Children are source of laughter, snack

This is not an easy job. Can I just say that up front? I don’t know what you might have been thinking about the life of a humor columnist for a student newspaper, but I can assure you, this is not all popsicles and rainbows.
Funny-on-demand is a bit tricky, even for a guy like me. “But Aaron”, you might be saying to yourself and perhaps to some sort of hypothetical version of me, “you’re the funniest guy on campus! Surely writing a column of humorous ideas and stories in a timely fashion cannot be difficult for such a man as yourself!”
While, yes, I do appreciate and thank you for your confidence in me and in my writing abilities, I really must insist that this gets a smidge difficult at times. Do you know how hard it is to consistently entertain a group of primitive screw-heads (nice little Army of Darkness nod there, changed to knuckleheads) like you and not offend anybody? I don’t really enjoy staying up until 4:00 AM burning my eyes on the harsh biting glow of a computer monitor with a blank Microsoft Word file the only company I keep that prevents me from meeting my pillow in a sweet embrace of blissful slumber.
Thanks for letting me get that out. Now onto something that is hopefully funny.
I love kids. I especially love little kids. I especially love little kids with a bit of lemon and pepper.
I’m joking, I promise. Lemon makes the skin too tough.
But I really do love kids, which is why I am an Education major. I’m getting K-12 licensure, hoping to be a Kindergarten teacher when I graduate. After teaching Kindergarten for a while, I’d like to move on to middle school or high school history. I had, until my junior year of high school, planned on going into the field of medical research. Then I took Chemistry and Pre-Calculus in one semester and decided that was not exactly the path God had planned out for me.
As I’ve said, I love little kids, and little kids love me. From then 3-month old Addison Butler, who fell asleep in my arms on Baby Day in my Speech and Language Development class 2nd semester my freshman year, to 3 year old Cade Wilson, an incredibly sharp boy at my church (he’s a Batman fan), to all the kids I’ve ever had at church camp and all the kids in my Scout troop back home, I really am just a big fan of kids.
I think part of it, and I know this will really shock you, is that it’s a lot easier to make kids laugh. Kids make me laugh, too. And not in that Art Linkletter/Bill Cosby “Kids Say the Darnedest Things” kind of way, I mean kids make me laugh that deep, hearty, entire-body, gut laugh. Kids make me laugh the laugh that comes just from being happy and laughing not necessarily because something funny happened. And that’s a very good laugh.
Being a human jungle gym also lends me to a kinder disposition on kids. After months away from home, I walk into my home congregation and gain about 400 pounds. Immediately, 8 or so 50-pound balls of hair, kool-aid, and Spider-Man t-shirts bounce out of the pews and onto my arms, legs, back, chest, and somehow even my head.
Do you remember those toys, especially Transformers, that would all join together and make one really big Transformer that could just wipe the place clean in fifteen seconds? Yeah, that’s what I become. I step into a room with little kids and two things happen. First off, there’s a loud 80’s hair metal song playing with lyrics going “More than meets the eye!” Then, kids leap into the air, spin around, catch a ray of the sun off of their shoulder or something, and then latch on to me tighter than wet follows water.
So I walk around the church a few times, passing parents who pry their children off me with no great ease. Sometimes I have to leave before the kids are all clear, and let me tell you something from experience: getting a little kid with a mind dead set on hugging you off is harder than getting a bad waffle out of the waffle iron in the cafeteria. Normally, in both cases, a good fork goes a long way, and a little butter never hurt anybody.
Little kids never cease to amaze me in their constant wonder and awe in learning new things. Now, you may be thinking that kids don’t like learning, seeing how most kids hate school. Well, no, kids like learning, just so long as they’re learning something they find interesting. For instance, I can sit down with Andy and Matthew, a couple kids I met over the summer, and tell them everything I know about lightning, in the middle of a terrible thunderstorm no less, and they’re both sitting there in slack jawed amazement at everything going on around us. This is especially impressive since not fifteen minutes earlier little Andy was breaking out into tears when the wind picked up, that’s how scared of storms he is.
What I did next, I suppose, could be seen as a little mean, I guess… Since Andy wasn’t so much scared of the lightning anymore, I put the fear of electricity back in him a few weeks later by attaching a pair of live jumper cables to his earlobes. Last I heard, he was out of the hospital, and the speech therapy is supposed to be making a lot of progress. But man, you should have seen the sparkle in that kid’s eyes.

While at first I thought this article was completely unedited, it turned out I was wrong. The one edit was due to a lack of "professionalism". Honestly, people, if you give Aaron J. Rushton a column in a paper, you just kissed professionalism bye-bye.

The spice of life: An addiction gone too far?

capsaicin
Pronunciation: kap-'sA-&-s&n
: a colorless irritant phenolic amide C18H27NO3 that gives hot peppers their hotness
OK, now, I can’t even begin to tell you what a phenolic amide is. I did absolutely terribly in my Chemistry class in high school. The only time I had any clue at all what was going on was when we burned the chemicals to make all the different colors. OK, well, there was that, and then there was this one time on the final exam where the question had some mysterious chemical compound that was made of sodium, carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. I don’t remember any of the subscripts (those little numbers), but I do know that the chemical symbols all next to each other spelled out NaCHO. So of course, in the middle of the final exam, I shouted out “Hey! That spells nacho!”
I tell you that for no good reason, really. I just thought it was funny. But really, I don’t know what a phenolic amide is, but I do know what capsaicin is. Capsaicin is what makes hot peppers hot, and that’s good enough for me.
You see… I’ve got a problem. It’s an addiction, really, and possibly a downright dependence.
What a lot of people don’t know is that capsaicin really does produce pain in the nerves of the mouth, throat, and digestive system. This stuff really hurts. Now, since your body is in pain and is not actually receiving any physical harm, your body doesn’t know how else to react so it starts putting out endorphins. Endorphins are those amazing little happy hormones that keep us all whistling zip-a-dee-doo-dah and skipping along the cobblestones, feelin’ groovy.
Now, since the capsaicin produces pain, and the pain produces endorphins, and the endorphins produce a natural high, if you will.
Now, with all that in mind, I’m telling you what I’m about to tell you as evidence of my addiction. I assure you, none of the following is made up.
I was sitting at the house by myself over the summer, just goofing off at the computer. I live out in the middle of the country, and it was too late to go see a movie, too late to call anybody, too late to do too much of anything, but way too early to go to sleep. After all, when you wake up at 1:30 in the afternoon, how early can you really go to bed?
I was feeling a bit down in the dumps, so I tried to find something to do to cheer myself up. Well, none of my friends were online, so I couldn’t talk to them. I didn’t feel like watching a movie. Reading a comic book didn’t do anything for me. I realized then and there that something was seriously wrong, because if reading a comic book didn’t help, hoo boy was I in trouble.
After some careful consideration, I suddenly came to the conclusion that my capsaicin level was too low. After all, I’d not had hot sauce all day, and I’d been awake for nearly 9 hours. Trembling, I walked into the kitchen and stood at the pantry. I pulled down a box of crackers and a bottle of Garlic Tabasco sauce. I took out one cracker and applied hot sauce liberally. I ate the cracker.
I decided I didn’t need the crackers.
I popped the plastic mouth off of the top of the bottle, turned it up, and drained it dry in about 15 seconds. I then walked to the fridge and washed it all down with a jar of habanero salsa. By this time, my arms were shaking violently and my sight began to swirl and mesh into one big red blur. I leapt to the spice rack, pulled down the chili powder and the ground cayenne and snorted them both clean. I seem to remember at this point that there was a bag of fresh jalapenos lying off to the side of the counter. Well, there had been, at least.
I woke up 3 hours later, on the floor, covered in sweat, shirt torn, scratches all over the cold linoleum floor of the kitchen.
I can see where I’m headed. It’s not a happy place. A few years from now you’re going to see me sitting on the side of the road begging for change just so I can buy a fresh cayenne. I’ll be out behind bars and restaurants, just hoping for the throw away buffalo wing sauce. One day I’ll be walking out of a clinic with an IV drip plugged into my arm and a bottle of Texas Pete Hot Sauce flowing straight into my arteries.
There are witnesses to my addiction. I can go through a half-bottle or more of hot sauce at one meal in the cafeteria. I began eating fresh jalapenos at approximately 18 months. FRESH jalapenos, mind you. Pickled jalapenos, the ones in the jar, yes, they can be hot, but fresh jalapenos have been known to burn the skin. I carried a bottle of Louisiana ‘One Drop Does It’ Hot Sauce to church camp for an entire summer. I had a holster attached to the side of my pants that I carried my hot sauce in. One drop really doesn’t do it, for me.
Am I living a lie? Is all the joy I derive from my life a mere sham? Does existence hold no meaning for me other than my next capsaicin fix? Of all the problems I have with the cafeteria, this one holds out into the forefront: NOT ENOUGH HOT SAUCE! I can’t make it through three meals without running out.
I sit at my table in the cafeteria, fork in one hand, hot sauce bottle in the other, and without fail some guy comes up asking for the hot sauce. I watch him shake his few meager drops onto his chicken sandwich, or maybe throw a little in with his ketchup. Ha. HA, I say! The only reason I ever get French fries is to have something to put hot sauce on. I’d drink it straight from the bottle, but then people would look at me funnier than they already do.
I use crushed red peppers as potpourri. I eat bushels upon bushels of pepperoncini, jalapeno, chipotle, hot wax, cayenne, Mombassa, chiltecpin, Jamaican hot, and habanero, and I am not satisfied. I crave more. I want to feel the burn.
I need help.
But first I need some hot sauce.

If I were to stick with the italic edit thing, this whole article would be in italics. It never saw the Bison.

What you are about to read is true. These are actual letters from an unnamed source between a former student and his parents. The names have been changed to protect the innocent. If there are small children present, or if you have a heart condition, please, do not read this article. If you have any information regarding the whereabouts of any of the victims in this story, please, do not hesitate to contact the authorities. You just might save the life of someone you love.

8/27/02
Dear Mom and Dad,
Well, it looks like you don’t have to worry anymore, I got a job! I found a job on the phone here in town. Yeah, I know, go ahead and laugh, I’m a telemarketer. But I’m planning on really just keeping this until I find a better job. It pays pretty good, so it’s worth it. Some people can be a bit rude at times, but I can understand, I’m interrupting their dinner to ask if they want to change their long distance provider. Oh well. Love you both!
Your Loving Son,
Aaron

9/5/02
Dear Mom and Dad,
Hey. New job hunt has come to a screeching halt, nobody else is hiring. I almost think listing a telemarketing company as a reference is bad luck! Ha ha… Oh, well, a job is a job, and I’m managing to pay for most of my necessities myself, so that’s good, right?
Your Son,
Aaron

9/26/02
Mom and Dad,
I think some of the supervisors and managers here don’t really like me all too much. One of them made the throat-slicing movement when I asked if I could go to the restroom. I’m terribly frightened.
Aaron

10/6/02
Mom and Dad,
There’s a new dress code at work now. I don’t really understand why we have a dress code when we’re on the phone with people, but anyway, we all have to wear these white shirts with big red concentric circles on the front and back. For some reason, they make me uncomfortable. I feel like I’m being constantly watched.
Aaron

10/28/02
Mom and Dad,
My friend Billy said something about trying to find another job. I guess they heard him. We didn’t see Billy at work for about three weeks, and then he came back with patches of hair missing, drool running down his cheek, and a lack of ability to form coherent sentences apart from the telemarketing script.
Aaron

11/7/02
Mom and Dad,
I just realized where I recognized my boss from. I think I saw him on an episode of COPS one time.
Aaron

12/5/02
Mom and Dad,
I’m sorry I didn’t call on grandma’s birthday. I think they’ve bugged my room. I heard two of the managers talking and they quoted me word for word from the last phone call I had with Duane. Keep the doors at home locked and don’t let the dog outside at night.
Aaron

12/19/02
Mom and Dad,
Sorry I couldn’t come home for Christmas, but somebody cut the brake lines on my car and left a telephone sitting next to the tires with a note saying that if I called the police, they’d know about it. I can’t go back in the dorm. It’s cold. So very cold.
Aaron

4/6/03
I quit the job 3 months ago, and they’ve been after me ever since. Can’t use names, can’t leave anything they can trace. You have no son. Burn this.