Category Archives: nonsense

tweets, how do they work?

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Twitter is kind of beyond me.

I have an account (@Alpacalypse5), but 99% of my posts are Instagram photos and links to posts that I write here on the blog. Succinctness (is that even a word? Spellcheck says it is, so suck it) isn’t my strong suit to begin with, and that little character-count in the bottom right corner of the Twitter posting screen just fills me with dread. Plenty of people are really good at being very funny and/or profound in 140 characters or less, but my heart probably couldn’t take the amount of Adderall I’d need to be included in their ranks.

Could you imagine, though? Going out in a blaze of Adderall-fueled viral tweet glory? My obituary would be like:

“In search of that one golden moment of virality, Shelby took a whole handful of prescribed ADHD meds, wrote what is now considered the Best Tweet Known To Mankind, then dropped dead of a massive coronary. She is survived by her husband and dog, who are both pretty fucking annoyed that she didn’t stock the fridge with sandwiches before she croaked.”

And then the obituary editor would be like, “Frank, virality totally isn’t a word” and Frank the obituary writer would be like, “Fuck you, Steve. You’re always so negative. You know what? I’m sick of this dead-end job, and that’s not even a pun. I’M OUT.”  And then, in the final cruel twist of irony, Frank’s flouncing would knock my half-written obituary into the recycling bin next to his desk, never to be finished. The author of the Best Tweet Known To Mankind wouldn’t even have an obituary to be remembered by and her memory would fade into the ether as quickly as, well, a non-famous person’s tweets…

…

…wow, I got kind of lost in that one.

ANYWAY.

What I came here to say was that I’m going to try to be better at actively tweeting instead of just lurking, so feel free to follow me if you want.

Also, if you’re super confused right now, it’s totally ok. I am too, and I wrote this shit. Sometimes you have to just go with it.

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Acid reflux, huh? I feel your pain, birdie.

professional harsher of mellows

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My dog can harsh anyone’s mellow.

Seriously. The Dalai fucking Lama could roll up in here, my dog would lose his shit because, OMG stranger danger, and the Dalai Lama would be like, “Shit, dog…you’re SHRILL”. And after five whole minutes of the drama that is Junior’s carrying the fuck on, the Dalai Lama would be like, “I can just sit with a lot of annoying things and be at peace with them but your dog is way too much. I gotta go.”

Or …who’s more laid back than the Dalai Lama?

OMG, I HAVE IT.

Matthew fucking McConaughey! My dog could harsh stoned-ass Mr. “Alright Alright Alriiiiight” Matthew McConaughey’s mellow, I swear to you.

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Nice, uhh…belt buckle.

Sidenote: Mr. McConaughey, if you’re reading this and you want to test the theory, please do feel free to stop by. I make excellent brownies and I’m definitely a fan. A big…BIG fan.

Ahem.

Anyway, WTF was I talking about before I got distracted by Matthew McConaughey?

Oh, right. My dog being a shit.

So, I’m laying on my back starfish-style in the middle of the living room floor this evening (I TOLD you things get weird when my husband isn’t home), attempting to meditate. It didn’t actually start out as attempted meditation, by the way.  It started out as attempted yoga to try and coax the GIANT KNOT OF EVIL out of my back. Which, that sort of worked but sort of didn’t because the original giant knot of evil kind of eased off but then two other places started to seize up on me while I was laying on the floor. Which was why I was laying starfish-style on the living room floor to begin with – because basically, I couldn’t get up.

SO, while I was stuck down there, I figured I might as well close my eyes and try to meditate for a little bit. Or more to the point, “sit with the pain”, as they say. Those fucking sadists.

So, again, laying on the floor on my back, arms and legs akimbo. Eyes closed, taking nice deep breaths. Calming breaths. Quiet breaths. So quiet. So calm. Everything is smoothing out, things are coming down a few notches all by themselves. Things are OK. I’m whole, I’m at peace, I am a denizen of the motherfucking light…

…and then the shit hits the fan.

“AAAAAAA-RRRRRRRRRROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!”

The dog was three inches from my head when he let out with this full-throat war cry of doom. Also, keep in mind that he’s a tiny dog – he weighs like 10lbs and is smaller than most house cats – so it’s not like a regular sized dog’s howl. It’s as if someone took the tiniest miniature wolf imaginable, gave it several hits of helium…and then stepped on its tail. (Side note: if you like puppies, do yourself a favor and search “tiny howl” on YouTube when you’ve got like an hour or three to spare. I assure you, you will not be disappointed. Case in point. Also, that video is not at ALL what my dog’s howl sounds like, unfortunately.)

“AAAAAAA-RRRRRRRROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!! ARRRR ARRRRR ARRRR-OOOO!”

Three. Inches. From my head. After ten whole minutes of blissful silence and falling deeper and deeper into a concentrated state of mellow (which, as I’m sure you’re aware, does not come easily to those with teh ADHD and anxiety). It was like someone dumping a bucket of ice water on a sleeping person. Much spluttering and swearing ensued.

What set him off? WHO FUCKING KNOWS. It certainly wasn’t a knock at the door or a car in the driveway or any other even remotely reasonable thing. Maybe a mouse farted three houses over. Maybe the wind blew in the scent of the Dreaded Neighbor Cats. Maybe it was the exact moment when Mercury hit the 7th house of Libra with Pluto ascendant. This is legit how capricious my dog is. There doesn’t even HAVE to be a reason for him to sound the alarm. It’s like he’ll sit there and think to himself, “You know, I haven’t scared the shit out of the humans with my sudden blood-curdling howls lately. Maybe I’ll let one rip right…NOW”, and he’s off.

So, suffice to say, my mellow was harshed quite suddenly and thoroughly.

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“Not a single one of the six people that read this blog are going to believe you, Mahm. I have stolen all their souls through the Internet and turned them all against you.” -Junior T. Armitage

 

sometimes a plane is just a plane

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Saturday morning Junior was at the groomer getting his hurr did and I had two hours to kill. I knew that if I stayed in town I’d end up living out one of several scenarios:

  1. I’d go to WalMart and spend way too much money on a bunch of shit I didn’t need, including but not limited to make-up that I end up never wearing,
  2. I’d go to Sephora and end up blowing half the rent money on buying all eleventy billion colors of Kat Von D Tattoo eyeliner which is my new most precious favorite thing ever,
  3. I’d eat my way through half the fast food joints on the strip because clearly I hate not only my circulatory system but also my liver, brain and colon,
  4. I’d go to Pier One and spend a small fortune on wooden giraffes (you can TRY to explain to me why I don’t need like seven of those motherfuckers but I will never believe you. NEVER.)
  5. I’d go to SuperCuts and get a horrible, terrible, no good, very bad haircut.

All of these scenarios ultimately end with tears…usually mine. I know because I’ve actually done all of them, with the exception of buying the wooden giraffes.

So, instead of subjecting myself to the clearly unmanageable temptations of downtown West Lebanon, N.H., I decided I’d drive up the hill and hang out at the airport. Not like, the inside of the airport where people are waiting around for flights (though that holds a certain appeal as well, though probably better done in larger airports where more than like six people are in there at any one time and people will get creeped out by the fat lady with no plane ticket doing cross-stitch in the corner for two whole hours), but rather out in the observation…area? Parking lot? Basically, it’s the back side of the airport. There’s a big chain-link fence to keep dingbats like me off the runways, but you can park up and watch the one or two planes an hour take off / land. There’s almost never anyone else up there, at least not in the winter, so I can sit in my car cackling at ‘Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me’ and doing my cross-stitch in relative peace.

When I got to the place I normally park up, there was a jet sitting just on the other side of the fence. It was a smallish jet, what I later learned was a Gulfstream 5. I learned that by, out of sheer random curiosity, punching the registration numbers emblazoned on the tail of the jet into Google. Not only was I able to find out what kind of plane it was, but I was able to see who it was registered to and, after a little dicking around, could actually find a cataloging of all the recent flights this plane had taken.

WEIRD, RIGHT?!

This is probably a good time to remind you that my run-away imagination is built for conspiracy theories. I wish it was built for like, writing enormously popular novels or screenplays because that would be way more lucrative and life-improving, but no. It’s pretty much all conspiracy theories all the time up in my ol’ cabeza.

So, when I was sitting there seeing all these details for the flights of this plane come up (on my PHONE, no less. We live in the future and it’s a magical place, people!), of course my brain was starting to rub its figurative little hands together, going “Yes, I can work with this. YESSSSSS.”  Pretty soon I was Googling the company that the plane was registered to (some kind of crazy hedge fund investment firm thing in Manhattan), and coming up with all kinds of far-fetched reasons why rich Manhattan-ite investment bankers would be flying a private plane to East Desolation, N.H. in the middle of January (which, trust me, is NOT the time you want to be here unless you’re a skier. Or a polar bear. And even then, your judgement is suspect). Everything from shady investment deals to covert extra-marital get-aways to a corporate team-building workshop (‘come survive the wilds of New Hampshire in the middle of January with nothing but the clothes on your back, a book of matches and three tins of Alpo’) bubbled up from the dregs of my imagination and it was altogether entertaining.

Later on when I got home and told Mark about my adventures in low-level phone-based Internet sleuthing, and questioned why all these people on Internet message boards would be talking about THIS SPECIFIC PLANE unless it was A VERY IMPORTANT PLANE, he totally burst my bubble. Turns out plane-spotting is a big hobby, just like train-spotting – people hang around airports and take note of the tail numbers of planes they see on the tarmac, then post the details on the Internet so that other people can “track” the planes. There’s even an app you can buy that lets you input the tail numbers and plot all the plane’s flights on a map.

So, fuck it. Next time I have to wait for the dog to get his hair cut, I’m totally buying myself a wooden giraffe. Maybe two.

 

giraffe

You cannot even fathom the dog-propelled chaos that would ensue if I brought this home. Junior would alternately try to hump it, chew on it, and refuse to come into the room where it resided, out of sheer terror. I need like…three.

 

 

 

 

Mexican candy

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The other day one of my co-workers sent an email out to the office saying that there was a bunch of Mexican candy in the kitchen if anyone wanted to try some.

My first thought was, “I wonder if that’s a euphemism for heroin”.

My second thought was, “That’s probably insensitive. Good thing I didn’t say it out loud”.

My third thought was, “Why am I still sitting here talking to myself when there’s free candy?”  And with that, I was off down the stairs like a shot.

Turns out co-worker was being extremely literal – it was actual candy from Mexico that a family member had sent him for Christmas. There were little chocolate chew things, some rolls of fruity gummy stuff, and these quite lovely caramel disc things that were sandwiched between Communion-esque wafers.

There were also some crazy peanut butter marzipan things that looked for all the world like peanut butter fudge, except that really they were just compressed powdered peanut butter and marzipan, so when you’d go to break a piece off it would crumble into a pile of delicious dust in your hand. I completely do not understand the logic.  If you want to sell tons of candy, shouldn’t you make it easy to consume, especially on the fly? There’s no way you could eat one of these peanut butter things on the go. You’d get covered with sugary peanut marzipan dust and everyone would look at you super weirdly when you sat there at a red light trying to lick all the delicious candy dust off you arms on the way home from work. And don’t even get me started on kids trying to eat a candy like this. No sane parent would ever let their kid into the house with loosely compressed clods of sugary peanut butter dust that disintegrate with merely a stern look. You’d be finding thin films of peanut butter dust on every surface for weeks. Which, I guess if no one is around to see you lick it up then you have nothing to worry about, but still.

Anyway. Back on track.

There was one other kind of candy in the pile. These things:

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Mmm, hot and salted. Two qualities I always look for in a candy. And life, really.

The description on the wrapper was so weird that I couldn’t resist it. Like a moth to a flame, I grabbed one and peeled back the wrapper. The texture was something like a less chewy version of fruit leather. I broke a little piece off the corner and sniffed it. Hmmm, raisin-y! I was super skeptical of the whole “hot and salted” thing advertised on the label, but in true How Bad Can It Go spirit, I popped it into my mouth anyway.

At first taste, I was screwing my face up and saying I didn’t like it. It was sour and weirdly salty and sweet all at the same time (though I didn’t get any heat from the chile in it at all, and usually I’m overly sensitive to chiles). I totally wasn’t into it. I didn’t spit it out, but I set the candy aside and kept kind of side-eyeing it suspiciously for a while.

However, not one to be bested by a confection, Mexican or otherwise, I eventually broke off another little piece and tried it again.

And now, I might be addicted. These things are bizarrely delicious. There’s something about the sweet-salty-sour combination that ends up giving the impression of savoriness. I mean, it’s not like eating a piece of steak type savory, but all the flavors end up balancing each other out and it’s just…good.

Weird.

But good.

(Like me! Heh.)

potential pork disaster

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I’ve explained before why I chose to call this blog, “How Bad Can It Go”. The short version is that, basically, I have two modes:

  • Hyper-analytical super overly cautious mode, where I come up with every completely unfeasible nightmare scenario imaginable and either completely talk myself out of doing everything or just totally paralyze myself with doubt, and
  • Impulsive mode, where I just DO shit (usually weird and/or inadvisable shit), with the mantra “how bad can it go?” playing over and over in my head.

The impulsive side of me is definitely the more creative side. Impulsive me starts a blog, for instance! Impulsive me randomly embroiders rainbow pterodactyls and makes up narratives to go with squirrel pictures. 

When I’m cooking, sometimes the impulsive side of me takes over and I end up creating masterpieces. Other times, I just create messes.

Tonight’s cooking, I fear, could go either way.

I got an Instant Pot for Christmas. It’s an electric pressure cooker, essentially. It does a bunch of other stuff too, but the part with the steepest potential learning curve is the pressure cooking part. Cooking under pressure doesn’t work like regular cooking. There are adjustments to cooking times, ratios of liquids to solids, and all kinds of other happy horseshit that I frankly haven’t bothered to read up on yet (which, if you know me at all, does not surprise you in the least). Point being – you can’t just take a normal recipe and put everything in the Instant Pot exactly like you would a regular pot and expect it to actually, you know, work.

So, tonight when I started just randomly throwing things into the Instant Pot, I may have set myself up to find out just how bad it CAN go.

I don’t think it will blow up. Let’s get that cleared up right now. I also don’t think it will catch fire…definitely another plus.

Am I entirely sure whether the 3lbs of pork I put in there with two cans of tomatoes, half a can of green chiles, a whole bunch of spices and a little water will actually turn into chili in the randomly selected time I set it to cook for, though?

Mmm…not so much.

But like I said, I’m pretty sure it won’t blow up, at least.

 

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“Mahm, don’t wake me up unless it’s edible. For serious.”

 

 

 

things I’ve told myself recently

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This is also known as my “some day list”, because most of the time when these things pop into my head they’re prefaced by the phrase, “SOME DAY when I’m (rich / famous / in better shape / truly run out of fucks to give / drunk off my ass / fill in the blank)”.

  • Some day I’m going to hire a maid to come in two days a week and clean my house.  I wouldn’t ask her to do gross stuff like clean my husband’s hairballs out of the bathtub drain or exorcise the science projects out of the back of my fridge, but everything else would be fair game. The problem with this plan is that Junior The Dog would lose his sweet tiny ever-loving mind from stranger danger if someone he didn’t know came to the house while we were gone. Or even while we were here. So basically, if I ever want a maid for real, I’m going to have to figure out how to take my dog to work for a half day twice a week (not happening – last time he went to work with me he shit in my boss’s office), or I’m going to have to start tranquilizing him twice a week (probably also not happening. Probably.)

 

  • Some day I’m going to own a house of my own rather than renting, and I’m going to paint the rooms whatever weird-ass colors I want. To be fair, our landlord is pretty easy-going and he probably wouldn’t balk if I wanted to paint walls weird colors in our apartment – the last tenants had blood-red walls in their bedroom, in fact. When we came to look at the place, everything looked totally normal and chill until we got to the bedroom and then it was like, instant bordello. But not in a good way. If you see what I mean. Anyway, I want my own house for a variety of reasons, but chief among them is usually my desire to have things like a lime green bathroom and blue living room walls and stuff.

 

  • Some day I’m going to live somewhere where the driveway is not an icy death trap of doom every winter. This one is pretty much wishful thinking in New England, honestly – even the nicest, most well-maintained driveways end up with a layer of frozen slush and hate caked to them at some point in the winter here. Unless I want to cough up beaucoup bucks for one of those crazy heated-driveway setups, I’m destined to always be disappointed on this front.

 

  • Some day I’m going to develop good habits, like washing my face before bed, writing every day, not automatically adding “fuck” to every other sentence when I’m speaking aloud, cleaning up after myself as I cook rather than just piling all the dirty dishes in the sink and pretending I don’t seem them for the next three days, exercising on a consistent basis, not drinking as much…they all sound good in theory but none of them are very fun in practice so I’m basically doomed to never achieve any of them.

 

  • Some day I’m going to hang up a coat rack so that we stop just dumping our coats and sweatshirts and other outer-wear paraphernalia on the kitchen chairs when we come inside. This one is probably the most do-able of the whole list, to be fair.

 

  • Some day I’m going to go through all my dishware and silverware, take an inventory, figure out what pieces I’m missing and buy them. I literally have three soup bowls to my name, only two of which match, and one of which is structurally unsound and will some day crumble and dump boiling hot soup all over me. Also, another example of how bad it is: my mom actually bought butter knives and put them in my Christmas stocking this year because when my folks were over for Thanksgiving and mom was setting the table she could only find two butter knives. I replied that yes, we only have two, and she just couldn’t wrap her mind around why we didn’t have a full set of them. I explained that, you know, sometimes things need to be pried out of other things and butter knives get bent and then they have to be thrown away. Or like, sometimes you REALLY need to chip the ice off your windshield and you can’t find your scraper and you’re already late for work and the butter knife is the first thing you think of and then you forget to take it back inside. Stuff happens, and butter knives sometimes pay the price.

 

eye

Some day I’m going to remember to shut the bedroom door before I do my eyeliner so that things like this don’t happen when the dog starts barking at a squirrel out of nowhere, making me jump and stab myself in the eye. And worse, screw up my eyeliner.

when squirrels collide

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If you’re not familiar with the Powerman 5000 song, “When Worlds Collide”, the title of this post isn’t going to be nearly as funny to you as it is to me. That’s ok, I’m used to being mostly just hilarious to myself.

Anyway.

Happy 2016! I hope your celebrations were all that you wanted them to be. We’re pretty low-key on the New Years front around these parts. First of all we live in the sticks so there aren’t really any bars or clubs within reasonable driving distance to go to. Second of all, Hubs and I are both pretty antisocial, so the idea of going somewhere where there are a bunch of drunk revelers in close quarters is…unappealing at best. At worst, it makes us run and hide. Or fake illnesses. Or work ourselves into states of ACTUAL illnesses. No matter which way you slice it, it’s not good. So, instead of braving the crowds, we stay home and watch movies or play games. This year we were lucky enough to have some friends over to hang out with, which was great. There was much eating of delicious foods, drinking of booze and laughing until faces hurt. And that was just me! Everyone else had a good time too, though. At least, that’s how it seemed as I polished off an entire bottle of pinot noir. Wine goggles for the win.

Anyway…back to the squirrels.

We had a snow storm the other day, so the squirrels and birds have been filling their faces like crazy lately. Yesterday when I got home I noticed that my feeders in the back yard were empty, but I was on a tear to get a bunch of food cooked before guests arrived so I completely forgot to fill the feeders before it got dark out. This morning as I was standing there waiting for the kettle to heat up, I looked out the window at the feeder and there was a squirrel on top of it, forlornly trying to scrape up some of the cracked corn that had gotten wet from the snow and then frozen to the wood. Wracked with guilt, I turned the kettle off, put my boots on and went straight out to refill the feeders.

After I’ve filled the feeders it takes a few minutes for the birds and squirrels to decide the coast is clear and come back to them. When I put the feeders up I’d been hoping that the critters would all flock to me like a fat redneck rainbow-haired Cinderella, but it has yet to pan out. Anyway – I stood there in the kitchen waiting for the kettle to heat up AGAIN, when the squirrels finally sounded the all-clear and came back to gorge themselves. At first, it was innocent enough:

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“Morning, Bob.”  “Morning, Phil.”  “Sunflower seeds AGAIN?”  “Yeah, that cheap bitch is withholding the suet nuggets, apparently.”

But then, things got heated in a hurry:

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“So Bob, I was wondering if maybe I could be the inside squirrel today.” “No.”

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“But Bob, you’re ALWAYS the ins-” “Did I fucking STUTTER, PHIL?”

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“Maybe we could BOTH be inside squirrel today? Maybe we could share the seeds?” “EN GARDE! I’ll let you try my Wu-Tang style!”

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“Ok, ok, I just think there’s probably enough room for both of us…” “EEEEE-YAAAAHHH! HE, HE, YEEEE-AAAHH! WAAAAUUUGGGGGH!”

 

Phil was summarily evicted from the feeder after that. Whether determined or simply somewhat dim, he remained undaunted though! He came back a little while later for more abuse which I recorded and you can see here (WordPress won’t let me embed the video – apparently I need to pay for that or something).

Poor Phil. I wish I could figure out a way to make him his own feeder so that he could sit in it stuffing his face with suet nuggets while flipping Violent Bob the double bird.

Some day, Phil. Some day.

 

well that’s…disappointing

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Ever one to leave things until the absolute last minute, I just bought my husband another Christmas gift on Amazon. Even with the super-duper-omg-rush shipping it won’t arrive until Saturday, but it’s the thought that counts, damn it!

Anyway.

A couple minutes after I placed the order I received the customary “hey you just placed this order” email from Amazon. A moment later ANOTHER email popped up entitled “Your Amazon.com Promotional Credit”.

OOOoooo! Promotional credit? How EXCITING!

It only took half a second for visions of sugarplums and new embroidery swag to start dancing in my head. Then I started reprimanding myself, pointing out that I should use the credit to buy something responsible like vitamins.

The sugarplum-obsessed side of my brain began to whisper sweet sultry nothings about the new pots and pans I’ve been thinking about getting. The responsible side scolded about boring shit that ran the gamut from compact fluorescent light bulbs to laundry soap.

I clicked on the email, all excited to find out how much new stuff Amazon was about to let me acquire for free, and scanned the email for a dollar amount.

No numbers? WEIRD. I read it again, more carefully.

“Purchase has qualified me for promotional credit, blah blah, yes yes…credit added to my account…but how much ISSSS ITTTTT? Can be used toward the purchase of…a digital HD copy…of Kung Fu Panda on Amazon Video.

…Oh.”

The visions of pots and pans and sugarplums and free laundry detergent all melted like the Wicked Witch after a judicious application of water. SIGH.

I mean…I don’t have anything against Kung Fu Panda. I saw it when it came out but it isn’t something I’ve ever felt the need to watch again in the SEVEN AND A HALF YEARS since it was released.

I wonder if I can redeem the credit and then send the copy to someone else as a gift. Do you want a digital HD copy of Kung Fu Panda? I might be able to make that happen.

 

panda

I share many traits with pandas, including body shape and general disinterest in physical activity.

 

 

 

 

amateur proctology for fun and profit

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I’ve been dealing with a funk lately, and one of the things the funk has decided to preoccupy me with has been failure. Failure to write, failure to keep up with household tasks, failure to take good care of myself and those that I love, failure to get shit done at work. You name it, my brain will figure out a way that I’ve failed at it and then proceed to make me feel terrible about it.

So, while I was sitting here this afternoon, mentally beating myself up over being a failure in all things, I finally thought, “You know what? Fuck it. I’m going to write. I don’t even care what comes out. I’m going to write it and I’m going to post it, and the Internet can suck a dirty donkey dick if they don’t like it”. That, of course, was false bravado, because after about 150 words the funk refused to be ignored further and proceeded to remind me that I’m a gigantic failure because I actually DO care what the Internet thinks about what I post.

As an aside, one of my habits while reading and writing is to look up words to make sure that they mean what I think they mean. This habit was partially born out of my annoyance at a former boss who used to say dumb shit like “that’s a mute point”, with no idea what the words he was saying actually meant. Although I know it’s sort of hard to tell from reading my F-bomb-riddled blog posts, I’m a certified vocabulary whore.

So, in my building panic about being a praise-seeking suck-nut, I opened up a new tab in Firefox and started looking up words for, essentially, praise-seeking behavior. This of course led me to the word ‘narcissism’ and the related psychological definition, and I sat reading with mounting horror what seemed like a near-definitive description of myself. From there, I started reading articles about how people become narcissists, what can be done to help them get over themselves, etc. I was in full-on psychological self-diagnosis mode and was getting ready to start looking up phone numbers for therapists. Things were looking BLEAK.

At that point, I noticed something down at the bottom of the page on the original description of narcissism that had prompted this snowball effect of self-diagnosis. There was a note I failed to see during my first, second and even third read through. It said, in essence, “Almost everyone will recognize some or all of these qualities in themselves when presented with this list. Self-diagnosis is dangerous and you shouldn’t do it. You’re probably fine, really…but if you think you aren’t, talk to someone about it rather than just sitting there assuming you’re the living embodiment of awfulness”.

I embellished, but you get the idea.

A light clicked on in my brain at that point. Sure, I have my funks and my self-esteem issues. I’m a perfectionist sometimes, and I DO seek praise from others sometimes. But…so do most other people. It’s called BEING HUMAN. All humans are a little bit narcissistic, otherwise we wouldn’t have survived as a species.

And just like that, my head slipped right out of my ass without even the slightest strain. I blinked at the bright light of the outside world, and once I realized what had happened, I started to laugh.

Because really, if you can’t laugh about something as personal as your own brand of crazy, you’ve probably got your head pretty far up your ass.

 

head-ass

I smell a new cross-stitch design coming on.

sugar therapy

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This week has been kind of shit-tastic. Mass shootings, Republicans trying to de-fund Planned Parenthood for like the 85th time, bad weather, fuckery at work, on and on.

Normally my strategy for dealing with stress like this is to drink, in case you hadn’t noticed. I’m not saying it’s a GOOD strategy…but, you know, it’s better than some.

Anyway.

I had already decided this afternoon that an adult beverage or two was in order this evening. Then, on the way home, a brilliant plan struck me: why not drink…AND build a gingerbread house! My husband was going to be out playing cards with his buddies so it was a perfect opportunity to have a dinner that he’d totally hate, then crack a bottle of wine that he’d also hate, and make a huge sugary mess on the kitchen table.

SOLD!

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Sugar and wine! How bad can it go?

It should be noted that this kit came with directions. I didn’t READ the directions until much later in the process…but it DID come with directions. Good for Hasbro, trying to make things easier for people. The kind of people that read directions before getting halfway through something and realizing they might have fucked up, anyway.

It turns out that what you’re SUPPOSED to do is apply the icing and construct the house first, THEN use the rest of the icing to apply candy decorations.

My problem with this plan is as follows: who the FUCK other than professional bakers who work with piping bags on a regular basis can pipe icing decorations onto a surface at a frigging 90 degree angle?

Not THIS bitch, that’s fo’ sho’.

So, rather than follow the prescribed order of operations, I applied Shelby Logic and did what I fucking wanted. Incidentally, this may be a large part of why I failed Algebra three times in high school as well.

Shelby Logic says that decorating the walls of the house while they’re still flat on the table makes WAY more sense, so that’s what I did. I decorated THE SHIT out of all four walls, then I went to stick them together in the little tray that comes with the kit…and started to realize the possible error of my ways.

It turns out that the reason they have you stick the walls together in the tray first is because you can’t lay an already-decorated piece of gingerbread decorated-side down in order to apply the frosting for the joins, and it’s actually surprisingly hard to apply the frosting evenly with one hand while holding said piece of gingerbread up with the other. Especially when one has been drinking. Also, there’s the fact that if you do it the “right way”, the joints have time to harden up before you put the roof on, which saves a lot of panicking about the whole structure caving in when you insist on trying to spread icing flat across the roof parts later on.

Ahem.

Anyway, I channeled my inner Tim Gunn and made it work:

IMG_20151203_191809432_HDR

As Tim would say, “that’s a LOT of look”.

It’s a little rickety in places, but it’s not like I’m gonna be playing Gingerbread Barbie with it or anything so I think it’ll be ok.

And you know what? People are going to be dicks, stuff is going to go wrong, bad things are going to happen…but it’s ok. Life goes on.

And gods willing, I won’t have a hangover tomorrow.