Heathens for Easter

I forgot to blog yesterday, thus marking the end of my most successful New Years resolution EVER. I might have slacked on a lot of other things (being neater, being more productive, and drinking more water) but I was totally on the ball where my blog was concerned. And the failure is all the more alarming because I had a totally classy topic picked out: cheese whiz.

I wanted to write about cheese whiz because I used to eat it a lot; it was the kind of thing that we never had laying around the house but that my mom always put in my Christmas stocking and care packages. Now, it’s no secret that I like cheese in general. And cheese that can be manipulated with one hand while reading is my favorite kind.

That said, I don’t eat cheese whiz too often anymore. I never made a conscious decision not to eat it; it just sort of turned out that way. I’d love to say it is because I married someone who doesn’t take kindly to eating preservatives and under his tutelage I have changed my food-sinner ways, however, in addition to making me seem like a quitter, that’s blatantly untrue. Mainly it’s just expensive and I’m cheap.

Anyway, I had some cheese whiz on Monday of this week because my mom put some in my Easter basket. (That’s right, my mom still makes me an Easter basket. Every holiday is fundamentally an excuse to give gifts in my family. Sometimes they involve beer. Heathens for Easter!) I’ve never been one for turning down some free ‘whiz, so I squirted it onto a couple crackers while scoping out my blogs. It was pretty damn amazing.

The more amazing thing, however, is the feeling of strange shame that comes from eating cheese whiz alone in your home. I’m sure that the feeling of shame would be more pronounced if you were eating it in public; however, the alone-eating shame was pretty profound. It sort of made me wish that I wasn’t reading the blog of some emotionally turbulent teenager who loves to make bland “Life is Nothing”-statements. In a certain light (a glaring artificial light that made the most of the bright orange cheesy goodness), I might have seemed creepy.

Some American Shit

Dear guy-ahead-of-me-while-I-drove-to-work,

Hi. You don’t know me but I was behind you at about 1:15 this afternoon, headed south on Folsom avenue. You might have caught a glimpse of me in your rear-view mirror with the dice hanging from it, though perhaps not. I try to maintain a very polite distance from other cars. Hatchback and oversized sunglasses? Distinctly hunched driving posture? Yes, that would be me.

Well, sir (and I hesitate to apply this term because your age was so hard to determine from so far away and so strange an angle), I am sorry that I hurried past you as soon as the road opened up to two lanes. The moment that my car hurdled passed yours I realized the implied insult of my actions. When a person who has been following another takes the first opportunity to pass, the sideways glances exchanged are rarely pleasant ones.

I just wanted to clarify that I meant no disrespect. If you felt admonished by my haste, if the sight of my little green car puttering weakly past your window brought you any embarrassment, or if this last indignity was the straw that broke your Model-A’s back, I apologize.

I understand what you were trying to do, guy. You were out driving your classic car in the sunshine on a Sunday afternoon and you stuck your arm out of the window. You had dice on the rear-view, and I respect that. You were probably listening to some righteous jams and you felt no need to hurry. Hell, you were on a Sunday drive and that’s some American shit right there.

I’m sorry that some schmuck in a green hatchback had to pass you at the first opportunity; that I had to be the jerk-wad reminding you that your tranquility is as outdated as your vehicle and twice as likely to break down. I didn’t mean to be a jerk, but I was on my way to the outlet mall to slap on my lanyard and sell some sneakers. That also is some American shit, but with a difference emphasis.

Wasting my own time

This blog is an early one because I am having trouble getting started on some projects. My brain, it would seem, is reluctant to focus today. I’m not even motivated enough to waste my time scrolling through the internet. I am merely sitting, gazing at my word processing screen, yawning and fiddling. I would jump start my brain with a Pepsi, but I’m trying to avoid drinking soda in excess and, well, 9:13 in the morning seems a little excessive.

Since I’m not going to drink a soda and I am not, apparently, going to write anything productive, I guess I will discuss another form of drinking that has been weighing heavily on my mind. I am talking about the drinking of alcohol here, so if you are under 21 please do me a solid and avert your eyes.

I am an infrequent and lackluster drinker and as such I mostly drink beer. It doesn’t even matter what kind of beer, much to the chagrin of my main squeeze when we first started dating. (At the time I was in the habit of drinking Natural Lite while he drank Sapporo. Now he drinks PBR and I drink hard ciders that taste like juice.) But beer takes a lot of drinking and it’s heavy, grainy stuff that always makes my stomach upset the next day. Well, the upset stomach is debatable; there is a slight possibility that my stomach is always upset following a beer-binge because beer always encourages me to eat lots of things, like red meat or 14 mozzarella sticks with marinara sauce, that I wouldn’t usually eat. But I elect to blame the beer because if I had to choose between beer and cheese sticks, my vote would be heavily dairy.

But what does a casual drinker drink instead of beer? I have been ruminating on this for a few weeks and when the pressure is on (i.e. the waitress is staring straight into my panicked face) I always sissy out and go for a Blue Moon or a Pyramid. It doesn’t help that I panic easily in bars; I’m not the sort that a barkeep pays attention to. (I love parenthesis today! What follows is an aside on why I have a hard time ordering in bars. First, I am not very aggressive about standing at the bar and making eye contact. Second, I think I have that disheveled bookish look that says “I will pay in cash and buy one round all night.” Third, I’m not a hot babe or the hot-babe-equivalent of a tab-opening heavy tipper.)

I don’t mean to imply by all of this that I spend a lot of time worrying about what I should drink on the weekends. I just spend a lot of time thinking about pointless things in general and my official drink receives no more or no less thought than other silly ruminations like whether I am too old to continue wearing Converse sneaks or whether I should improve my mind by compulsively re-reading modern classics or by delving into the antiquities. This, to my eternal shame, is how my silly brain works.

So cocktails and my relationship with them. Mainly my interaction with hard alcohol has been the delightful days of college when everyone had a lukewarm handle of vodka under their bed and we chased it with blue PowerAid. I remember attending these parties in apartment-style dorms where the alcohol was laid out in the vanity area of the bathrooms – shot glasses and flavored vodkas arranged beside hair brushes and deodorants. The best part of these parties was that you had to pass through this vanity area to use the toilet, and so the hallways were always crowded with confused people, struggling to differentiate between the line for the toilet and the line to use that same dirty shot glass. Now that I think about it, maybe that explains why I always drink beer…

Anyway, that is the association that I have with hard alcohol. After that frenzied freshman year I never spent much time around people who drank cocktails (these were the days when beer pong reigned supreme…is that still happening in over-priced apartments around the world?). But I have an idea about cocktails that directly contradicts all of my experiences.

You know how I always get everywhere early? (I love being excessively conversational even more than I love parenthesis today.) Well I usually spend this extra time reading in my auto, slumping and sweating when it’s sunny, shivering and hunching when it’s cold. But whenever I pull up to a curb to meet a friend for dinner and realize that I have time to kill I always imagine myself going into the bar, settling myself with a drink and reading in the comfort of a booth and climate control. I am married, but now that I think about it this is how I would want to meet someone; a fellow loner in a depressing restaurant bar, drinking something with a two-part name and reading a book by someone with a three-part name.

To return to my point, in this bar/drink/book/waiting fantasy of mine I always order something that isn’t a beer, because when you are being as suave as imaginary me is being, you don’t order a beer. Whatever it is that I am ordering I hope it involves soda water because I want an excuse to buy a seltzer bottle and a bar cart. If I can’t have soda I sure as hell want soda water in a bitchin’ bottle. (Please see below.)

Yeah, I want this. Take note.