So by "lifestyle" they mean "good lord in heaven, man, have a muffin already".

Randy's been steadfastly on the Atkins diet for something like forty pounds, so tonight at 9:25 when we finally decided it was time for dinner and he looked at me and asked if we had any microwave popcorn, I was understandably surprised. I have to admit, though-- after a year and a half of bunless burgers and Macadamia nut lunches, I was privately a little bit giddy at this break in protein protocol.

And I understood the little saucer of butter, right, but it seemed odd when he furtively shoved an entire loaf of white bread into the microwave next to the popcorn bag. I mean, that didn't seem normal, not really. And then when he tried to mash a raw potato on the counter as a topping... I, I don't know. And then croutons? On popcorn? With apple slices? And oatmeal?

Hey, and aren't there a lot of carbs in raw pasta? Because he's on his second box of dry Creamette angel hair right now and stop me if I'm wrong but I'm pretty sure that's an Atkins no-no. I'm not going to say anything to him, though; I've got him yoked out in the middle of the yard on a tether strap right now and he finally seems to be slowing down. I think I'll wait to drop any major dietary bombshells until I'm positive he's reacting to external stimuli. 
¶ posted by Erin on Sunday, October 29, 2006

  *** See?

I got my graded midterm back in tax class this morning. My plan was to scan the red-streaked pages and then post them here, but the instructor actually wouldn't let me leave the room with my test. I suppose that's so I can't sneak it to someone in another class as a cruel joke. Taking into account that my primary objective was to be the first one done with the exam (and I totally was, score) I did pretty well. I was saddened to learn that there were no bonus points offered to the student who asked, "Yeah, but I mean, how is the IRS going to know?" the most times in class. Because I had that wrapped up.

On that note, you'll be thrilled to hear that I'm now more than happy to take care of all your tax preparation needs and I only charge seven dollars. Or eleven hundred dollars. Or six totally random numbers. Apparently it's all the same to me.

Oh, and you can't itemize.

Or have any kind of income.

And it would actually be helpful if you were technically deceased sometime in 32, I mean 45109, I mean .02337. I mean last year.*** 
¶ posted by Erin on Wednesday, October 25, 2006

  Apparently the Belly Chain is Never Okay.

When I was a freshman in high school I wasn't allowed to wear smoky blue eyeshadow because my mom said it made me look too old. (In hindsight, the primary problem with the eyeshadow may have in fact been with my application which, if memory serves, involved a slightly damp Q-tip and a bricklayer's trowel.)

And after a morning spent at the Nordstrom makeup counters I've come to the realization that I can't wear smoky blue eyeshadow at thirty-one, either, because it makes me look too old. Like seventy-three. (Application techniques notwithstanding, because I think MAC actually sells a trowel now, and it looks like Chanel's gearing up to market a caulking gun for spring.)

You know what would have been great? If the Age Appropriate Trend Fairy had woken me up early on the ONE day of my life that I would have looked kickass wearing a ton of smoky blue eyeshadow. Like, "Hurry! Today's the day! Oooh, and lucky you! I just checked my Age Appropriate Trend Calendar and until three o'clock you get to wear glitter in your hair, too! Let's GET A MOVE ON."

And then I'd get all excited and jump out of bed and ask if maybe today was also the day I finally got to wear a belly chain, and then the Age Appropriate Trend Fairy would throw her clipboard down and yell that if ONE MORE PERSON asked about that goddamned belly chain she was seriously going to ask for a transfer into Baby Teeth or Wish-On-An-Eyelash or something. I mean, come on. 
¶ posted by Erin on Sunday, October 22, 2006

  You know, the ones where I run the water for a few minutes while reading US Magazine with the door locked.

If I see Randy slicing a piece of bread on the cutting board, I immediately grab said board, brush the crumbs off, and throw it in the dishwasher where the threatening crust flakes will be scalded and soap-poisoned and the board rendered once again harmless to the family. But when I pull a knife out of the wooden block to cut a lime, stir a cocktail, and scrape something mysterious and orange off the counter, all I have to do is wipe the blade on my jeans and then throw it back in the block. Good as new.

Call me a hypocrite if you want, but I cite the miraculous cleansing power of denim. See? There's a reason why I a) wear jeans every day, b) hardly ever shower, and c) never really wash the jeans, either. If I could bring myself to wear a Levi's jean jacket every day I could elimiate all of those time-consuming upper-body sponge baths. 
¶ posted by Erin on Thursday, October 19, 2006

  Sort-Of Warm: It's The New Safe Temperature For Meats!

My mother is a phenomenal cook. Growing up we always had these beautiful, delicious meals with tender meats and vegetables so fresh they squeaked. Our salads always had mandarin oranges in them. We ate all-beef bologna. You're with me.

In recent years my mother and father have adopted gourmet cooking as a fairly serious hobby, and now on holidays all I have to do is show up and watch them gleefully prance around shucking oysters and crisping bacon for Oysters Rockafeller, or torching the tiny little tops of individual Chambord crème brûlées. Sometimes I assist by pouring the whole pitcher of Bloody Marys down my throat and zoning out to Krull on TBS with my brother, and sometimes I assist by offering to genuinely assist but then falling asleep with tomato mouth and an empty pitcher in my lap instead. I feel slightly more guilty about this when the holiday in question is, say, Mother's Day, but my keen sense of priorities and my sharp focus on maximizing my parents' joy allows me to shake off any fabricated guilt and find that other bottle of Mr. and Mrs. T's mixer in the pantry.

My mom wasn't born knowing how to cook, however, but you probably already know that because at last count my dad has told thirty-four million people the story about my newlywed mother crying because she thought boiling water was burning. There's actually a newsletter: it's called "I'm Not Kidding-- 'Seriously, The Water's Smoking!' She Cried". In the winter my grandmother used to make a huge pot of vegetable stew and then she'd just set the kettle out on their frosty Georgia porch instead of in the refrigerator. Years later my mom, painstakingly perfecting her mother's recipe and perhaps struck with a sweet nostalgia, tried that same trick at our house. In Pensacola. We left town for a July Fourth vacation only to come home to a Hazmat team and a robot probe trying to figure out what the fuck was in the slow-bubbling Satan's snackpack sitting on our porch. And also if we had maybe buried a sweaty family in our backyard just underneath the topsoil and then ladled the bodies with beef broth.

I am by no means a gourmet cook, but I do seem to have acquired my mother's hardwon talent as well as her sense of pride in a sophisiticated, well-presented meal. I genuinely enjoy cooking and I do it often. Tonight, for example, we're enjoying a delicious slow-roasted pork tenderloin and blue cheese mashed potatoes. I actually started the roast yesterday but it took longer to cook than I anticipated, and when it was finally done the pan was way too hot to put in the fridge so I just left the whole thing on the counter. At room temperature. All night. And then, inexplicably, all day today. But if I've learned anything from my wonderful mother-- her good-natured naïvté, her boundless ability to laugh at a silly mistake and to learn from it-- it's that unless someone winds up in the hospital with a tube up their nose, you keep your MOUTH SHUT, Chef. 
¶ posted by Erin on Tuesday, October 17, 2006

  I'm so happy I'm not the jealous type. Now duck, or I might inadvertently laugh on you and set you on fire.

Randy and I were just watching some show where the woman goes off to dance with some random dude leaving her... nonrandom dude fuming.

"Would that make you mad?" I asked Randy, flipping through US Magazine. "If I went off to dance with some guy at an event or something?" A totally hypothetical question seeing as how the last time I 'danced' with anyone I had to be force-fed vodka for an hour and a half while the rest of the party was surreptitiously blindfolded and then asked to sign confidentiality wavers. In Braille.

"I don't know," he said, turning down the TV. "It might be weird."

"'Weird' because it would be weird to be party to some strange man's apparent suicide? Or 'weird' because of the other man part?"

"No man would try to kill himself by dancing with you," he clarified. "Not when he could just disembowel himself." True. Why suffer needlessly? "The second 'weird'."

"That's so funny," I laughed. And then did a little airy scoff-laugh thing that was supposed to exemplify my breezy, unconcerned nature but really just made me sort of choke. "If the situation was reversed I honestly don't think I would care." Silly men with their silly, jealous caveman proclivities. I scoff-laughed again just to punctuate my thought, and then I got up to get some water. Scoff-laughs kind of burn.

Randy muted the TV and turned to see me in the kitchen. "So when we were at that wedding a few months ago? And that one woman was talking to me? The wife of a client? Remember that?"

Hmmm. "No."

"Really?" Randy asked. "Because you stood up from the table and left your dinner to come and stand between the two of us. With your fork," he added.

"Oh!" Anytime I leave free food unattended it rings a bell. "You must mean the drunk whore who had you pressed up against the goddamned wall for an hour."

"It was like ten minutes. And now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure you had two forks."

"Uh, it was FORTY-FIVE minutes." Give or take. Anytime anyone else around me leaves free food unattended it rings a bell until I eat it.

"She was telling me about her daughter's wedding! And that they're thinking about buying a house!"

"Just because you're a realtor doesn't mean you have to cozy up to wasted sluts all night to make a buck, Slick."

"Her husband was ten feet away! Holding a grandchild!"

"Whatever. She was totally out of line. I heard she was giving handjobs to the wait staff in the courtyard."

"You did not hear that. God, she has like six kids, Erin." Randy turned the volume back up.

"You're just lucky I got there before she had your belt off. If I ever see that bitch again it's ON." I tried to scoff-laugh but it came out all crusty and on fire. "What's her name again, anyway? I mean, besides 'Drunk Whore'? Isn't she married to a judge or something?"

"I don't know," Randy said, turning the volume up to like eleven hundred million. "I don't actually think she has a name."

Yeah, you better hope she doesn't have a name. Whore. 
¶ posted by Erin on Sunday, October 15, 2006

 

We went to Cold Stone Creamery tonight, and not only would the little ice cream masher people not mush a whole chocolate sheet cake into my chocolate-dipped cone, but they also refused to mush my Wendy's double-stack cheeseburger in there.

Apparently there isn't a song about how menstruation trumps RULES. 
¶ posted by Erin on Wednesday, October 11, 2006

  What I Lack in Segue Ability I Make Up for in Dogs that Smell Gross.

For the past week I've had this adorable puppy at my house while her owners are out of town. She's tiny, she's fuzzy, she's probably valued at roughly thirty-seven thousand million dollars. Canadian dollars. She pricey.

My yard has no fence... a handy twist when you're responsible for a thirty-seven gajillion dollar unpredictable liability with a brain the size of an olive and forty legs. And as an added bonus, Puppy on Loan is obsessed with taking "wow, smells like crap" to the next level. You wouldn't know it to look at her-- she looks like a teddy bear that swallowed a tiny deer which, hi, cute, teddy bears should seriously get on the ball and start devouring more wildlife-- but she smells like a cat shit sandwich. Every time The Jake wanders outside to pee on something? PoL darts directly underneath him. Urine in the face. Nice. Oh, and she's a "recycler". Meaning that everything that comes out of her body? GOES RIGHT BACK IN. And then out. AND THEN BACK IN. And then out. AND GUESS WHAT. YES. GOOD GUESS. EXACTLY.



On a totally seperate tack, I spent the entire day yesterday at Matt and Melati's phenomenally kickass Tequila Stakes Croquet Tournament. And I watch Nightline, right, so I happen to know that there are people out there who go on MySpace and make internet friends who they end up maybe tentatively meeting for coffee... and then if coffee goes well maybe they agree to go to dinner... and then if dinner goes okay, well, then one person shows up for a surprise midnight date a few nights later with a knife and a pretty serious misunderstanding. Me, on the other hand, I can't even begin to imagine how my luck is so amazing that I continue to meet the most phenomenally genuine, hilarious, gracious people on the internet. After the tournament victors had been crowned and the requisite tequila shots had been... shotten, we were sitting on the patio-- I had switched to beer to sober up-- and we realized that it was like 2:15 in the morning.

"Is Randy going to be pissed?" Gorgeous Melati asked.

I'm sure I made some drunken dismissive gesture and then spilled something. I'm really good at that. "What? Randy? Please. I'm calling the fuckin' shots at MY house, thanks. Uh, but I will need one of you guys to aim a Listerene firehose directly into the back of my throat later, though. A Super Soaker would be perfect if you've got one. I may have mine in my trunk, I'll have to check ."

"I've got a brand new toothbrush and a bottle of mouthwash with your name on it," offered Melati. Again with the awe$ome. Girl is unstoppable.

"Oh, God, that'd be great. I mean, not right this second," I clarified. "Randy and I have a trust-trust relationship. I'll go home when I'm goddamned good and ready to go home, and he's totally down with that. But right before I leave? Whenever that happens to be? Someone's gonna have to 'accidentally' push me in the pool. And then probably burn all my hair off. I don't know, we'll play it by ear."

Oh, and then I remembered that I had PoL at home, and that she'd now been left on her stinky, stinky own with Randy for close to fourteen hours and it was entirely possible that Randy had forgotten that we were even watching a dog. Also possible that he'd unintentionally eaten her. So I ruined a perfectly good toothbrush, mainlined a pint of Scope, and called it a day and a half.

You're really not supposed to just drink mouthwash. Or aged tequila. Or both at the same time, mixed. Seriously. Bad plan. 
¶ posted by Erin on Sunday, October 08, 2006

  Don't quote me, but I'm pretty sure eternal agony is a deduction this year.

If it's true that nothing's certain but death and taxes, it's mainly because they're MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVE.

Matt sent me this after I detailed my tax preparation class. He compared that post to "the 77th hour of a mescaline trip. Like when the bats come out of the glove box."


Matt is obviously a man who has attempted to itemize a part-year return... FOR SATAN. Words fail to describe the majesty here. I recommend you click on the picture to go to flickr and view it in the original size. If you throw up it only means you're human.

A couple of conversations I had with my instructor last week during which I didn't cry except for a little:

ME: "Wow, I think I really messed that problem up."
INSTRUCTOR: "No, you got it right: '7293.60' is the right answer."
ME: "How can that possibly be the answer? '7293.60'? That's not even a WORD!"


ME: "Wow, I think I really messed that problem up."
INSTRUCTOR: "No, you got it right: '7293.60' is the right answer."
ME: "How can you see what answer I got when your eyes have been scalded out of their sockets by the white-hot acid fumes of the devil?"
INSTRUCTOR: "Okay then, you got it wrong. Whatever." 
¶ posted by Erin on Thursday, October 05, 2006

  Confidential to My Parents:

Hey! Good morning! Yeah, so I woke up this morning and I was all, "WOW! This is an AWESOME day!" I don't even know why, it just seemed... special for some reason. Like maybe something really memorable happened on this day a while back that I don't remember, but that YOU might remember in excrutiating detail. Just a hunch, I don't know.

So anyway. I guess... maybe I'll talk to you later? I've got tax class this morning but I'll be around most of the afternoon. And I'll have my cell with me. You know. Just... I don't know, in case.

P.S. Your Outlook does have a Calendar application, right? Yeah, no... no reason.

Hey! Thanks! 
¶ posted by Erin on Wednesday, October 04, 2006