Y’all, yesterday was not a good day for reasons that a) you already saw on Facebook if you know me in real actual person life or b) will not hear about right now because I am maintaining an Air of Mystery.
Hahah, ugh, being kindly let down and still kind of disappointed? The worst! We’re trying round two today, so fingers crossed.
But I will not leave you hanging, readers. Instead, I’m going to tell the story of how I remembered why I cannot be in departments other than my own for more than like 20 minutes.
Thanksgiving is over and done with, huzzah! It is absolutely my favorite holiday (stuffing + sweet potatoes + getting slightly overdressed without traveling), but this one was a doozy. High points this year included the truly ridiculous cherry pie that we impulse-bought from Southern Sweets, which I swear to god weighted six pounds. Low points included the fact that my dad tried to get us to go to Cracker Barrel instead of cook, which… no. Plus two members of our four-person party were sick, one couldn’t eat, and things were generally Not As Usual.
Still, though: pie.
As I was noting with a friend a week or two ago, this has been a memoir year. It sucks while it’s happening, but you get the sense that in a few years you’ll be able to spin something out of it into your memoirs.
I know this will happen, because most of my favorite stories (the time I headbutted the piano, the time I got dumped via GChat and then had to go to a birthday dinner, the time I turned 20 on a roof with a giant inflatable nautilus and a bunch of people from the internet) actually involved me crying at some point during them, despite the objective hilarity of the proceedings in retrospect. Continue reading →
This weekend, I managed to dance along to a room full of people who jumped so enthusiastically that you could feel the floor flex a good six inches. It was a great deal of fun.
The floor-creaking incident happened at the Macklemore show at the Masquerade I hit with a couple of friends this weekend. Given that Macklemore puts together a strange Seattle rap-dance hybrid, I wasn’t totally sure what to expect from the show (my usual concert bands are along the Avett Brothers/Decemberists continuum, and no one dances because of feelings).
Two songs into the set, Macklemore noticed one of the folks wearing thrift shop coats and asked to borrow it. It was duly passed up, and he broke into the one track off the album that every drunk college kid in the audience knew by heart. There was jumping and lights and at one point Ryan Lewis, Macklemore’s producer, climbed on an air vent and jumped into the audience. It is rare that I see skinny little white dudes from Seattle leap from the ceiling.
Oh yeah, I also performed in this year’s Emory Drag Show. So that was a thing.
So, I may still be playing Christmas music on loop in my (fixed!) car, but this weekend managed to cheer me up at least a little bit. This was due in no small part that I (hold on to your hats, here) went to a street festival over the weekend–Cabbagetown’s own chili cook off/excuse for bluegrass, the Chomp and Stomp.
Though I didn’t partake in any of the chili, I was in the minority. The way the festival was set up, interested folks paid $5, bought a spoon, and walked around to any of the kajillion chili booths to receive a cup of whatever they were serving. One street had restaurants serving up their versions, and another had individual competitors. It would have been impossible to try everyone’s without exploding, I think–there were easily 40 booths on each street.
Since I passed up the chili, I snagged some cheese tamales from my family’s favorite Mexican restaurant in town, Mi Barrio, allowing me to continue the weekend food theme of cheese ‘n carbs. Most of the Mexican food in Atlanta can’t hold a candle to what you can find literally anywhere in Oklahoma, but Mi Barrio is certainly a contender. Plus, it was $5 for two large tamales, which is pretty much the best thing. Continue reading →
Today we’re going to talk about Christmas music. Specifically, we’re going to talk about why I have had the first CD of Sufjan Steven’s box set on loop in my car for the past week.
So, for those of you who don’t already know this, this will require a bit of backstory. My mother was raised Jewish. My father was raised as nothing in particular, but a nothing stemming from the Methodist and Baptist traditions. This means that I have a Hebrew name and, when I lived in Tulsa, my sister and I were the only two Jews at school. We got to explain Hanukkah to our classmates. This was made weirder by the fact that, in my family, Hanukkah was celebrated at the same time as Thanksgiving.
There is some longwinded family scheduling lore behind this, but the basic facts were this: Thanksgiving and Hanukkah happened at the same time for child-me, and they were followed by Christmas with my dad’s family. This worked pretty well.
Dances With Nerds 