Wow, I got a lot of hits yes­ter­day. Maybe I should post links within notes on Face­book more often.

Any­way, here’s one of the “lost” sto­ries I was going to link to in my 25 Things post…

I’m gen­er­ally a hor­ri­ble liar. I tend to have a hard time con­trol my facial expres­sions (that research was the basis for a new show that’s pretty good), which always give me away.

How­ever, when I was on a home stay in Japan, my host’s class played a game where we were split into teams and a per­son from each team had to eat one of three iden­ti­cal look­ing pieces of sushi/​onigiri. The fill­ing of two of them would be nor­mal, but the fill­ing on the final one would be a big chunk of some­thing “spe­cial” like natto or wasabi. Turns out I was pretty good at that for some rea­son, and my team won the game.

Flash for­ward to the “Sum­mer of Toy.” It was sum­mer break after Toy class had crossed, and Joe M, Eddie C, and I were drink­ing every night. The game plan was basi­cally that we would alter­nate nights between Joe M’s place and ours, and call up every­one we could think of each night. Since we were drink­ing every night, we couldn’t afford new alco­hol every night, so every so often, we would have a “Scraps Night” where we just try­ing to fin­ish all the rem­nant han­dles we had lying around.

One Scraps Night, it was towards the end of the night, and we had killed every­thing we had left play­ing 7 – 11-​Double. (That game nights the alco­hol go fast!) We had absolutely noth­ing left except for Bac­ardi 151. No one, of course, wanted to do (poten­tially back-​to-​back on end) shots of 151, so we looked around for mix­ers. Unfor­tu­nately, we were basi­cally out of all non-​alcoholic drinks, too. Joe M sac­ri­ficed some of his work­out Gatorade for the cause.

I for­got who was rolling, but I got picked to drink the mix of 151 and orange Gatorade. It was, of course, not the great­est feel­ing in the world. Every­one in the room was watch­ing, and I would like to think that I kept a straight face. I want to think that I had every­one fooled. Until some­one asked how it tasted. I tried to say, “It’s great,” but my voice cracked.

… then every­one knew. Except maybe Clay­ton L. He wanted to go next.