My friend Melissa just made the gigantic mistake of alerting me to the existence of... Snark Handbooks. Oh. My. God. With titles including Snark! The Herald Angels Sing: Sarcasm, Bitterness, and the Holiday Season, I. must. own. all. these. books.
They're like... manuals on how to be me. And God knows, I need help with that.
Wonder if Kickstarter would let me have a fund set up to get the series? If I tell them that I really need a series of self-help books on how to be a bitchier bitch? That not having them is keeping me from reaching my full potential as the Impressaria of Innuendo, a Virtuoso of Verbal Attack? I have my doubts since they refused to help The Bloggess to get a taxidermied wolf pelt to wear to the première of Twilight: Breaking Dawn, Part One. I mean, she got Wolf Blitzer in the end, but not because Kickstarter wanted to help. Fools.
There's a lot going on over the next month... and I will no doubt find a lot about which to be snarky. Not in a totally Grinchy way, but in a way that reminds good Episcopalians everywhere of the Eleventh Commandment...
Thou shalt not be tacky.
Forget that rule at your peril, because if you do, you'll find your transgressions catalogued in a blog entry here. If you help me to be snarky by participating in an event that brings it on, or if your own snarky comment makes me snort, you'll find yourself here too. It's like separating the sheep and the goats. And We All Like Sheep. Baaa.
Okay, so... Wow. Where to begin? Let's start with the fact that my (awesome) family does a HUGE Thanksgiving every year, but I couldn't handle it this time around. My life is just too fucked up right now to be able to cope with all of the questions... especially the ones surrounding just what the hell happened with the man of my dreams nightmares, who turns out to be incapable of sustaining a relationship if there's any discord whatsoever. Especially discord that he created himself by being bug-fuck nuts suffering some kind of crisis that, for reasons that are beyond me and the rest of the universe, he can't / won't let me or his friends help him to get through. Whatever. Maybe I'll write more about that later, but for now... let's just say that it's his loss in a huge way because I can't imagine anyone else who would put up with his bullshit idiosyncrasies and be as (a-hem) "flexible" as I am (literally and figuratively).
So, since I couldn't cope with the huge gathering this year, I was thrilled to bits to have an invite to join a group of supremely snarky local friends who are serious foodies, absurdly intelligent, and a load of fun.
At some point, I think on Wednesday night, it came to our attention that Pat Robertson had put his foot in his mouth - again - to a degree that it's a wonder that bigoted jackass doesn't have athlete's tongue.
No idea what I'm talkin' bout, Willis? Well... he asked his co-host if mac & cheese is "a black thing."
So, how does my lily-White Anglo-Saxon Protestant ass respond? First, by railing about it with friends on Facebook in an epic session of comments... which of course, because my buddy Dan was involved in this, turned ultimately into a series of sexual innuendos focusing on breakfast pastries. Because that's how we roll. Much to the chagrin of some of our other friends and Dan's long-suffering wife Becky, who, I hasten to add, is ultimately responsible for the giant metal peacock that I still can't believe she didn't buy immediately, but instead alerted the rest of us to its existence and made us egg on Christine until she bought said giant metal peacock. Admittedly, it didn't take much to get her to buy it. Because we all agreed that Beyoncé needs a friend and partner-in-crime. Also, Ich bin ein berlinner. But I digress. And I'm probably not nearly as much of an ancestral WASP as my name suggests. But that's not the point.
Then... the light switch flipped, a choir of angels sang, and I remembered that Thanksgiving is really supposed to be about being grateful for all the blessings of our livesthe food.
Game on, foodies.
White People Eat Mac & Cheese Too, Asshat. Sorry. That's Reverend Asshat, I guess.
The only reason I didn't spell out "Fuck you, Pat Robertson" in cheese letters that would have browned nicely so that you could read the message (and we could have emailed a picture of it to him) is that I dropped the last few slices of cheese on the floor and the dog ate them. To be fair, I didn't have enough cheese for the whole message even before it landed on the floor and made its way into the dog, but "FU, PR" would have gotten the point across and been cryptic enough that children who could read wouldn't have been corrupted and taught to swear by a side dish. Also, by that time, I was eleven shots of espresso deep, I had to be ready to go in fifteen minutes, and I was covered in flour and had splattered whipped cream everywhere while making butter and buttermilk from whipping cream... because if you're going to make buttermilk biscuits from scratch, you'd damned sure better make the buttermilk yourself as well as the butter to slather onto the biscuits. Anyone care to open the betting on how many shots of espresso I've had today?
But seriously. Look at that food. Damned near all of it locally and sustainably produced. When my high school friend, Shannon, saw the pictures of our Thanksgiving spread, she commented, "Next year, I'm coming to your house." When she learned that there was tiramisu, homemade by my awesome new friend from Milano, she said...
Correction: Next year, I'm coming to Your house... and I'm wearing clown pants (because sweat pants would simply be unacceptable).
I'm holding you to that, Shannon. But if you're wearing the pants, you have to wear the shoes too. Because the shoes make the outfit. Or break it.
The next Village Foodies Event here in our little corner of Pittsburgh is going to involve a gaggle of astonishingly cool women... and the giant metal peacock, whom we've christened Jay-Z. We'll set a place for him and send pictures to The Bloggess. And post them here. Because we can. Stay tuned.
Not mine, necessarily. But for the next generation's, maybe.
Stolen from the facebook status of an old partner-in-crime's husband:
Teenager: I'm not a nerd. I'm an intellectual badass.
Maybe there is hope. Just maybe. I have hope because of kids like whoever said that, and my choir buddy who writes this blog and our exceptional organ scholar who said, in response to another (adult) singer's suggestion that we use the processional cross as a weapon, "the power of Christ compels you."
You know what? Maybe there's hope for me too. Maybe, just maybe, like my heroine (not heroin, because that's a downer, and it's clear that what I do not need is anything to squash my soul more since I've lately been the bug more often than the windshield), The Bloggess, I too can claw my way out of this crushing misery and get back to my intellectual badass, riotously funny self.
The self who said, while on choir tour, "I just bought a handle of gin, four bottles of wine, five cigars, and a lampshade. It's gonna be a good weekend."
