My Neighbour Errol- Gifts
When you get to be close friends with someone, you can’t help but want to give some token of your affection for them, to show them how much they mean to you. Friendships are still relationships, after all. It makes sense.
Some friends buy each other gifts. Some write quirky songs. Some make crafts.
My friend Mai Sheri made me a PoTaDos one year! Amazing!
Errol…has different ways of showing affection…
One day we were hanging out like we normally do and he said, quite earnestly and with no scarcasm, “I should give you my nose hairs. I’d like you to have them.”
…
No, I am quite serious.
…
No, really.
Why does he want to? I don’t know, it’s Errol.
Exhibit A.
It’s like a cat that’s leaving a dead mouse for you on your porch. Only one of us thinks it’s a gift.
Guess what’s inside?…Go on, GUESS!
Is it a man thing? Are men just naturally obsessed with their nose hairs? Is he crazy? (yes) Or just messing with me? (very yes). I don’t understand why he has to keep talking about them.
I will talk about Hugh Jackman though.
And why are they a gift? Do they have special powers? Is there some sort of value to them? What makes them so special?
I do not like talking about nose hairs. I do not even like typing the word. I do not want them. I, in a rare instance of drawing boundaries, have told him as much.
But he persists. He tells me he wants to encase them in amber so I might have a piece of him for all time. I tell him that is the creepiest thing I have ever heard.
Look, they’re even grosser MAGNIFIED!
I would think it was a joke, I really would. Except the other week when I visited, his daughter gleefully giggled “Are we going to give Manpans her GIFT?!”
I thought to myself “What gift?”. Errol quieted his daughter and said “After dinner.” I wondered what it could be. His daughter seemed impossibly excited about this.
Like, Pinkie Pie excited
Then I realized. And Errol confirmed. Nose hairs. He had actually saved them. I narrowly avoided the grossness. His daughter was very disappointed.
I am quite paranoid now. That at any moment a tupperware container full of black and white nose hairs (white cause…he’s old) will be left in my apartment.
EW EW EWWWWWW
I try to tell him that he is disgusting, that I want nothing to do with anything to do with any part of the innards of his nose.
But then he gets this sad look and says “But I’d save them especially for you…you know, I don’t offer anyone else my nose hairs. You’re the only one.”
…And then I feel guilty.
Oh, don’t look at me like that…
Yes, I feel guilty, actually guilty for refusing a 42 year old man’s nose hairs. And the thought “You’ve hurt his feelings” ACTUALLY crosses my brain.
Why? What is wrong with me?! I know I’m in the right here! I know that it’s okay to say “No, I do not want your nosehairs, please provide wings instead”.
I hope I get these tonight actually…
I know that he is completely and entirely doing this because he knows it grosses me out! And yet STILL, something twinges inside me and I can’t help but feel like a bad friend.
Either something is very wrong with me or he is an evil manipulative genius…I’m going to go with the latter.
At least he doesn’t know I feel guilty…oh wait…now he does…
Posted on June 27, 2013, in My Neighbour Errol and tagged ERROL, gifts, nose hairs. Bookmark the permalink. 8 Comments.
Thoughts from the Test Chamber 
There were a couple of seriously disgusting pictures in that post. Seriously.
You know, I always think that if I were in your place, I would draw more boundaries. But just now I realized that I probably wouldn’t. I don’t have a friend like Errol (I mean seriously, who does?), really nothing that even comes close. My friends have boundaries of their own. And now I do think that if I had a friend with none…I might feel guilty for trying to create them myself.
But since that doesn’t happen to me, I can continue to look at you like you’re crazy for letting him get away with things.
Hahahaha, that’s a good point. And yeah, I think a very morbid part of me wonders how far he will go. So it’s just as much as my fault :D.
Googling “nose hair” is a terrifying thing to do. There were grosser pictures, trust me 😀
Hey, I didn’t choose those disgusting pics! ^_^
I think Manpans should do a onewoman show called My Neighbour Errol. I think it’d be hilarious, even if at my expense. 😀
You know, I’d start setting conditions on this to limit the biohazard potential here (after all, the purpose of nose hairs is to trap microbes and remove them from your respiratory system) so at the very least you should insist on two weeks of irradiation to kill anything that might still possibly be alive.
Also, I very much doubt Errol has any means of access to a radioactive source of the right sort of half-life to do this (ie. it needs to be a pretty short half life so that it decays really quite fast and doesn’t leave any significant background radiation).
Anything less than that and you can consider it an act of biological warfare.
Hmmm, you bring up a terrifying but accurate point. I take this to mean I should just wear a biohazard suit when Errol is around.
That’d be cool!
Or you could just put him in the biohazard suit and seal it up- same end effect without you going through the same degree of ongoing discomfort…
He’s an evil manipulative genius. I barely know him and I know this. Stay strong, Manda!