5. Become a Cat Burglar
You know how hotels have those personal little room safes in the closet to lock up your valuables, presumably because the hotel knows all those people roaming the halls with carts steal stuff? I mean that certainly explains why their carts are filled with hotel supplies anyway. If you don't believe me, just try and leave twenty bucks on your night stand before leaving for the day; I guarantee it will be gone when you get back. I'm just glad the rooms are restocked and cleaned using magic, otherwise there wouldn't be anything left for the guests to use after they stole everything.
It's safe to say I'm cracked!Anyway, nothing makes me want to perfect my cat burglar skills more than having access to a random safe for long periods of time. Every time I stay in a hotel with a room safe my first thought is, "I bet I could crack that shit!" I'm ashamed to admit that I've spent more time than any normal person would in my hotel room trying to break into that safe without using the given combination. I figure if I could add "safe cracking" to my skill sets, coupled with my already inhuman ability to scale buildings (buildering…it's an urban climbing thing), then I would make one badass cat burglar, or better yet a superhero.*
*Are people with exceptional skills, but no super powers whatsoever, still considered superheroes, like Batman, etc? Inquiring minds want to know… and by inquiring minds I mean probably just me.
4. Go Night Swimming
How do you know if you have sexually aroused a mermaid?I am a fish when it comes to water. When I go to the ocean, I swim straight away from the shore and don't turn back until I can't see the shore anymore. Seriously, one day you will read about me either getting lost at sea, eaten by a shark, or struck and killed by one of those giant cargo ships. The last time I was in the ocean and swam back to shore, some guy actually asked me, "Where the hell did you go?! England?! JESUS dude, we were all watching to see if you would actually make it back!" I don't know what it is, but something about me and water just works. Admittedly, this is the one reason I could see belonging to a gym, but the local community swimming pool is still way cheaper for lap swimming.
My favorite time to swim though is just after midnight or just before bed. Gyms and community pools are rarely open all night, but hotel pools usually are. So when I stay at a hotel, I live my dream of going for a swim every night, just before bed. One day I will perfect my dream and have a pool in my backyard, so I can swim naked under the stars. Oh yeah, sometimes in the ocean I get naked, because who the hell is going to know when you're several miles out to sea? Oh…um…I guess everyone now….nevermind.
3. Iron
The trick is to press your grilled cheese, not iron it.Being a straight man, I don't iron a damn thing. Frankly, I don't give a crap if what I'm wearing has a few wrinkles in it, despite my OCD tendencies for neatness. In addition, I have found that most wrinkled items of clothing become unwrinkled after you wear them for five minutes, so I really don't see the point of this exercise anyway. If I buy something that seems to remain infinitely wrinkled, even after folding it or wearing it, then I simply decide that it is a broken piece of clothing. The broken piece of wrinkled clothing should then either ideally be returned to the store for a full refund due to a defect, or donated to someone who sleeps in their own urine, feces, and vomit, so no one will notice if they're a little wrinkled. Honestly, when was the last time you got close enough to a bum to see if their shirt was wrinkled or not?
When I buy a suit, I always buy it from a place that has free suit pressing and on-site tailoring anyway "coughMensWarehousecough," so I never have to worry about pressing it before leaving on a trip. If I'm really honest, I would admit that before typing that last sentence I had to look up ironing and pressing to see what the hell the difference actually was. Regardless, whenever I'm in a hotel room, there is always this iron and ironing board taunting me in the closet. There is a small part of me that thinks, "I'm paying for that so I should use it." Needless to say, I eat a lot of grilled cheese when staying in hotels.*
*Culinary tip: Pressing is what you do to grilled cheese, ironing is what you do if you want cheese all over the hotel ironing board. As it turns out, apparently I still don't iron in hotels and yet I find that little irony simply delicious.
2. Become a Metrosexual
Use it or lose it.Hotels have this uncanny way of making me feel like everyone else is using way more crap than I am. So because it's free, and by free I mean it's already included in the price of the room, I try and use as much of that free stuff as I can. I become the full-on metrosexual for the duration of my stay, especially since the house elves seem to replace it all anyway, no matter how little of it I use (and I simply hate to be wasteful). Listen up house elves! At home I use a bar of soap for more than one shower! Yeah, that's right, I actually save the same bar of soap from shower to shower until it's gone! Shocking, I know! So please, for the love of god, don't throw out the soap just because it's opened! Frankly, I curse your very existence every time I have to get out of the shower, already wet, to find and unwrap a new one from the counter, because you took the "used" one away while I was gone!
Honestly, all that stuff is just begging to be used. I mean they provide you with an armada of useless stuff that you never use at home and then post a sign in your room that almost dares you to come up with something you forgot, which they haven't already provided for you. Incidentally, it's great fun calling the front desk and telling them you forgot your flugelbinders at home and was wondering if they had any down there. When they say no, just seem puzzled and say, "Really? Huh. Every other hotel already has them stocked in the room." It's also fun asking them if they have a "portable" hair dryer, because you actually like to stand in front of the mirror, while blow drying your hair, instead of dry humping the bathroom door jam due to the three inch cord they put on that thing.* Seriously, what the hell is that about?! The coffee maker isn't anchored down! The Grilled Cheese Presser isn't anchored down! The flatscreen TV isn't anchored down! The goddamn personal safe isn't even anchored down! But the hair drier, oh the hair drier, now THAT is some valuable shit right there! Let's bolt this thing to the wall, give it a holster to live in and put a three inch cord on it, rendering it completely useless unless you face fuck the wall when drying your hair!
But I digress…. Having that array of products laid out for me, suggesting that everyone who's anyone uses all this crap, just makes me want to use it all for the hell of it. I don't use body wash, lotion, shoe polish, or half the other stuff they provide for me, but again, I figured I paid for it so I might as well. The only times this gets dicey is when someone says to me, "Oh, you smell great! What are you wearing?" To which I simply reply, "It's called Holiday Inn. Do you really like it, because I know where I can get a whole cart full of it." The other time is when someone happens to notices how oddly shiny my sandals are.
*Technically this isn't dry humping since you're all wet while doing it, but since you are "drying" your hair, I felt it qualified for some reason.
1. Have Sex
Hotel sex is always the best amenity, BYOCH!Are any of you surprised to see this as number one on my list? If you are then you probably haven't been paying attention to this column. Just being in a hotel makes me want to have sex. (Okay who am I kidding, having sex is usually the thing I want to do most anywhere, but work with me here.)
Now, having sex in a hotel may seem seedy and dirty to you, but I think you're overlooking the major advantages that make it totally worth it. First and foremost there is no mess to clean up afterward, thanks to those diligent little house elves that change the sheets for you each and every night. What?! Don't look at me like that, if you think sex isn't messy then you are most certainly doing it wrong. Do you have any idea how exhausting it is to change sheets on a king size bed?! I do, and if you have sex with any kind of regularity then this can get really tiring, really fast. But at a hotel you don't have to worry about that at all, and NOT having to change the sheets on a giant bed just makes me want to have sex in it that much more.
Second, in a hotel room the headboard is usually nailed to the wall, so you can be as loud and wild as you want in the sack. Also, you likely won't hear from the people next door anyway, because they'll just call the front desk to complain and not come knocking on your door themselves to tell you to be quiet. Do you have any idea how embarrassing it is when you're home and your neighbor comes banging on your door, because you're being too loud during sex? I do, and having to look them in the eye each and every day you go off to class/work from that day forward is mortifying, even if you weren't the one yelling and screaming in ecstasy like a banshee.
Third, when staying in a hotel, you're usually in an exotic place on vacation, and what better way to make it even more memorable than to have sex there. Everyone likes to keep a mental list of all the places, away from home, that they've had sex, and having sex in a hotel still counts in my book. So what better way to make that list more robust than adding all the hotel sex you've had.
Finally, room service is only a few button presses away, and you can usually get just about any post-coital food you want delivered to you, fast. Personally, after sex, I usually have an urge to kill a water buffalo with my bare hands and devour the entire thing raw, so having several hours of loud, wild sex and then ordering a rare steak immediately afterwards is about as close to total satisfaction as I could ever imagine.