Do You Need Help to Your Car with those Broceries?

The other day I was in the self checkout line at the Walmart and I was doing what I always do when I’m in line anywhere, which is look at what other people are doing in that line. Mostly it’s not awesome. This time it was sort of funny though, because the guy in front of me was buying the most bro-ed out shit I have ever seen hanging out together in one shopping cart. To start with, he had about fifty Gatorades (the big ones), next to which were many Slim Jims (maybe five baker’s dozenses). Also he was buying multiple different products with the word MUSCLE written in bold letters across them. To simulate what this looked like, I wrote the word ‘muscle’ in bold letters for you there. Also there were a lot of red boxes, which means he was either stocking up on Weight Watcher’s Smart Ones (doubtful, as he was probably trying to build mass, judging by all his muscle goods), or he was loading up on Tyson Any’tizers. These are among the bro-est things you can eat. If you don’t believe me, take some ganders at this advertisement (Any’tizement?!):

Eat Chicken Fries! Think about sports! 10 DOLLARS, BRO, SHIIIIIIIIIT!!!!!!!!!!!!

Sports seem fairly irrelevant here. The promotion has, as far as I can tell, nothing to do with sports. You just have to buy a shit ton of chicken, and then you get rewarded with $10. Obviously, the balls are there so that bros know this promotion is plenty bro-friendly. The kicker is that I think boneless (BROneless) wings are bro enough to stand alone (aBRone). For example:

The B stands for Bro!!

See what I did there? I took out the sporting equipment and replaced it with three Susan B. Anthony-s (AnthBROny-s). Will bros still buy pre-made freeze-dried quesadillas in sprite of/because of a triple portrait of this Quaker BROad? TIME WiLL TELL.

I guess this isn’t as bad as that Dr. Pepper advertised as being ‘not for women!’, which is the worst example of a beverage discriminating against a group of people since Baskin Robbins came out with that Meat&Milkshake, which was advertised as being ‘not for Jews!’.

You’re So Welcome!!!

For what? Oh nothing, I’m just going to fucking totally help you with your New Year’s Resolution, that’s all!

Why am I not focusing on my own? BECAUSE IT’S TOO HARD. (My NYR is to pull off calling people ‘hoss’. So far every time I’ve tried I just end up sounding racist. Racist against…cowboys? I don’t know it just sounds racist.)

Last year by this time I had also given up on my resolution, which was to become the kind of person who has a lot of different mustards. I know what you’re thinking, ‘sounds easy. Couldn’t you just buy them in a store? This is America.‘ And to you I say, ‘First please stop talking like a Brett Easton Ellis character, it is terrifying; and second, you clearly DON’T GET IT.’ It wasn’t about the mustard at all, really. It’s about the lifestyle that the mustard alludes too. For instance: A guest could ask me, ‘Michela, Do you have any Champagne mustard?’ and I would reply haughtily, ‘Of course, Admiral, I have plenty left over from the feast of One Dozen Honey Baked Hams that I held last week’. I don’t want to just buy mustard, I want to be in a position to need many mustards. For my guests.

So having already failed two resolutions in a row, I feel just the right amount of qualified to help you out.

If your resolution is to lose weight, which I understand is a pretty common one, I have an excellent diet that I can recommend to you. I invented it and it’s called the Manic Housewife with Body Image Issues diet. Basically, instead of eating things that taste good, you eat only baby carrots and cheap Riesling wine. They taste awful together. The best thing about this diet is that due to the nature of the character you will be playing, there are periodic binges built-in to the structure of the diet, though to stay in character, your binges must be things you purchased for your fictional children. For example, you will have to eat a whole box of Gushers or something nuts like that. You probably won’t lose any weight (I certainly haven’t), but you will wake up every day feeling just terrible with a gross taste in your mouth!

Obviously my diet will not be enough to succeed with the resolution, you will also need to incorporate an exercise regimen. If you’re like me and you don’t like the look of all these modern gyms with their windows, I have an EGGSELLENT and needlessly complex solution for you. First you’re gonna have to apply, and be accepted to New York University. You’re then going to need to be assigned to live in the incomparable Third Avenue North residence hall, where you can take full advantage of the generously titled ‘Fitness Center’. There are only three machines and one of them is haunted (the others are broken), but there are no windows and the room has a certain dank veneer that you will no doubt find encouraging. While working out, you will be motivated to not become the human version of this room, who is the overweight ghost of a murderer whose day job is to calibrate thermostats on industrial refrigerators (which he fills with the remains of victimsOMGGGGGGGGG!!!!!).

If your resolution is to read more, then first let me congratulate you, because reading is fucking awesome and super goddamn important. I recommend that you model yourself after my go-go library-hold-placing, jet-set lifestyle. It is incredible glamorous, according to both ‘Modern Pajama Schmo’ and ‘The Weekly Hermit’ magazines. Most importantly, get on goodreads.com and friend me, because my double secret plan B resolution is to get more friends on Goodreads.

If you want to build an arsenal of interesting tales in 2012, an easy way to do this is to hitchhike and/or pick up hitchhikers. Your friends will love to hear stories from the road, everybody does! That’s why Jack Kerouac is famous, despite all evidence that he is probably a shitty friend (he just left Neal Cassidy in Mexico! What a shitty move!).

I’ve heard that getting organized is a popular resolution. This one is easy. All you have to do is get so super disorganized that your friends and family submit an audition tape for you to that show ‘Hoarders’. Then those fuckers will come and clean the shit out of your house for not even any monies. Yaht. Zee.

Apparently the most popular resolution is to spend more time with your friends and family. I’m flabbergasted that you even need to resolve to do this. Who are you spending your time with instead? Are you the Phantom of the Opera? Do you live in a network of tunnels beneath the Paris Opera and have no contact with people, friends or otherwise? Are you spending all your time with your enemies, undercover, to learn their ways as part of a revenge plot? You will never be happy. If you want to spend time with your family and friends, I recommend that you…just do…that? They probably would love to see you.

If you need any other help, just let me know.

The Really Great Idea I Just Had

This idea is struck me as being so great, that I decided to resuscitate my long dormant blog to share it with you, my family and three or four college friends who read this.

The idea came to me while I was milking the dregs out of a wine bladder that I had extricated from its box-home (incidentally, is there such a thing as ‘the dregs of boxed wine’? If there is, I’m sure that you can read about it on this website: http://bumwine.com/).

I think what really got the inventive juices flowing that enabled me to come up with this idea that I think is just so great is that someone in my dumb house was blasting Harry Belafonte’s ‘Shake Senora’, which has long been one of my favorite songs, mostly because it makes me think that anything awesome is possible. Dance with these spectral offensive linemen in my spooky Connecticut home (is there any other kind?! Am I right, Mom?!) during finals week? Of course I will be doing that. That is within the realm of possible activities, because ‘Shake Senora’ exists and is great. Some of you might not get this Beetlejuice reference, because you’re busy doing other things. (Some really rough endings to that sentence that I tried before deeming them simply too harsh to be said by someone sitting cross-legged on a bed littered with multiple former egg nog vessels (Side note: A fun thing to put on my resume/make into a TV pilot would be Egg Nog Vassal, where I describe my relationship with this seasonal beverage as being feudal and full of mutual obligations and I have to call Nog ‘my Lord’) are: busy doing absolutely nothing better with your life, and, busy not deserving to live. Obviously, these sound way too mean and I would never write them down.

I promise that I’ll tell you my great idea, but for right now just let me think a little more about Egg Nog Vassal. Maybe it is not too edgy to be the name of a mostly saxophone folk trio? No, you’re right, too edgy. That band would obviously be called Just the Sax, assuming ‘just the facts’ is a real expression and I’m not just trying to convince myself that it is for the sake of Just the Sax.

Okay here we go.

So I’m thinking what I’ll do is save the bladders from the box wines, fill them with water and sell them as incredibly inconvenient CamelBak-style hydration solutions that you have to carry like a slithery football, or, more accurately, like a fucking bag of water. You’re probably thinking ‘this doesn’t sound like such a great idea, not blog-revival great, at least’, but that’s because I haven’t told you the kicker (it’s called a kicker, because it makes you want to ‘kick in’ some start-up capital to get this idea off the ground, obviously). The kicker is that I won’t rinse out the bags, so the water that you’re drinking will taste vaguely of old $12 per 5 liters White Zinfandel.

This product can also be used as a posture de-stabilizer because if you are interested in using Fun Bladder (that is its working title) in a hands-free capacity, you will need to drape it over your shoulder and walk around pretty hunched over so that it won’t fall off when your wineter sloshes around. Wineter is obviously the name of the water and wine mixture with which your Fun Bladder is dangerously over-filled. Winter Wineter is a special edition Fun Bladder that I will release seasonally, where your wineter contains traces of a very Christmas-y mulled wine. Winetar Weiner is a promotional event where competitive hot dog eaters have to dip their dogs in wineter instead of water to scarf them down. There are no survivors.