Manly Men Only - a tribute to Presidents' Day

I like holidays. With the exception of Valentine's Day, I think any holiday is a good holiday --- especially one that gets me out of work. With that in mind, it's easy to see why I would love Presidents' Day. And I loved this last Presidents' Day. I got a Monday, easily the worst work day of the week, off with pay, and I was free to have fun with friends.

Back in September, a group of us decided to do something extra awesome for Labor Day. We ended up seeing who could buy the best outfit for $10 at Savers (a thrift store that happened to be having a 1/2 off sale that day). Later we all dressed up in our awesome clothes and decided to throw a Labor Day parade. Suffice it to say that it was supremely awesome and will long be remembered. I'll blog about it sometime soon, I promise. A sort of retroactive look at some of my favorite moments in 2008.

Anyway, Savers was having a similar 1/2 off sale on Presidents' Day. I ended up going shopping with my boys Jared and Joel. Jared and I were hoping to find awesome briefcases (just because), but he found the only one. I took care of my predicament by finding an awesome brown faux alligator skin briefcase on Ebay --- it's sweet. Anyway, we bought a bunch of stuff: some awesome clothes, pictures to decorate our apartments, and other miscellaneous stuff like a lunch pail. We stopped at a 7-11 to get slurpees because it just felt like the right thing to do to celebrate the beautiful weather we were enjoying.

As we were driving back to Sparks, I blurted out, "I want to make a movie." That was that. We got back to our apartments, put on some sweet threads, and got to work making a movie. We started with a very, very loose plot based around Jared's briefcase. With that seed of an idea planted in our brains, we started filming with my digital camera, the only camera we could find spontaneously. The quality isn't great, and it's pretty obvious that we were winging it, but after a week's worth of editing, I managed to put together a decent little film.

We premiered it just over a week ago to a group of friends and associates from around the way, and the film was successful. People laughed quite a bit, and that was enough for me. We didn't make any high art. It's pretty basic stuff, but what else would one expect from a spontaneous gesture on Presidents' Day?

I've since uploaded the video to Youtube, but I haven't done anything with it yet. I decided tonight to make it available to my faithful blog readers before I whore it out on Facebook. I hope you enjoy it, and if you really enjoy it enough to post a comment full of praise, feel free to do so. I suppose you could comment and tell me how stupid it is, but I've probably already thought whatever negative criticism you might bring up. So unless you've got something really original, you should probably just keep it to yourself. Anyway, enjoy. Here it is: