day of laziness.

But only for one day.
By the end of day two, my chips were stale, and my pajamas were getting stinky with BO.

"Cliff," I said, "we need to get out of the house. This is disgusting."

We pondered different things we could do outside. Go for a hike? No that's too much effort. Play some soccer? Nah, the park is too far away. We weren't ambitious in our outdoor mission, just sick of lazing around. After much deliberation, my brotherand I had agreed that we would go out for a jog. We're not much of a jogging duo, so we agreed on a moderate length of path: around the block.

In our ambitious moment of going outdoors, even my father became motivated and decided to run around the block too. For the next three minutes, my brother, father and I experienced the great outdoors. When we finished, my father went back inside, but I hesitated.

"Cliff," I said again, "we need to do a little more than this."

"Like what?" He pondered. "We could do yardwork," he suggested.

I thought about it. "Mom and Dad have a gardener already."

"So what?"

We wandered into the garage, and grabbed a pair of incredibly old, rusty rakes. They weren't much for raking, but we didn't really need to rake anything, we just needed to move around. So we brought our rakes into the back yard, and used them to get twelve or so leaves into a pile (if you could call it that.) When we were done, we considered moving the leaves into the compost bin, but decided that the compost was kind of far away from the leaf pile, and that moving the leaves wouldn't be worth the effort. Again, we weren't the most ambitious vacationers.

And that was the end of that.

Having run out of "active" activities to partake in, my brother and I fell victim to inertia. Cliff and I sat down back down on the couch and started to play Tetris on our Nintendo DS's once again. I wanted to protest, but the Nintendo was alluring. I gave in. My brother won the first game, and I had to beat him. We played for a good half-hour or so, when out of the blue, my brother had this incredibly brilliant, sudden stroke of genius.

Without a word (and without taking his eyes off his Nintendo DS) he stood up and walked over towards the stair well. He walked up to the second floor as if to enter a different room, but then he stopped. Instead of walking further, my brother turned around at the top of the stairs, and began to walk back down. It was brilliant! Walking while playing Tetris!

For the next half hour, with our eyes glued to our Nintendos, my brother and I walked up and down the stairs, back and forth, me on the left, him on the right, me going up, him going down. A beautiful marriage of brain-dead Nintendo and real, bonefide exercise has finally been found.  ¶ 11:53 PM