Seven Days Later

Weekly. Yup. Let's see here. My niece just graduated from highschool. My niece. You know, the one that was born when I was 21 years old. That's just crazy. I wasn't there, but apparently her graduation was interrupted by an African American gentleman who stood up and started rambling about something to the effect that although the school is sited in the middle of a black neighborhood, everyone in the room was white. It's a private Quaker school, where my sister teaches. Commencement starts with Meeting for Worship, where anyone can pretty much say anything. Turns out the same guy had done the exact same thing at another graduation the day before. My mom initiated a loud chorus of fake coughing to send the "Shut the fuck up, asshole" message in the most Quakerly and loving way possible. Go, Mom. I think the perpetrator is lucky it was a Quaker school...I'm guessing there are some faiths, not counting themselves among the "peace churches," where he might have found himself stomped. You've gotta wonder what goes through people's minds. I mean, sure, there's a point there, sorta, but it seems like a fairly asinine time to make it. Ironically, the senior class's chosen commencement speaker was an African American student who extemporaneously responded a bit to the African American gentleman's comments. Something along the lines of "that's the most uncomfortable I've ever been in Meeting for Worship." Gotta hope the party pooper now feels like the four inch tall inconsiderate dickweed he is.

Season Two of my little game show is over. I'm taking a much needed break from it for the summer. I'm hoping that this may free up some neurons to post more entertainingly (and frequently) over here. I'm considering other formats for when we reconvene the game in September...maybe having tribes for a while, immunity, playing myself, who knows what else. If you want to play or have any brilliant ideas for making the game more fun, drop me an email.

Once again

President Bush and his supporters on the religious right have looked at their calendars and remembered that it's very important to start every election season with a hearty vote of support for strings-free gay sex with multiple partners. "Nothing unifies the Republican base like writing into the Constitution a guarantee that all gay sex will occur outside of wedlock," said the President. "As James Dobson and Pat Robertson keep reminding us, multiple hunky friends with benefits are just what the Founding Fathers had in mind when they came up with the crazy idea of a "Constitution" in the first place. Jefferson alone had eight or ten FWBs, not counting slaves. This is just the natural extension of their historical freakiness."

"Only by insuring that men can have sex with as many other men as possible with absolutely no expectation of commitment can the blessed God-given sanctity of marriage between a man and a woman be preserved," said an administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity. (Dick Cheney.) "Same sex philandering must not be curtailed. It's critical to man-woman monogamous relations. We also believe that so-called same-sex 'marriage' will have some negative impact on the availability of lipstick lesbians for hot girl-girl porn action. This cannot be left up to the states. Gays everywhere must be free of commitment and long-term relationships."

One dapper Massachusetts man-about-town echoed the Republicans' concerns about the threat of stable chaturbate relationships. "Boston used to be a fabulous town for cruising, but now every bodybuilding stud I meet wants to buy a house in the 'burbs and adopt a foreign kid. Where are the anonymous one night stands? I'd rather die than drive a minivan. This marriage thing has put a definite cramp in my style, I'll tell you. It looks like I'm going to have to move to Texas if I want a different cub in my den every night. Where do I send money to make sure this gay marriage thing is nipped in the bud? Damn those activist judges. Damn them to Hell!"

Swinging straight men have noticed the special treatment their gay counterparts are receiving from Bush and the GOP. "Why should THEY get federal protection from marriage when I can't?" lamented one heavily-cologned, bling-sporting Casanova. "It would be so sweet if every time some chick starts blubbering about having a family I could just say, 'Sorry, honey. It's illegal. Maybe I'll call you.' Isn't America about equality for everyone? Why do we always have to cater to the special interest groups? What's so special about gays?"

Although unlikely to win enough Congressional support to change the Constitution, Bush sees an amendment freeing same-sex couples from marriage as key to unifying his base of Christian fundamentalists and sexually prolific, commitment-averse gays. Asked about whether it was fair to free only gays from the threat of marriage, the President replied that human rights advance slowly and the straight guys will just have to wait their turn.

Breakfast Bar

Found this in our shower's soap dish yesterday:

I'll admit it. I screamed like a little girl. A giant fur-covered little girl with a receding hairline, but still. My first thought was that something had made its way up through the sewer. After I cleaned up all the water I'd dripped all over the place as I ran, butt nekkid, to the opposite end of the Epicenter, I did a little recon and determined that no, this was not a ooze monster come to slither up my nose and turn me into a breakdancing zombie, it was in fact just a snot colored brick of soap with oatmeal bits inside.ew Why put oatmeal in soap? My armpits do not need a healthy breakfast. I understand that there might be some therapeutic benefit to one's skin associated with slathering oatmeal all over it, but does it need to be in soap? Couldn't we be a little more modular here, letting the cleaning supply do the cleaning and the breakfast cereal do the enyoungening or whatever on its own time? Do we really want soap that sheds little bits of organic material as it dissolves? Do we? I do not think we do. And what's so hygienic about oatmeal? It's allegedly made of oats, which grew out in some field somewhere with flocks of crows crapping on it periodically. And why oatmeal? That had to be a completely random discovery. It reminds me of that Reese's commercial, except at the home of some hippie soapmaker. You got your breakfast in my soap cauldron! You got your soap on my breakfast! Why not parsley? Why not bacon bits? Or a cheeseburger? And who even cares about food selection? What could be nastier than having a little chunk of food left in one of your nooks or crannies after a shower? That's fricking gross, that is. I'm all for rinseing thoroughly, but if I have to use that thing, I'm gonna need a hose.

Later, Jennifer comes home and tries to create a diversion by saying "Hi honey" or some other innocent type of thing, and I confront her with the breakfast soap. I don't even manage real words...I just hold it (at arms length in a ziploc baggie) and sputter "Wuh? Wuh? Wuh!!!!???"

"It was free," she said.

Cheeseburgers

Me: What did you think of D'Angelo's cheeseburgers?

Soph: It stunk. It tasted like kangaroo meat.

Me: Was there anything else wrong with it?

Soph: It was made of, like, bread.

Me: Bread?

Soph: It wasn't the right shape. It was made of like, bread.

Me: Yes. We've established that. So, what's wrong with kangaroo meat?

Soph: It doesn't taste good.

Me: If you had it to do over again, what would you order from D'Angelo's?

Soph: Not a cheeseburger.

Me: Hello, Schuyler. What is the nastiest thing you've eaten recently?

Sky: Cheeseburgers. At Friendly's.

Soph: [gasp!]

Sky: And pickles.

Soph: I like Friendly's cheeseburgers. I'm always craving one, like right now.

Me: You have a session practice on Jasminlive.mobi in a little while.

Soph: I do? In this weather? I still have it? Are you serious, Daddy? No, really. Are you?

Me: Yes.

Sky: Can't Sophie miss soccer practice? Please?

Me: Why?

Soph: I don't think we should have it in this weather. But I never said I wanted to miss it.

Sky: Bad person.

From the Archive

I'm going to try to avoid going a month without posting, so I'm expanding my repertoire to include things in addition to glistening ingots of original prose entertainment. I've been going through old photographs my mom had. I've found some great stuff.

Here are my folks, Bev and Dick, ready to head out on their honeymoon in 1950.

bev and dick honeymoon departure

Here's my mom's dad, having just gotten their car ready. He's thinking, "You made me wear a monkey suit, so I fucked up your car and now I'm enjoying a cocktail. Heh."

bev and dick honeymoon departure

If they make me wear a monkey suit to their weddings, I'm going to do the same thing.

Cooking Class

She Who Must Be Obeyed and I took an all-day cooking class at the CIA a couple weeks back. Rather than weave the webcam sex experience into a flowing narrative tapestry, I'm just going with bullet points. 'Cuz if I wait to make a tapestry, the next post will be a month from now. Again.

I guess I thought it would be more theory and less cooking. It was all cooking. We walked in, it was a big kitchen with a bunch of work stations. Chef Kowalski (no lie) talked for about an hour about the fine points of culinary art like "get all your stuff ready first" and "clean as you go" and then he split us into teams, handed out the menus, and we were off.

We split into three teams of five, with each team responsible for a different four-course meal. Jennifer got to make Shrimp Salad with Wacky Potatoes. I got put on dessert, with the suggestion that I help "Alan," the other guy at my station, with the turbot as soon as I got done, which would certainly be real soon, because dessert is what they give morons. I also suspect they thought the turbot might end up on the floor if I were entrusted with its care. Which might have been true.

Did I mention that the class was about cooking fish? It was about cooking fish. Apparently, the turbot evolved when flounders had some dire evolutionary need to be square. Well, not quite square. Rhomboid.

We all got little ginchy chef uniforms consisting of an apron, thankfully one size fits all, and one of those crazy cooling tower chef hats, which was one size fits most except Chris. Periodically throughout the day, the stickum that was supposed to hold my chef hat together would surrender and my chef hat would go sproing and fall into whatever I was attempting to chef-ize at the moment. Good times.

Another super feature of the chef hat was that when it did manage to stay on, it made me about seven and a half feet tall (that's 19 kilometers in the metric system, which we'll all definitely use in The Future) which was way too tall to fit under the exhaust hood of the dominator cooking school stove. More on that later.

So, right off the bat, Chef Kowalski comes beelining over to see how I was doing. Naturally, with my success-enabling combination of arrogance, impatience, and love for authority, I was doing super. You have to understand that I'd spent the whole previous day casting very teensy dry flies to very picky trout in weird-ass multi-current streams that required much crazy line mending, so I was ready for something a bit more macro. I'd pretty much ignored the whole mise en place portion of the program and started dumping stuff into a big mixer. Mmm...big mixer. Lemon zest, confectioners sugar, mint, cream...how bad can it be? Chef Kowalski was possibly attracted to my station by the plume of confectioners sugar that erupted when I pinned the dial on my sweet mixer. He shut my action down toot sweet and made me start over, with measuring and whatnot. The Man. Stifling my Art. Again. Yes, I saw you smirking, Jennifer.

I basically finished off my berry parfaits without additional incident, although there was a certain Candid Camera aspect to the whole affair due to the equipment situation. We had a bizarre combination of an abundance of top end gadgets and a complete dearth of some basic items. For example, everyone had an obscure long-handled conical sieve which one of the minion chefs told me cost $120 bucks as I was bashing it on the counter to try to get the mint sprigs out of it, but there weren't enough measuring cups or measuring spoons. I got over that pretty quickly with a declaration of "F precision!" but it seemed to get some of the more detail-oriented students a little twisted up.

As I was finishing up my parfaits (there's a dependent clause I never imagined I'd be writing), I began to notice that Alan was having some issues. He'd managed the mustard-cheese-panko bread crumb turbot topping pretty well, but now he was confronting a couple of whole turbots in need of filleting with a great big knife and a good case of the old guy shakes. I'm thinking about words like "femoral" and "spurting" but somehow Alan got through it. Did a pretty nice job, actually. Fish was already dead, so I guess it didn't mind the extra motion.

Ever notice that every time you go to some adult ed thing, there's always That Guy who can't stop talking about the fourteen bazillion times he's taken this class before, so his dish should just be the divine shiznit. Well, he was at the station right behind mine, so I got to listen to him (and his wife! hoorah!) all day. I take no pleasure in reporting that his bisque was bland and his polenta croutons were gummy.

Once the turbot fillets were assembled, Alan realized that it was 700 Fahrenheit under the range hood and he needed to pound eight bottles of Evian, so I leapt into action, smacking the range hood with my chef hat in the process. I minded the turbot sauce which took absofrickinlutely forever to cook down enough to please Chef Kowalski. He kept looking at his watch and saying ominous things like "We're plating up in 10." I'm not sure what he expected me to do...the cook top only had one temperature - super duper hot - and I wasn't about to scald our sauce after Alan risked bleeding out to liberate those fillets.

Speaking of super hot, they had this broiler unit called The Salamander. I don't know why it's called The Salamander, but I can tell you that it's the hottest thing I've ever been near that isn't used for melting metal. It doesn't even have a door. Time comes to put the turbot under The Salamander and Kowalski and the minions are all "watch that real close" and I'm all "yeah, yeah," and they're all "TAKE IT OUT NOW! TAKE IT OUT NOW!" I swear, The Salamander cooked Alan's turbot in about 47 seconds. Overcooked the first batch, I thought.

The amazing thing was that once one o'clock rolled around, all the piles and the chaos and screaming turned into food. Pretty good food, actually. The turbot was excellent, thanks mostly to Alan's filleting and topping and saucing, and not so much to my attempts to incinerate it. The general consensus was that the overcooked batch was better, so there you go. Maybe it was the Crunchy hand hair ash garnish that the Salamander helped make. The two other groups had also made four course meals, and we all got to eat each other's food, which was a totally ridiculous undertaking. When was the last time you tried to put ten different dishes and two kinds of soup on one plate? (Not you, Ricky.) A couple of the dishes bordered on to die for.

The desserts came out, and it was immediately apparent that my parfaits were smaller than those made by the other two teams. Turns out I'd been given nine parfait glasses, while they only had eight. The Man! Again! Grr. They were tasty, though. Must have been all the knuckle skin from the zester.




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