 |
Post-Modern Drunk: Werewolves, Gods, iPhones, Shallots, and Other Things We Have Too Much Of
Werewolves With Bad Joints
Earlier this week, I told a relatively new coworker that I have Lupus, and she thought I was admitting to having Lycanthropy. There are a couple of things wrong with this: I have a coworker who a) thinks it sounds totally reasonable that I turn into a werewolf and b) would just casually admit this to someone at work.
What Hath God Wrought?
Rick "Exterminate the Brutes" Perry, Rick "Frothy Mixture" Santorum, Michele "Cray Cray Eyes" Bachmann, and "Rock You like a" Herman Cain have all at various points claimed that God personally asked them to run for president during this election cycle. Either God is like a lobbyist hedging His bets, or He's just fucking with them. Actually, more than anything else, I think this demonstrates that God is a fan of Barack Obama. The other option is that there are four separate gods who are each slightly different types of sadists. In that case, Republican National Convention is going to turn out like one of the uglier battles in The Iliad. I can't wait.
4S-Files
I am one of those poor deluded people who bought a new iPhone 4S the moment it became available. This was necessary because my old iPhone 3G (three versions ago) from three years ago had basically stopped working. The Home button had pretty much stopped working--I don't know how familiar you are with the Home button, but it's one of two actual buttons on the iPhone and is used approximately 180 times in a normal day by an iPhone user.
Things you can do without the Home button
Turn the iPhone on.
Turn the iPhone off.
Things you can't do without the Home button.
Everything else.
So I got a new iPhone. It's nice. I haven't used any of the new features, like Siri, because I don't really don't need to make new appointments or be the tool talking to an inanimate object in public. But the 4S is such an improvement over the 3G that it feels like I've been catapulted ten years into the future. The camera is such a huge improvement that on its own it is worth the cost of the phone.
Someone Is Wrong on the Internet
I am definitely getting old, because I am no longer going out of my way to get into arguments on the internet with people. I recently unfriended someone because I realized I had never actually met him, I had nothing in common with him, and he wasn't smart enough to continue talking to on a regular basis. Of course, I haven't entirely softened: I did leave the thread with a "What the hell is your problem, you patronizing twit?" I mean, it's not exactly like I'm beating my swords into plowshares here. More like beating my swords into slightly duller swords. Still, this is what counts as personal progress for me. Anyway, life's too short to get into arguments with stupid assholes. Especially my shortened life. How did I go 32 years without realizing this?
And burnt the topless towers of Allium
I've been cooking a lot more, mostly because of the CSA share, but I did have one slight mishap that was totally not my fault. My girlfriend and I are in love with pate mousse. When we realized we were going through a $10 jar a week or more, I decided to look into making it for ourselves. A friend of ours is a cook who did a massive batch of pate for the wedding of a mutual friend, so we asked her for her recipe. Unfortunately, our friend, who is a great cook, isn't quite as good at transcribing as she is at cooking. So we got a recipe that was missing one slight instruction. So instead of calling for 5 tablespoons of shallot, her recipe called for five shallots. Pate winds up tasting slightly different when you've put in somewhere between ten and twenty times the amount of shallot. That batch had to go into the trash. I scrapped that version, and next time just went to Julia Child's recipe from Mastering the Art of French Cooking (mousse de foies de volatile, if you're keeping track and want to try it yourself). It's awesome. You should totally have some yourself. Just be sure to get the right amount of shallot, at least within a magnitude or less.
Blast from The Past
My license, which I lost somewhere six to nine months ago, at no particular time that I can remember, just appeared in the mail today. It was sent with no note, to my old address (the one on the license), in an envelope with a return address in McAllen, TX, which is the southern-most tip of Texas. There was no note. I definitely lost my license while I was in NYC, so somehow it made it all the way down there and then made it back to me. My suspicion is that someone found it and had been using it as a fake ID. I like to think that it was some bouncer who with a lot of pride in their job who retrieved it and sent it back to me, perhaps noticing that the kid trying to get into the roadhouse didn't sound like he came from New York City.
Spoiler Alert: Jesus Dies in the End
I went to a talk last night about why we should read Moby-Dick. I'm no big fan of Moby-Dick--I made it about 200 pages into it back three years ago, and wound up coming down with Lupus, and I'm not entirely sure Moby-Dick didn't give me the disease. Regardless, I didn't finish, and I'm not particularly interested in going back and giving it another go. Anyway, so one of the audience members asked, essentially, "Why SHOULD we read Moby-Dick, anyway?"
The author leading the talk said that it was for the pleasure of reading it and experiencing it, not precisely for the plot. He said, "The whale destroys the boat in the end and everyone dies but Ishmael, who survives by floating on Queequeg's coffin..." The group of high school students sitting in front of me who so clearly had to come to this talk because their teacher made them were horrified when he said this without even a spoiler warning. Their shock was palpable that someone would just go ahead and reveal the ending of a book written 160 years ago. It was adorable.
