Holiday Cocktails from Your Parents’ Liquor Cabinet

The “Dad”

• 1 oz. Jim Beam
• splash tap water

Combine in repurposed Pokémon-themed jelly jar. Add ice to taste while complaining about lack of proper barware.

 

The “9th Grade Sleepover”

• 1 oz. gin
• 1 oz. vodka
• 1 oz. Cointreau
• 2 oz. flat Diet Coke
• 2 oz. water

Combine first four ingredients in mostly-empty Diet Coke bottle; replace missing gin and vodka with water. Serve warm and furtive.

 

The “Company’s Coming”

• Box wine, to taste
• Glass decanter

Pour wine into decanter; serve with dinner. Feign ignorance when asked about varietal or provenance.

 

The “I Think This Is How You Make a Mudslide”

• 1 oz. Bailey’s
• 1 oz. Kahlúa
• 2 oz. 1% milk
• Vodka?

Combine. Wonder if Bailey’s has curdled. Garnish with sugar cookie and drink anyway.

 

The “Training Wheels”

• scant 1 oz. vodka
• full glass orange juice

Pour vodka into orange juice. Complain loudly about how it tastes awful and everyone else gets to drive alone with just a learner’s permit and THIS FAMILY SUCKS

 

The “World Tour”

• 1 oz. duty-free vodka (Russia)
• 1 oz. Johnnie Walker (Scotland)
• 1 oz. Campari (Italy?)
• 1 oz. Coyote-themed Tequila (Mexico)
• 1 oz. mystery liqueur, left over from reception from a wedding that has since begotten two children (Texas)

Combine in highball glass, stir gently. Family member with the most passport stamps drinks.

 

The “Nightcap”

• 2 oz. expired Children’s Dimetapp

Serve at room temperature, neat.

A Child’s Compendium of Illustrated Dido Suicides

Finals week is here and, like it always does, everything is falling apart. My weekend was equal parts awesome and flat-out horrible (more on this later. Though I will say it involved sobbing on the phone while wearing a paper crown in the rain).

Doing “research” for my Medieval Studies papers, I came across a collection of illustrations from the Romance of the Rose. Naturally, I looked for my favorite subject: Queen Dido. Dido, for those of you whose education is not as useless as mine, is the ruler of Carthage who offed herself when her boyfriend Aeneas left to found Rome. Life’s tough. And right now, I so get Dido. I mean, no one’s abandoning me to go marry a Latinine Princess, but the misery part is kind of there. Let’s empathize, shall we?

This one doesn’t get the concept of proportion exceptionally well. Dido’s crown is approximately twice the size of her head, and the sword is a full 2/3 the size of her body. Also, why are those guys just waving their ginormous hands around instead of stopping her?

Another gigundo sword, combined with Dido’s jaunty wave, as if to say, “Hey Reader! Just spearing myself through the kidneys over here!” Also: great hairstyle.

This Dido gets a more reasonably-sized crown, and a nicer dress, despite being cursed with the face of Winston Churchill. She’s also just kind of poking herself in the boob, rather than doing a full-on kabob-ing. I can’t say I blame her; I’d hate to ruin that dress too.

The facial expression. JUST LOOK AT IT. This is the look of a girl who has six more pages on Jean de Meun’s translation of the letters of Abelard and Heloise to write while her car is stuck in Schaumburg. Who are all the randos? I couldn’t say, though I like the baby’s raised eyebrow as if to say, “Seriously, girlfriend? Stabbing yourself over him?“

Another groovy dress, but with more dramatic projectile bleeding. Dido’s face makes it look like she just tripped and fell on the sword and is now yelling “OH SHI-” And again with the passive onlookers. Their eyes are practically glazed over. Were medieval people so jaded that even suicide was a boring spectator sport?

“Comment Dido se tue” indeed. This Dido apparently needed to climb into her childhood Play-Castle and light it on spidery orange fire before enswording herself. Also: neck length.

Again with the hanging. Here we actually get a sense of some narrative drama, what with the Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria about to carry Aeneas off to Pride Rock in the background there. But again: that castle is the same height as a full-grown woman? WHO IS BUILDING THESE THINGS

Obviously, there’s a moral here. As Dydo (the medieval version) said herself: “Mal fait amer hom Troyan.” Trojan guys are dicks, no pun intended. As modern women, let’s be glad that the only problems we have are getting our term papers done and finishing our Old French finals and oh God I just spent an hour looking up manuscripts for NO REASON

De Gustibus

I have a theory that there are two major, opposing areas in which girls become obsessed: food and fashion. There are a select few who can manage and foster a full-time interest in both, and they’re doubtless more interesting and more actively involved on Pinterest than I am, but generally, I think it’s either/or.

See, devoted involvement in either of these things requires an investment. Sure, you can get away with the basics when it comes to bodily coverings or nourishment. But why stop there, the fashionista/food geek will argue, when you can have hand-tooled leather boots from Anthro or artisan emerald Ostrich eggs? Thus, the expensiveness necessitates a choice. As does the expansiveness, for that matter. If most of your disposable income goes to artisan maple syrup and lavendar macarons, you probably aren’t going to fit in a sample size.*

If you know or stalk me, it’s pretty obvious which camp I fall into. Even the a casual observer can look at my secondhand J. Crew blouse that’s missing a button and smells like the church basement I bought it in and discern my level of involvement with my clothes. My requirements for vestments are 1. is it warm and 2. does it cost less than ten dollars. My closet is utilitarian and also a huge mess.

But my pantry? Well, it’s also a mess, but also full of the fruits of my labor. I don’t mean the purple potatoes and the farm-fresh eggs (though I buy those too, duh) but the various appliances that chop, blend, bake, and store comestibles. When I got a grant to cover my rent in New York last summer, I dropped $30 on a pizza stone, just because. A half-off Amazon gift card became an immersion blender. I whined and complained about our family’s charcoal grill until my dad trucked out to Jersey for a Craigslist gas-powered number. I smuggled a fancy 60-Euro knife back from Paris and treat it to regular sharpenings by Dave at the Farmers’ Market. Lately? 46 big ones for a multicompartmental, vacuum-sealed, Bento-style thermos. It came with a spork. I literally squealed when it arrived.

One day, maybe, I’ll have world enough and time to pay attention to what I’m supposed to wear. But I’m just going to get barbecue sauce on it anyway.

*Unless, like me, you’re on the anxiety diet

My Apartment Is Trying To Kill Me

As a nominally healthy 21-year-old girl, you can probably guess how often I 1. like to bake food and 2. worry about dying in my sleep. However, as a tenant in a cardboard deathtrap of an apartment, I must tell you that your guess is wrong, at least as of last night.

But let’s back up. My charming coldwater flat has mice. Or perhaps it’s just mouse; I’ve only ever seen the little vermin in a singular state. It’s always when I’m in the kitchen, innocently chopping up an onion or something, and I hear that telltale squeaking scurry of little feet. I freeze, holding my knife like the Baker’s Wife from the nursery rhyme, waiting. And then! The damn critter scurries out from under the radiator and into another hidey-hole before I even have a chance to cut off its tail.

Despite my best attempts at cleaning, after spending pretty much every waking hour in the kitchen mixing, kneading, sautéeing, and swearing when I burn myself, there are inevitable chunks of food, scraps of pie dough, and other culinary effluvia that escape my notice and probably provide adequate sustenance for a tiny creature.

Yesterday, after whiling away the afternoon dicing apples and working a pound of butter/lard into flour*, I ignored the sounds of scurrying and plugged into my laptop to bang out another thousand words of miserable drivel for my novel-in-progress. For the literal and metaphorical fruits of my labor, I decided that I would bake one of the tiny pies I had constructed as a bribe-cum-reward. I set the cantankerous oven to 400 (it runs cool), popped in a pie on one of those awesome nonstick sheet things, and went back to pepper my story with a few more adverbs.

Not twenty minutes later, I smelled something, and it was not pie. It was distinctly gassy. Panic set in instantly, as per my special talent for Freaking Out, and I sprinted back to the kitchen, which was suspiciously devoid of mice. There were flames in the oven, which I figured was a good sign that things weren’t about to combust, but also a strong odor of Not Good. I shut off the oven, put the pie in the toaster oven, and proceded to fling open every last window in the apartment. The temperature that could charitably be called “rustic” now plunged all the way to “Little Match Girl,” and I huddled in a blanket under the ceiling fan, breathing slowly and wondering if the fatigue setting in was normal end-of-day exhaustion or the gradual effects of carbon monoxide poisoning.

Two hours later, I’d finished dessert, called my mom twice, and summoned my upstairs neighbor-dudes to see if it really smelled like gas. “Maybe?” they said, sniffing up and down the hallway. I diligently Googled the signs of CO exposure: a hypochondriac’s nightmare of the nonspecific headache, fatigue, nausea. I looked up CO detectors: legally required, so naturally our building doesn’t have any, and unfortunately not even obtainable by Amazon Prime. At long last, I went to sleep, knowing full well that it could be the last time I ever closed my eyes. I wondered how long it would take anyone to find my corpse. “She died doing what she loved,” they would say, “having a panic attack while eating pie.”

I was never so glad to hear my alarm go off at seven this morning. Or, at least, I thought I would be. Actually, I felt groggy from staying up late worrying and freezing from the window letting in all the cold air in Chicago. As I stumbled to the kitchen to make some coffee, I heard the scrambling noise of rodents heading for the hills, and had a brief moment of symbiosis. Mice can only survive if there is breathable air, I assume. They could be the canaries in the coal mine that is my apartment! We could get along and eventually they would walk on their hind legs and sew me a dress like in Cinderella!

Until we get the oven fixed, anyway. Then I break out the snap traps.

*It makes the best pie crust and you’re wrong if you disagree

Thoughts as I write my third novel

• This sucks
• This sucks
• God, this sucks
• Adverbs ahoy!
• Ooh, let’s have the dad character wear a goofy Scuba-Diving related t-shirt in the climactic argument scene
• A pun on the word cappuccino is always appreciated, right?
• If I make the protagonist short and brunette, it will definitely be less obvious that she is based on me
• When I say this sucks, I am referring to both the process of writing and the product it creates
• Dammit, I should’ve written a dog in here somewhere
• Logical scene transitions WHAT ARE THOSE
• Why do I always spell it vocabularly
• I could take an entire flock’s worth of birds by bird and STILL HAVE NO PLOT
• Definitely going to nickname this car the Land Whale
• Oh wait, except now I need it to be a pickup truck
• The older sister character’s fiancé is going to bring her macaroni and cheese in New York and IT WILL BE SO ROMANTIC
• This sucks
• This sucks

No longer just when chased

In the last two weeks, I have taken up a new hobby. It’s one that’s entirely antithetical to my other top hobbies (cooking, eating, and The Internet, in that order) and one that I suck at. Every other afternoon, I put on some stretchy pants and one of my mom’s old sports bras* and kind of lurch down to the lake and back.

I guess, technically, I’m running, despite the fact that the word implies a modicum of coordination. But jogging has these awful Olivia-Newton-John connotations of sweatbands and pastel hand-weights, and my own approach is much more minimal. I put on shoes that I had fitted for me an eternity ago at a real running store and I listen to a bizarre cocktail of This American Life, The Offspring, and Katy Perry and I just go. Not far, mind you. I can do about 4 miles (rounding up generously) in a single heave, and even that’s a bit of a stretch. I’m slow, very slow, but I take unjustified amounts of pride in the fact that I can at least maintain a continuous running motion without breaking down and walking.

And? Why? I don’t know. I’m not a natural athlete and never have been. Even in high school when I was ostensibly on the track team, my idea of exercise was to come home and run between the TV room and the kitchen while eating a toaster-strudel-sandwich**. Once upon a time I dragged my bony ass to the gym every weekday but then I realized that gyms smell like feet and sweaty people always phone in their cardio-machine-wipedowns. I do yoga, but my arms shake a lot and my hips hate me for it.

Running is different, though. I get to be outside, which I love. I get to do some hardcore woolgathering, which I also love. It’s like the feeling of letting your imagination wander while staring out the window of a train or car, but with more moving around and gasping for oxygen! And afterwards, when I stagger up the stairs with a bright pink face and unclip my Dorky Running Belt where I keep my pre-dosed children’s Benadryl and apartment keys, I am tired. Not dying, I-slept-four-hours-on-a-futon tired, but the kind where your body makes your legs feel warm and pleasant and cuts off energy to just the chattery part of your brain that spouts insecurities.

So maybe I’ll keep doing this? I actually look forward to it? I can only phrase these things as questions because I don’t really believe it? Maybe I’ll train for a race one day?

*Too big, natch
**You smear two packets of frosting between the strudels and oh my God

An Open Letter to All Girls I Am Facebook Friends With Who Have Tattoos

Hello, random girl from high-school choir/old Jesus-camp buddy/friend’s ex who went on a friend-request spree two years ago! How’s it going? I see that you’ve recently turned 18, or else you’ve stolen your older sister’s driver’s license. Good for you! That’s a rite of passage! I’m sure you’ve already downed plenty of Bacardi Breezers in celebration.

Now, I don’t want to come across as too judgmental, but I think even writing this letter precludes that possibility, so here goes: your tattoo. It’s awful. Just…God-awful.

I don’t care that I sound like your mom* when I say that tattoos are for life and you will absolutely regret this. Carving up your flesh with a treble clef in the shape of a heart or a Shakespeare quote or a word in Sanskrit is positively braindead. Because seriously? Let’s examine.

First of all, the placement speaks volumes.

• Ribs? Your parents were out of town spring of senior year and you avoided bikinis for a few family reunions afterwards.
• Wrist or ankle? Too small for anything major or complicated, so you’ve basically got a permanent doodle. You’re a human post-it note.
• Lower back? Don’t even attempt to redeem that one. I hope hostessing at The Sizzler is a rewarding career for you.

Secondly, the thing itself. You got a word in a language you don’t speak? That literally means nothing to you. Oh, it’s in English? I’m sure that your body art is a testament to the deep, human truths that only the lyrics from Wicked can convey. Or maybe you have a really lovely rose or quarter note or shooting star. That makes sense if you want to identify yourself as a botanist or piece of sheet music or a girl with no imagination.

Wait, okay. You’re right. I’m being majorly harsh. I sound like a 21-year-old Andy Rooney**. Here’s the real problem I have, I think: a tattoo at 18 is a sign that you are taking yourself way too seriously. You believe in your own judgment enough to mar yourself with something for life, and for a nascent adult, that is a dangerous road to go down. If you start thinking you know best, you’ll never question yourself, and you’ll end up forcing yourself to hold unchanging, unbending postures just to justify what you did in the past. You can’t grow if you can’t change, and you can’t change if you’ve branded yourself as something, as anything.

That, and your tat is fucking ugly. Sorry.

love,
Blair

*Previous installment in the “Blair’s a square” series here
**He’d totally back me up on this, though.

I am part-squirrel, part-magpie, and ALL excited for the fall season to start. That is to say: I think I’m obsessed with saving things. Not, mind you, in a traditionally pack-rat-esque sense: I don’t keep newspaper clippings* or silly things like paystubs** and I dispose of freebie t-shirts regularly (except three: one from Scav, one from Doc Films, and a rotating wildcard). I’m dangerously into stocking up for the Cold Winter Months, both literal and metaphorical.

I’m working hard at school (OF COURSE) but also at my job, diligently socking away every paycheck into my savings account. Thanks to my quarter-million-dollar education, I’ve learned one thing: I am unemployable. Also: the names of Charlemagne’s sons and the use of the aorist tense. But seriously, I can’t help but like the feeling of Being Responsible enough to give myself the gift of a post-graduation employment lapse. My meager hoard will let me do what I want: write, live abroad illegally, and shop for Quebecois produce at the Marché Jean-Talon, at least for a little while.

On the more material side, and to torture my menagerie metaphor further, I’m like the ant in the fable***, but with the ability to put quinoa and whole-wheat pastry flour in Ball jars. I’ve planned out a weekend whose chief highlights will be picking an entire bushel of apples, loading my car with bison burgers, and travelling far afield to Logan Square to get my first share of organic guilt-free delicious farm meat. I can picture myself in a few short months, surrounded by a frozen stockpile of homemade casseroles and ready-to-bake scones, cackling with schadenfreude as I watch the fools around me starve in the snow.

Actually, I highly doubt that will happen (I would 1. share my hotdish and 2. feel bad if all my friends died) but the pleasurable aspects of readying oneself for cold cannot be denied. Even these days when we can have tomatoes in December (don’t get me started), there is something nice about bending to the will of the coming winter and get while the getting is good. Literally, metaphorically, replete-with-homemade-applesauce-ed-ly, I want to build up a hidey-hole and spend the next little while in there. You can come over, but only if you’ll take a t-shirt on your way out.

*LOL WHAT’S A NEWSPAPER. OR A CLIPPING FOR THAT MATTER
**LOL WHAT IS PAYING TAXES
***Or that awful French poem we had to memorize in high school. Remember? La CI-gale AY-ant CHAN-té TOUT-e l’é-TE

Grownuppitude beckons

My usual whirlwind of back-to-school activities is slanting hard towards actual responsibilities. Gone are the days of merely remembering to buy notebooks and pencils and printer cartridges. Now I have bills to pay! And a job to work at! And also coursework, I guess!

I know, I know; college is totally fakey-adulthood and the Real World Is Realer and all that, but sometimes I’ll be doing something innocuous like buying a red tube dress for my Homestar Runner Halloween costume on eBay and I get all HOLD UP WHO SAID I COULD HAVE A CREDIT CARD. I don’t think I’m ready for that kind of thing! Mostly because I keep forgetting my online bill-paying password!

But people around me are growing up. My oldest cousin just got married. I have two Facebook friends MY OWN AGE that are engaged. Outside the realm of interpersonal relations, I’m all of a sudden about to write a 40-page paper comparing two very old texts in two very foreign, very dead languages. How is that even conceivable?

And somehow I got a car.

Oh, the car. THE CAR. You guys, my parents are selling me a car at a low, low rate and I’ve already broken it. Somehow, probably stupidly, I toasted the battery and had to do a litany of complicated things like CALL TRIPLE-A and STAND AND WATCH INTENTLY AS MY BATTERY WAS REPLACED. This took a little getting used to. But at least it wasn’t the alternator*.

I’ve also had to do many more menial things like buy food (which I not-so-secretly love, so no big), assemble an Ikea bed BY MYSELF and barefoot (not recommended), and set up a savings plan with the intent of squirreling away enough money to support myself when I’m jobless and living illegally in Canada. On the whole, these things, all these things, are surprisingly easy. Given that I’m completely unemployable (it has been recommended that I try temping upon graduation), I should probably be a lot less cavalier (and a lot more frugal). But then I remember that once, the idea of getting my driver’s license existed in the gaping void of the future, and I rose to that occasion only two years later than normal!

So, my immediate goal, until I can conceive of a better one, is a moving target: learn on the fly. Also: buy printer cartridges.

*This is a very bad thing to have break, or so I’ve been told

The Strangeness of Kind-ers

People yelling things out of cars makes me nervous. Think about it: it’s a mode of communication reserved for fleeting moments of contact with a person you will in all likelihood never see again. No one ever rolls down their window to yell “PLEASANT DAY WE’RE HAVING!” or “LOOK OUT, YOUR SHOE’S UNTIED!” And don’t get me started on the guys who think that calling out “NICE TITS!”* is actually a compliment. 

Case in point: I was walking home from CVS with a bagful of sundry soaps and scrubs and a dog. Rounding the corner by a Chinese restaurant, the dog decided to poop, which made little sense because 1. he had already taken a huge deuce not once, but twice in our promenade and 2. his butt was actually against a tree. Animals, I tell you. They’re not people!

Now, I’m totally squicked out by the whole “curb your dog” thing, but I do do it** because it’s cleanly and neighborly and blah blah blah. But I’d foolishly only brought two bags along with me, because what kind of dog takes three craps on a 25-minute walk? Unable to scoop, I just…left it. I felt bad, honestly, but what else could I do?

Beeeeeep. Beep. I nearly jumped out of my earbuds. Some Chestnut-Hill, mom-looking woman with artfully messy hair was glaring at me from behind the wheel of her blue Subaru.

“Excuse me, but I really think you should clean up after your dog,” she shouted.

I explained to her my bag conundrum, and that I’m usually really diligent, but he pooped thrice, and on a tree, and so on, but this was clearly not good enough for her.

“Well, that place would appreciate it,” she shot back.

“I know, but there’s nothing I can do,” I said.

She rolled her eyes, huffed an exaggerated sigh, and accelerated down the road.

“But I always bring bags!” I said to no one. “He pooped thrice. THRICE!”

This woman apparently expected me to go back and pick up dog shit barehanded and lob it into a nearby trashcan which did not exist. Who did she think she was, being impossibly self-righteous? I pictured her cruising the rest of Germantown Avenue, berating people for wearing white after Labor Day or drinking cocktails before five o’clock (“Well, I think your liver would appreciate it”). I hoped that stopping to shame me would cause her to miss the start of Bikram Booty Yoga so that she’d return home early to find her attorney husband screwing a paralegal in their reclaimed farm-wood bed, à la Sliding Doors. So there.

This kind of unwarranted scolding is probably why I jumped about a foot in the air when an ambulance honked at me the other day, to the extent that such a thing is possible while seated inside a car. I was going to a doctor’s appointment and cruisin’ in my beaten-but-unbeatable Volvo 240 sedan. Were they going to yell at me about seatbelt use? Was my headlight out again? With trepidation, I rolled down the window.

“Hey,” says one of the ambulance guys. “We were just wondering…how many miles on that thing?”

I checked. “118 thousand,” I said.

“That’s cool. We were just talkin’ about it when we saw you behind us. Great car.”

“Thanks,” I said, beaming with pride. “It’s my first. I love it.”

“You can get 300 thousand out of it, easy,” the other one said with a chuckle.

“I hope to,” I said.

And with that, we parted ways. I silently wished them well and hoped they weren’t en route to something dreadful like a preschool fire, or an orgy gone awry, or a lawyer whose wife found him cheating and stabbed him in the neck with a decorative piece of driftwood.

If there’s a moral to these stories, I think it’s don’t yell anything if you don’t have anything nice to yell. Also: bring lots of poop-bags. I dunno, make up your own, because I’ve made it to five o’clock and can finally have a cocktail without fear of public upbraiding.

*Not to me, duh.

**Hehe, doodoo.