Sure, it is easy to laugh at a man who has a life-sized replica of a train in his basement because he has “always wanted to have a train in the basement.” We’ll roll our eyes and say, “Okay, train guy. I’m sure it’s very important that you got the real VIA garbage can from the broken-down VIA train that you and your friends found for sale, and I’m sure you never use the sound system you installed in the train because you’d rather just listen to the train noises. That sounds exactly like you, and it sounds great.” Or we’ll do a blog post about him and say something like, “That’s Your Boyfriend: Train Guy,” and paint him to be someone who you’d never want to date because of his odd obsession with not only trains but the idea of having his own non-functioning train that he can look at and sit in and use his imagination with, or whatever. But that is because we are all miserable!!! And will probably never know the joy of building for ourselves the one crazy possession that we’ve always wanted. (Closet from Clueless, in my case.) Something we can come home from the job we presumably have and look at and remember that there is something enjoyable in this world for us after all. There is a reason for all of it, for all of our hard work and all of the pain that life can sometimes bring. And the reason is, in this particular case, a big train in the basement.

Good job! I hope you get everything you want out of this video you made about your train, and I hope that you, unlike one math teacher I had in college, retain your somewhat pejorative, self-given nickname. (The math teacher I had in college asked us to call him “old dude.”) (No one ever did.) (Via TheDailyWhat.)