Category Archives: i don’t even know

Cocktails That Describe My Life

Above cocktails: French 75, made by me. And yes, they were good.

So, I feel like I could chronicle my life in cocktails. The good, the bad, and the ugly. Here are some cocktails I make on a semi-regular basis that describe my life. I’ve included the ingredients in case you’d like to make them yourself.

The “I’ve Given Up”

INGREDIENTS: 

  • coconut water
  • whiskey
  • ice
  • a deep sense of failure

This is what you make when you’ve run out of everything except whiskey and coconut water. Surprisingly, they’re not terrible together. No, they’re not amazing together either. They’re fine.

The “I Feel Skinny”

INGREDIENTS:

  • cheap vodka
  • soda water
  • lemon or lime wedge
  • ice
  • the belief that you’ve actually lost weight, even though it’s really just your stomach forcing your pants down your body that makes them feel loose.

Yes, this is basically just a vodka soda, and yes,  I was inspired by Louis C.K. who noted that when his stomach gets big, it shoves over his pants, pushing them down, making him think he lost weight. “I did it,” he says, “I ate my way to the other side, I did.” Oh man, I feel you, Louis.

The “I’m Sick And Also Sick Of Everything”

INGREDIENTS:

  • hot water
  • chopped garlic, or a bulb of garlic if you’re lazy as hell.
  • fresh lemon juice
  • ginger (ground or fresh)
  • cayenne pepper (ground)
  • honey
  • whiskey
  • a profound sense of sadness

My friend Ben recommended this drink. I get sick a lot with colds or sore throat maladys, and this really helps clear congestion and makes me feel like I’m actively doing something to be not sick anymore. Forgive me, I sound like a graduate of the Derek Zoolander School of Kids Who Can’t Read Good And Wanna Learn Do Other Stuff Good Too.

The “Life Is Going Really Good For Me”

INGREDIENTS:

  • vodka
  • cocktail onions
  • cocktail onion juice
  • a whisper of vermouth
  • a false sense of security

Yes, this is just a dirty vodka Gibson, but it’s my favorite cocktail. It’s surprisingly hard to find in bars because no one has cocktail onions because this isn’t 1925 and it’s not a bar for grandfathers. But I love this drink. The whisper of vermouth is crucial. You could make like Winston Churchill and go up to the drink and whisper “vermouth” or just make it so dry you leave the vermouth in the other room. You get the joke here? You don’t add vermouth.

The “Fridge Surprise”

INGREDIENTS:

  • whatever mixer you have
  • whatever hard alcohol you have
  • a dose of “LOL fuck this”

I think we’ve all made the Fridge Surprise at some point in our lives. How creative can we get with our cocktails, as we stare into a fridge of margarita mix and an apple, we wonder. The Fridge Surprise is kind of a metaphor for life, really. We never know what we’re going to find in the fridge, but we’ve got to make the best out of it.

I’m sorry if you don’t drink; this was not a fun post for you.

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I Suck With Money: Trying To Make My Money Matter

Mall Madness via Apocalypstick instagram

I am terrible with money. I spend money like I have it. I spend it like I’m Jay Gatsby and the all the world is one big party guest.

The worst are credit cards. I have to remind myself that when I use a credit card at someplace like Starbucks, I’m basically asking the bank for a loan for an iced cappuccino.

And then there’s the banks. I used to know so little about banking and how banks actually work. It wasn’t until I started seeing random $10 charges here and there that I started to question, what does a bank actually do for me, its client?

A while back I wrote a post on shopping local. I firmly believe it’s important to shop at small stores and keep your money in your community — if you can. So where does that leave me with banking?

When I wrote that post, I learned a lot about not just shopping local, but keeping your money local. And that’s when I entertained the idea of joining a credit union. In a credit union, you’re the owner. You know exactly where your money is going. You have, on average, lower fees for things like using ATMs, surcharges, overdrafts, and so forth. With banks, it’s like, god forbid if you use an ATM that isn’t part of your bank. You may as well walk over to the nearest body of water (a spilled drink at a bar is fine), open your wallet, and dump everything in it. Which, in my case, is like four dollars.

I would love to join a credit union. I’d love lower interest rates and lower fees. I’d know exactly where my money was going. However, and this is the big problem, there’s no credit union near me. The closest credit union near me may as well be in Michael Caine’s vacation home on the moon (because you KNOW he has one there).

So I’m kind of stuck. I don’t know what to do. Right now I belong to two banks. One of them I guess has most of their ATMs in Narnia, because there is only one near me, and the other one likes to charge me for apparently no reason.

Do you use a credit union? Do you like it? If not, what do you use and why?

Make Your Money Matter

This post is sponsored by Make Your Money Matter, in association with PSCU, though all views expressed are my own.

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Lying about having a boyfriend.

benicio del toro vogue

 

Two days ago I lied about having a boyfriend. I don’t do this, ever. This is one of those things I do not like to do. I do not want to feel like I have to lie about having a boyfriend to get out of an uncomfortable situation. Before I get to this story, here is an example of a situation in which I could have lied about having a boyfriend but I didn’t.

I was in Las Vegas in May, walking around with some of my dearest blogger friends, when we were approached by two men. One guy went right up to a friend of mine; the other went to me. This man stopped me and said, “Can I ask you three questions and you answer honestly?”

“Does this one count?” I deadpanned. He paused. He didn’t get it. So he asked again, “Can I ask you three questions and you answer honestly?”

When in Vegas, right? “Okay,” I said.

“One. Do you have a boyfriend?”

Really? “No,” I said.

Immediately he got right up into my face. “Two. Do you find me attractive?”

Without hesitation I said, “No.”

That got him to step back. “No?”

“No.”

“But it’s my birthday.”

And then, because I’m too polite, I actually felt bad for the guy, and wanted to apologize, even though he was the one who invaded my personal space. I asked to see his ID for proof, as if that even mattered, as if it even mattered if he was lying about his stupid birthday. I think that was my way of apologizing, somehow. He showed it to me for about two seconds. “Look,” I said, “It’s not very attractive when a man gets in front of your face and demands to know if you think he’s attractive.”

“It’s fine. I was just asking.”

“What would have happened if I said yes?”

My friend told me. I guess her guy was more attractive than mine. Turns out, if you say “yes”, the third question is, “What do I have to do to get you to kiss me?” Charming, right?

They eventually walked off, pretty soon after I made it clear that I wasn’t kissing anyone, and the whole event felt kinda weird and icky. “Why didn’t you just tell him you had a boyfriend?” people ask, when they hear this story.

“Because I shouldn’t have to do that. Because I should be able to be strong enough on my own and don’t have to pretend to have a man to provide some sort of imaginary, invisible protection. I don’t have a boyfriend and I don’t feel I have to lie about that.”

But two days ago, I did.

There’s a liquor store down the block from me, so yeah, I pop in there pretty often. And not just for liquor. They sell Diet Coke by the can for seventy-five cents. That’s just good business. Because I’m nearby and because I’m in there a lot, the guys who work there have started to recognize my face. They’ve always been nice, helpful guys so it seemed like a bonus to be recognized as a frequent customer.

Once, one of the men working there — and the only one on shift at that time — completely threw me off when he asked me, “Do you live down the street?” I paused. “What?”

“Do you live a few houses down?” Now. I’ve gone over this before. I feel, like many other women, that I suffer from over-politeness/unnecessary apology syndrome. I’ve been breaking out of this (see the above Vegas story.) But once in a while, I don’t think fast enough, and out of fear of hurting someone’s feelings or causing someone to get angry and call me a bitch (not like that matters at all, which I realize, but is part of the whole syndrome), I answered this man with, “Oh, I live very, very far down, a few blocks down.” I didn’t need to do that. I didn’t need to say anything. But because I go there so often and because it seemed like he had an idea of where I lived, I chose to give a half-truth.

“I saw you go into a house right down this street.”

Okay, that was fucking creepy. “No,” I said. “That’s my friend’s house.”

“Oh?”

“Yes. I go there a lot.”

And that was the end of it. I remember thinking, damn, I wish I’d specified the gender of this imaginary friend. I wish I’d said, “he” and “his.”

I’m now going to get to the boyfriend thing.

Two days ago, that same guy was working there, but he wasn’t alone, there was one other guy working the counter with him. Everyone was friendly and nice and then one of them (the non creepy one) said, “That guy you’re always in here with, is he your boyfriend or your roommate?”

Immediately I decided that this was not when I wanted to tell the truth. I wanted to lie. Full-on lie.

“He is my boyfriend. I stay over there all the time, so I guess he’s my roommate too!”

Yup, I went for both. Boyfriend and roommate. The guy who asked laughed good-naturedly. But the creepy guy…that wasn’t good enough for him.

“I saw you go into a house two houses down from here,” the creepy guy said.

This really, really bothered me. He knew exactly where I lived, and the way he shared this information did not feel like a fun, conversational “howdy-ho neighborino!” Ned Flanders exchange. This felt weird and I didn’t like it.

“That’s where my boyfriend lives. I stay with him all the time. It’s my boyfriend’s place.”

The bastard wouldn’t let it go. “Your boyfriend?”

“Yes. We live close enough so I am with him all the time. It’s his place. His.” And that’s it, I was fucking done with the conversation.

Now, as for the guy they’re asking about. Not like it matters to the story, but we’re dating. We hang out a lot. Is he my boyfriend? No. Is he my roommate? No. Want to guess what I did as soon as I hurridly walked home?

I texted him, “From now on, whenever we are in [name of store here] you are my boyfriend, we live together, and you have a gun.” I told him the whole story.

“Got it,” he said.

So, because of some weird dude at a liquor store, I felt like I needed to make up a boyfriend. I don’t know if I can go in there again. And unfortunately, for the owner and for me, it’s a good liquor store. Very upscale, huge wine collection, up until now great employees, and they also sell those night-late essentials like toilet paper, and also Advil and coconut water AKA my hangover kit. But I feel like I can’t go back in there without my fake boyfriend. I feel like we have to go in there, arm in arm, talking very loudly about how much in love we are, how I’m moving in, and how he’s a very jealous man with a baseball bat in his car. I wish they sold condoms behind the counter so that we could go up there and I could say, “May I please have a box of condoms, for me and my boyfriend, who is standing right here, for us to use to have sex with? We have sex. Because we’re boyfriend and girlfriend. We’re going to go home to his house and have sex. My boyfriend is going to have sex with me after this. So we’d like to buy some condoms, please, shopkeep.”

I don’t even know if that would deter this creepy guy. I have no idea what he’s thinking. I’m not seriously concerned for my personal safety. I don’t think I am in danger. I think this guy thought I was pretty or whatever and doesn’t know how to talk to women and doesn’t realize that he’s fucking creepy. Or maybe I’m making excuses for him because of the syndrome.

What I know for sure is that I wish I didn’t feel the need to lie. I wish I didn’t feel uncomfortable about the idea of going back there alone. And I really wish this creepy guy didn’t know where I live.

Goddamnit I need a drink.

 

Photo: Benicio Del Toro and Sara Foster by Bruce Weber for L’Uomo Vogue via Beniciodeltoro.net

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my future self.

exercise class

Okay so I’m just sitting here watching the wheels go ’round and ’round but there’s really no wheels aside from the ones in my head and they are spinning. I cannot focus on anything except the wrong things, like how loud this typing sounds and how annoying those goddamn children are next door and how I don’t know if I’m hungry and I think that logically I must be as I haven’t eaten since 11:30 AM and it’s 6 PM now and that I’m not sure if I’m hungry really concerns me. I am completely overwhelmed to the point of just being stuck and unable to move, though clearly I am able to type and get this all out there. Every sound is way too present. They are talking upstairs too. Why are they doing this. Why are they walking around. Just stop and stay in one place. I was walking around too and it was making things worse.

Really, on the outside, everything looks fine and probably is fine. I love to take the fine in life and stretch and contort it into “kind of fine” and then “not very fine” and then “fuck, I’ve ruined my life.” That’s fun. I am getting better at not doing this but on days like these when you see the work piled up, it’s piled in your mind, on your computer, when you see it, you think there is no way I am going to catch up with my future self. I know she’ll be there, because that’s how time works, it is inevitable that at some point I will have made these deadlines and I will come out on the other end and try to use this panic as I reminder to myself that things are never as bad as they seem and that I always pull through but

 

THESE. GODDAMN. CHILDREN. NEXT. DOOR. Fuck this, I’m done, I can’t write anymore.

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Missing Holden Caulfield.

new york city pop art billboard ad underwear

Holden Caulfield, via J.D. Salinger once said,

Don’t ever tell anybody anything.  If you do, you start missing everybody.

This has always stuck with me.

You know how certain songs cause you to time travel? You hear a song and your mind takes you back to where you were where you heard it and what you felt and who was there. When I hear “Thirteen” by Big Star I remember this incredible date this sweet guy took me on in New York. I didn’t have a lot of time and I warned him, trying to convince him that we couldn’t go out because even though I wanted to, I knew it wouldn’t work out. I was just too busy. But he was persistent, and not in a creepy way. In a way that was so sincere that I let my smile take up my entire face. I told him I had, “like, two minutes” — and he took it to heart. He hailed a cab and we went to an Italian restaurant…down the street. We went through three courses in about one minute. Literally. He planned this ahead. We took our leftovers over to a movie…on the sidewalk. He set up a TV to play Manos: Hands Of Fate, the best of the worst films ever made. It’s such a bad film that he was able to condense the entire thing into twenty seconds. Then he asked if we had time for coffee. Well, we had about thirty seconds. We went back to the Italian place that suddenly had coffee and desert set up on the table. It was the most romantic thing anyone had ever done for me. And somewhere, “Thirteen” by Big Star was playing. And I will forever tie that song to that incredible memory. It didn’t work out between us. I eventually went back to my ex.

Also, none of this happened to me, this happened on How I Met Your Mother.

Ha ha. Got you.

Sorry. I don’t know why I did that.

I got terribly astray from what I was saying, which was that if you let it, anything can remind you of everything. As humans we try to find connections in our lives, where there are none. For example, you’ll tell your friend over lunch about someone you went to high school with, and hours later, you’ll run into that very person on the street. And you’ll say, “My God, what are the odds?!” But if you really thought about it, you’d realize that the odds weren’t that extreme; maybe you were in an area where your former classmate lived, or you only noticed your classmate walking down the street because you had just mentioned them, or your classmate mentioned on Facebook a place they went to for lunch and that’s why you went there; you simply disassociated your classmate from the entire experience because it’s more meaningful to believe that it all happened by some delightful wink of the universe.

don draper wink

Okay, look, I’ll finally get what I’ve been trying to get to. And that is, it’s nearly impossible to forget anybody or anything you’ve ever done that ever meant something, even if it was only slightly. I’ll see a girl wearing fingerless gloves and I’ll think of 14th street in NYC. I’ll hear a Bob Dylan song and have a sudden and brief fervent passion for a boy I had a crush on in college. I’ll smell a certain shampoo and remember my staying with my ex-boyfriend at his house in Rochester. And I do these things — we all do these things — because we want to. Even though it hurts. Because unless you’re a psychopath, you can’t but feel emotion, even if it’s people you think you don’t give a monkey about. It creeps in, but you don’t notice it. To you, it’s like, “Why the hell am I missing Stephanie from elementary school? I haven’t thought about her in years.” It rains and I think about my apartment in New York City. And I think about what a hassel it was — but a great hassel — to move in. I thought about how it would be a ragtag group of me and my friends dragging a couch up a staircase like in Friends. Asking them, hey, can you move for free? I’ll treat you guys to coffee. And then I’m nostalgic for a moment that never even happened.

And that’s why I understand Holden Caulfield, that beloved outcast, so beloved by our generation it’s become cliche. Because nostalgia will fucking kill you if you let it. It’s like alcohol or drugs. Some people can enjoy nostalgia recreationally. Others let it ruin them. The worst thing is that sometimes you don’t even need to talk to someone from your past. All you have to do is see their photo or time travel via a song or memory and you’re right there and by the time you come back, you’re completely hungover with nostalgia.

God, imagine how i’m going to feel when I’m forty.

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Priorities.

skull printed shirt

(Note: this part of the story happened a few weeks ago). I freaked out when I lost this shirt. I bought it at a store in Sacramento and I went back (not just for the shirt, to see my mom) and I ran in there and said, please tell you still have them, and they said we just sold out, but these are similar, and they showed me a shirt that had different skulls on it, and those skulls looked like lightbulbs, and I was like, are you planning to order more? and they said no, and my world closed in around me, but then my friend Laura said, try calling the Karaoke place, so I did, and they had it, and I said PLEASE HOLD ONTO IT and I dashed over. Yesterday Troy at the apple store called and said, “You left your hard drive here” and I snorted and said, “Okay.”

Then 3 nights ago I was on a JetBlue flight to NYC and my TV was the only one that wasn’t lit up, and the guy said, “Maybe you have bad electromagnetic energy” and I said, “I really hope that isn’t the case, sir” and he said, “It will start once we’re in the air” and then I pointed around me at every single TV showing its JetBlue screen with moving images and said, “Then why are all the others working” and he said, “Just relax” and I said, “No, you don’t understand, my priorities are screwed up, and right now, this little TV is my entire life.”

The TV remained broken so he switched me to a new seat and a few hours later when it was dark I went to the bathroom and got lost on my way back to the seat and do you have any idea how fucking embarrassing it is to forget where you were sitting on an airplane? To walk down that aisle that seems so long with people staring at you, and I’m looking visibly confused and saying out loud, to no one, “Haha oops I forgot where I sat, where was I sitting?” with NO ONE HELPING ME, just STARING AT ME, with their stupid frog-like eyes, it was horrible, I almost fell into a heap crying, “JUMANJI!!!!!”

Anyway, merry Christmas.

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If I had a time machine.

david bowie and john lennon

Considering that I spend most of my time sighing girlishly over photos of young David Bowie, Paul McCartney, and Jarvis Cocker, it makes sense that my friend Tony made this observation:

“God help us all if you ever get your hands on a time machine and some roofies.” – Tony Archer
Oh ha ha Tony. No. I would use it for great things like saving John Lennon and Kennedy.

But first I would have so much Bowie sex. No, sorry, Paul sex first. Then time machine. Then Bowie sex. Then time machine. Then save John Lennon. Then time machine. Then Jarvis Cocker. Then back home for a nice cup of tea and wait for this whole thing to blow over.

Oh crap, I forgot to save JFK.

Whatever, worth it. But if I did remember to save JFK, and I don’t believe it’s a conspiracy, I think Oswald acted alone, I think I could have stopped him if I went up to him that day, punched him in the balls and said, “Stop being a dick” then handcuffed him to a streetlamp, called the police anonymously, then time traveled my sexy ass back to 2012. This is also the same thing I would do with Mark David Chapman. Or maybe I would instead try to be their friends, because friends don’t let friends assassinate presidents and musical geniuses.

“I guess I just wasn’t made for these times.” – Brian Wilson

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