Vegetable Oil Wrestling and Life Lessons

One of my first experiences with Cody that has stuck with me for years dealt with vegetable oil wrestling. Now, I realize you are probably asking yourself..what do you mean by vegetable oil wrestling? Do you mean people would get really drunk in a small house with tarps over the nasty shag carpet and minimal clothing on and literally wrestle in vegetable oil? That's exactly what I mean.

I remember when we were freshmen Cody encouraged me to come to a party where there was going to be vegetable oil wrestling. I logically had never heard of, much less actually seen anyone vegetable oil wrestle (or maybe even just wrestle) but Cody was pumped about this. I remember attending the party with some of my friends. I found myself standing against the wall watching all sorts of people roll around in vegetable oil, nearly naked, groping one another, slamming each other against the wall, slipping and sliding..and having an all around great time it seemed. I remember declining Cody's incessant pleas to wrestle with him. I think I used volleyball as an excuse. I claimed I didn't want to get hurt, but I really just didn't want to step out of the box. I have never been a person to step out of the box without hesitation. I don't want to be embarrassed. I don't want to make a fool of myself. I don't want do anything that I didn't have previously scheduled. I'm a stick in the mud. I know this.

This experience early on in college was luckily the beginning of a bit of a revolution for me. The more I spent time with new people doing new things, the more I have learned to be a little more spontaneous. I would attribute a lot of this to Cody. The rest of it is probably just a little bit of growing up.

Now, how in the world does this story about vegetable oil wrestling deal with present day? Cody and I are going to go to Europe this summer. And this is a bit out of character for me. Not because I don't like to travel, but because it is going to require me to accept that some things cannot be controlled when I am in a foreign country for nearly two weeks. There will be stuff that happens that we don't plan. We will screw stuff up and not be able to figure out where to go or when to go there. Things will happen that I don't see coming. And I will be okay with those things. The older I get, the more I understand that sometimes the best memories are made when you don't mean to. It's the screw ups that are the most memorable and that's okay. Cody and I are going to hop on a plane and go somewhere new and live it up. While we're young enough to walk and without children. We are going to travel and have fun so that we don't have to refer to how we once thought about going to Europe. The way we still refer to when we (I) almost wrestled in vegetable oil.