Concerning 102

Did you hear? I hit 100 Followers last week! Oh, right, I dedicated two posts to it. I guess you have heard.

Anyway, I acknowledged number 101, which was Jeney, last week. However, I've kind of neglected number 102. Well, I mean, aside from making fun of him some. See, I can do that. I know him.

Number 102 is my cousin, Napoleon. We first met Napoleon back when I told you about my made up girlfriend, Sarah Klein. He's the one who told my mom that my made-up girlfriend and I were going to be having the sex, and I got in trouble for it. He certainly made my childhood interesting.

So, a couple of weeks ago, Napoleon sent me an email detailing about how he was preparing for a tour of duty in Iraq. He's part of the Indiana National Guard, and he's already spent a year in Afghanistan. In the email, he added a link to his blog where he was detailing his latest adventures in the Middle East. However, the link in the email was broken.

Feeling like a dutiful person, I reported back to him that it was broken. He said he'd look into it, and then I told him that he might want to use Blogspot or Wordpress (I think he was using blog.com or something). I was pretty happy to see that he was writing a blog because that would keep me in touch with him, plus, since he's dyslexic, I thought that writing could only be a good thing for him.

A couple of days later, I got an email from him saying he now used Blogspot. A couple of days after that, and I picked up my 102nd follower.

Now, you know I can't leave the story off there, right?

One fine summer day, while we were at The Lake, my cousin Napoleon and I were hanging out on our shaded lot along with our friend Tammy. We were probably around twelve or so at the time. Napoleon had gotten himself a big bag of M&Ms from somewhere, and since he has a heart of gold, he was sharing his M&Ms with us. Tammy and I, however, kind of decided to play a bit of a prank on Napoleon.

You know how, when you're about that age, you titter and tee-hee about how eating green M&Ms will make you horny? Well, we shared this information with Napoleon, and just sort of rolled his eyes. That's when we decided to append the different colors of M&Ms to different afflictions. We told him the red ones would make him mad, and that the orange ones would make him shy and cause him to blush. We then told him that the yellow ones would make him pee a lot, and that the brown ones would give him terrible diarrhea. He scoffed at our childish attempts at humor, took his M&Ms, and went home.

Fast forward by one day, and my father is walking by the bathroom window down at the other cottage. We didn't have air conditioning at our lake cottages, and so the windows had to be open all the time. My father hears Napoleon in the bathroom, moaning in pain.

"Napoleon!" my father calls through the window, "What's wrong?"

"I've got diarrhea," he moaned. "Badly."

"You okay?" my father asks.

"Yeah," Napoleon yelled back, "I just need to stop eating the brown M&Ms!"

"Eating the brown M&Ms? Where the hell did you get a silly notion like that?"

"Matt and Tammy told me yesterday when I was eating all my M&Ms. And today I have diarrhea."

Behold, the power of suggestion.