How To Properly Prepare A Human for Thanksgiving Dinner.

1.  Start out by making a list of a bunch of humans you'd never want all in the same room at the same time, and then proceed to invite each and every one of them to your Thanksgiving dinner.

2.  Resign yourself to gorging from Thanksgiving until New Years Eve, when at that point, you will stoically join a gym, go for 2 weeks, and never return, ever again. 

3.  Thanksgiving morning: Wake up. Grunt something about "...fucking traffic".

4. Remove 9 years worth of clothing off of home treadmill in an attempt to find it for rumored post Thanksgiving workout.

5. Once shower water reaches 82º, wash human thoroughly under soapy running water.

6.  Remove any stray facial, ear, chin, nose, tongue hair that might cause human to human revulsion during Thanksgiving dinner.

7.  Carefully drape the body in clothes or circus tent that can successfully hide your soon to be, deteriorating physical state. 

8.  Transfer expensive, store-bought, world renowned bakery desserts into shitty household tupperware as to create the illusion of your baking skills and abundant Thanksgiving efforts.

9.  Simmer in traffic for 3-17 hours or until brain is tender enough to shoot anyone even looking in your direction. If you haven't done this, you haven't sat in traffic long enough, and must go back and repeat this process or Thanksgiving just isn't the same.

10.  Female humans: Spend roughly 1-4 hours rehashing and carefully dissecting every potential jab made at you at last years Thanksgiving dinner, and the year before, for no reason other than, it feels good.

11. Spend additional 3 hour car ride to dinner, berating your husband or spouse for claiming he didn't pick up on any of it.

12. To better prepare a human for inevitable snarky comments at table, 

carefully go over your "what if she says this…what if he says that" lists in the car ride over there. 

13. Always arrive on time, with homemade food, wine, flowers and a smile on your face. And half trashed if you can.

14. Upon arrival, pickle brain promptly with approximately 1/2 gallon of alcoholic beverage of your choice, to help diminish Thanksgiving awareness.

15. Look for something resembling a cornucopia, raise to lips. Pretend you're the dude from the Ricola commercial playing the Flugalhorn. Clean up fruit from floor.

16. Set timer for about 35 minutes; Time how long it will take for that one predictable asstard that's destined to try and impress us with his/her factual knowledge about the sleep inducing affects of the Tryptophan in turkey.

17. For proper digestion and retention of ones utensils, do not talk about Obama anything.

18. Lie about the hosts ability to retain the moistness and juiciness of turkey despite your Ginsu steak knife, your saliva, and 32 gnashing teeth not being able to break it down. 

19. Take unbearable friend or family members ass measurements to see if they'll comfortably fit in your oven for next years Thanksgiving dinner.

20. Be gracious and express gratitude toward people who contributed all the delicious food on the table. To all others whose food wasn't swallowable, point rudely at them and giggle.

21.  To guarantee the prompt elimination of oneself and/or visiting additional human families at the end of the night, in replace of egg nog, drink 12 raw eggs to spur on Salmonella poisoning. 

22. Take note of how annoying and misbehaved all kids are when they're not your own annoying, misbehaved kids.

23. Prepare human for dessert by discreetly unbuttoning pants while no one is looking. Refluff  shirt.

24. Using a hot oil thermometer, test gravy temperature to see if dumping it on someones lap is even worth it.

25. Observe droves of women toiling in the kitchen and the man clusters half asleep all over the couches. Observe.

26. To prevent calories and fat from adhering to stomach and thighs, eliminate plates and forks, eat cake and pastries directly from box. This is female-verified scientific data.

27. Go to the bathroom. 

28. Lift up shirt. Assess damage.

30. Stuff towels under door crack to muffle screams.

31. Be truly thankful for all your wonderful family members and friends. 

32. Walk quietly and classily toward your car. Close car door.  Start verbally throwing some people under a bus.

32.  Forgo cell phone game apps and instead spend the ride home playing connect the dots with your new cellulite dimples to pass the time.

33. Stare at brake lights. Curse turkeys.

34. Get home, go to your bedroom and pass out*****. 

*****Actually, did I ever tell you why you'll be extra sleepy and pass out ? Well, it's not because you're just full. It's mostly because turkey meat has these really high levels of this sleep inducing chemical in it that is naturally produced in our own bodies to help induce sleep. I'm not sure if you've ever heard of it. It's called tryptophan. 

:)~

~dawn 

Raising Your Own Backyard Pig

   

9 dirty socks, 8 empty, crushed bottles of Poland Spring, 7 multi colored sticky guitar picks, 6 wrinkled, stained t-shirts, 5 blankets, on the floor of course, keeping a 5 week old dried doody log company, 4 drinking glasses fused to the nightstand, 3 crusty forks, 2 empty family size bags of Doritos, an empty, archival container of chicken... or pudding, hard to tell, and probably 1 dead partridge somewhere, which I assume used to live in some sickly, withering pear tree.

This is my sons room. Well, not the picture above, but that's what it feels like. Walmart's Day After Christmas Sale.
(The anal retentive in me had to make sure you knew that.)

However, I think it's safer to assume that canoeing through the Amazon river, sans malarial shots, is less deadly than it is to embark upon a seedy journey into my son's room to change a lightbulb. Whatever the deal, I'm sure I should've called the CDC before I volunteered for helping out with something this categorically cootified.

In nature, there's a fascinating bird called the Bowerbird. The male Bowerbirds collect and artfully arrange color and object specific collections to attract a mate. And the males with the most spectacular displays in their lairs, win the female. The collections are varied things ranging from piles of nuts, heaps of specific flowers, piles of dead beetles, heaps of deer shit, and even color coordinated garbage. It's a trait fascinating for a bird from Papua New Guinea. And a borderline repulsive / heave worthy trait if you're a human. If my sons lair were the basis for any long standing relationship, it would only attract the head custodian of a hazardous waste removal company, a senior archeologist, or a herd of protozoologists. You shouldnt need tongs to clean a bedroom.

I'll try and give you a better visual: If his room were the first thing you saw when you opened the door to your house, you'd immediately smack the security alarm button, and call the cops because you'd think your house was ransacked by an irate band of bat wielding meth addicts that had a particular hankering for 2 week old ham and cheese sandwiches during their heist. And then you'd find the nearest shovel, pick it up and swing it around every blind corner you turned, hoping to bring whoever did this to their knees.

I'm a little nicer than that. I don't use a shovel. But I'd be lying if I said yelling with flailing arms, and a cattle prodder weren't involved.

A total pig sty. I have to say 'pig sty' because thats what my mom always called it, so for nostalgic reasons, filthy room must under all circumstances, equal "pig sty". I've never really hung out in an authentic pig sty, but I can promise you this; there's no loose leaf binders stuck to the walls there. And about the dried dog poop on the floor that I found-- pigs will at least eat shit. My son just leaves it there waiting for the fine art of disintegration to show us how it's done.

So on second thought, it's not like a pig sty at all, It's more like the 'after' scene of a Fall Out shelter, where someone forgot to install the door.

Bottom line is, unless you enjoy the sensation of deli meat caressing your scalp, laying on the remnants a 3 day old turkey sandwich is not an acceptable substitute for a pillow.

I guess the ability to live amongst viruses and newly unearthed species of cream colored fungi are one of those teenage milestones I just have to get used to. But how could it not bother him. You'd think that rolling over to go to sleep, and crushing nachos with your ear, or pulling up a blanket, but not being able to, because the gum and soda you spit out 6 weeks ago has welded the sheets to floorboards, would force upon him some type of personal intervention. I'm sure this is how the first Glue Trap was invented. Walking barefoot onto a teenage boys bedroom floor. Then I think, eh, stop complaining. At least it's still just gum. Innocent, little fruit scented gum. I seriously dread the day that used condoms become part of the harvest.

Thankfully, he does shower every day and spends more time coifing his coif than Justin Beiber ever did.
But showering is clearly his ploy to make his friends think that his cleanliness factor somehow infuses the rest of his life as well. And that he doesnt fall asleep on Village Bagels # 6 sandwich. Well ladies, let it be known that this cleanliness ends as soon as the last bubble encapsulating his filth goes down the shower drain. The waterlogged towels are thrown to the ground, where his wet, stanky clothes will lay for days, mulching into crop fertilizer.

So once more for clarity purposes: The showers are merely to fool the women. Not THIS woman, of course. The other ones. The ones who dont have to blow torch his underwear off the floor.

Now I don't expect a 12 or a 9 year old boy to have the same level of fastidiousness as their slightly anal retentive, moderately OCD, stain removing, rug cleaning, toilet scrubbing, sink bleaching, laundry doing, stink removing house maid of a mom does, who showers three times a day, periodically gives the vacuum cleaner attachments herbal baths, and rearranges the magazines so they stack in the proper descending color spectrum.

But I do expect him to know that when the sheets crack, it's time to wash them.

I finally decide I can't do it anymore. I walk into his room to make my last plea for cleanliness, but wearing socks now for protection. We make a truce. Sign peace treaties. Chest bump. And I walk out. I feel a cool breeze on my feet. I look down and see my socks are missing. I turn back and see that I walked out of my socks, because they're stuck to his bedroom floor. Stuck to the floor like 2 dead war flags waving in the toxic wind. Symbolic of my futile efforts.

So before I fall victim to some rare airborne e coli saprophyte, I'd like to extend an early apology: In the event of there being a sudden resurgence of the Bubonic Plague, or some other virus where your skin and appendages melt off and my kids indirectly wipe out your entire family, I'm truly sorry. I tried. I really, really did.

Thanklessgiving

Well its almost Thanksgiving day here in the United States. Some will be thankful and gracious for the food set before them. Most, however, will just be thankful they're going over someone else's house so they don't have to get off their fat asses and cook. But either way, it's a time we're all taught to take pause and be grateful for certain things we may take for granted during the rest of the year. Food, specifically. I'm assuming this means the plentiful pesticide laden foods we're all fortunate enough to grow tumors from. But oozing sores and premature deaths aside, we need to be thankful. But not to worry, I'm sure we can resume our normal ungrateful habits once the last of the stuffing leftovers are gone. Which could be upward of 6 months, so this grateful thing could potentially get a little exhausting. I better grab a pillow.

But I personally may be off the hook, You ask why. Well, I thought long and hard about this big, food on the table 'Thanks', and I'm coming up a little dry. No surprise there, dry goes hand-in-hand with cooking turkey. I know some people eat bugs, and dirty water, and pieces of their aunt if they happen to survive a plane crash and their aunt didn't. So emotionally it seems right. But when every supermarket has over 55,000 products, and every other billboard on the highway is a dancing french fry, logically, it just doesnt. That's like Paris Hilton being thankful for having 8,600 pairs of shoes. It just feels arrogant to me.

For starters, we have food. And way too much of it. And nothing we've ever hunted for. The bulk of it having more chemicals running through it than Keith Richards, and Courtney Love combined. I once read that our thank worthy food has so many preservatives in it, that autopsers actually claim it now takes longer, than ever before in history, for the decomposition process to initiate in cadavers. Hey thanks for that. That's great. I feel honored that I'l rot slower.

So thankful for that? I'm not. I'm all about the fast rot. Get it over with.

And honestly, with all the BHTs and BHAs in all this food we consume, I want General Mills / Lucky Charms to gimme my money back, for this supposed 'luck' I was brainwashed to believe in, and enthusiastically ate my entire childhood, in hopes of it resulting in a brighter future. When what they really should have added is the dancing, grey tombstone mini marshmallow at the end of their Lucky Charms marshmallow brigade to set the record straight. And I'd prefer my money in gold coin denominations glistening into a trolls pot at the end of a rainbow, because I don't feeling like waiting on line at the bank. Actually, If the horrid preservative facts stands true, I'm quite sure I'll be able to get up from my coroners table and come get it myself. So never mind. But we're supposed to be thankful for the food. Ok. Thanks for the 3,489 varieties of ketchup. I'm not sure how I'd survive otherwise.

The pilgrims were thankful because food sources were limited. And because they hunted and struggled for their food. They were making itchy underwear and womens sanity napkins out of corn husks for Christs sake. We don't hunt. We don't struggle. We don't drape our private parts in corn husks. We go to Stop and Shop and Balduccis Finer Gourmet Foods and point to entrees on restaurant menus. The whole thing seems a bit pretentious and hypocritical if you ask me.

On the other hand, if the world happened to reset itself one day, and we're back at ground zero, and I have to tirelessly hunt for 13 nights just to come up with a field mouse kill, than I'll be grateful for the field mouse. If I ended up on a desert and stumbled upon one of those little dentists cups filled with minty water, I'd be grateful then too. If I lost all my teeth and awoke the next morning to look like that 70's Farrah Faucett poster, I'd be grateful too. But for the said gluttonous amounts of biochemically engineered food and the climbing obesity rates alone, I'm shaking my head so hard I'm suffering from whiplash.

The people that should truly be thankful, are the people banking all the profits from all the unused gym memberships, the Bi-Pass surgeons, stint manufactures, antacid suppliers, elastic jeans manufacturers, and the Grave Diggers Union boys.

Don't hear that the wrong way. There are endless things I'm forever grateful for. And on every single day. Not just on the day Turkeys get executed.

I'm of course thankful for certain people in my life. I do stress certain.

I'm thankful for the reemergence of my own health, and having a healthy beautiful family that drives me to drink, and threaten their small lives. So I'm thankful for that. I'm thankful I have a steady hand and a good aim with a blow dart gun. I'm thankful for that. But I refuse to be thankful for the entire meat depatrment that drinks an IV infusion of antibiotics and steroids and e-coli for lunch, and then eats my insides, for Thanksgiving dinner. Not terribly thankful for that.

I believe in being grateful for the simple things in life, the unsung heros of the 'giving thanks' world. So that's where I shall redirect my thankful Hallmarky energies. So just so you dont think im a complete ingrate, I've decided to compile a list of small things that i'm utterly grateful / thankful for, in order to make a speedy upgraded recovery from a total ingrate degenerate, to a partial ingrate degenerate.

1. Organic Food: It tastes good. And I rot faster. Small gesture, but I appreciate it.

2. Clean Running Water: So I can turn on the faucet and drown out the sound of me peeing if someone is close by, so I can maybe retain some dignity.

3. Eyelids: When was the last time you high-fived your eyelids. Fish got shanked in this department, so I'm forever grateful that I can close my eyes when I see a squirrels brains spilled in the road or a bad grade on my kids homework. And for all the years I fake slept and pretended I was sleeping when I was married. Thank you eyelids. I'm forever grateful.

4. Straws: How else would I be able to anonymously shoot driveway pebbles at all the lame moms during PTA meetings. Forever grateful to Thomas Straw.

5. Hands: I'm grateful I have hands. How else would I be able to draw. And hold hands with losers. And talk. But a special thanks to one finger in particular for all the active involvement its taken in my communicative life. Thank you for always being there for me. Proudly standing up for me.

6. The Word 'fuck': Where oh where would I be without this. It's unconditional availability has gotten me through some pretty turbulent times. So fuckin A for that one.

7. Westport PD : All the times I've been pulled over has made me check my mirrors more ( only to see if I see them ). So I'm safer now--from Westport PD. So I'm thankful for scumbag cops.

8. Cougars: I'm so glad I'm called a cougar at my age, when I could have so easily been referred to as another less appealing, grosser animal. i.e. ' Old Flea Bag'. ( and don't get any ideas, or I'll sik my 28 year old mindless motor cross side of beef on your ass). So thank you guys.

9. My 3 dogs: It's helped me take my crap cleaning skills to new levels. I do it so fast now that I can seamlessly snatch your watch off at the same time. Don't know if you've heard, but I've actually recently been promoted to Shit Wizard. A special shout out and thanks goes out to my dog Luigis entire lower intestine. Too bad he can't hear me. The sound of him peeing under my coffee table is sadly drowning me out.

10: Corn and Callous removers: Makes Christmas shopping so much easier. Thank you Walmart.

11. Gas stations: God, I'd hate to have to wake up extra early to drill my own oil. Thank you Exxon for raping the planet for me, so I can get to kickboxing class on time.

12. Duct tape: Where do I start. Thank you, thank you from the bottom of my remotes battery compartment.

13. The Good Bacteria: Thanks for kickin all the bad bacterias asses for me. Sucks that you got that 'bacteria' stigma thing goin on in your name. That can't be good on job interviews.

I seriously hope your resume spends more time embellishing the 'good' part of your job. Anyway, you, my tiny friends, rock my biological world.

14. Nose Hairs: I can't imagine everything that would get through my nasal passageway without them flitting around up there. If I didn't have nose hairs, I could breath like 2 Coco Puffs up to my brain and drown head first in a bowl of cereal. Or on second glance, more like 2 desk globes or a couple of Penn tennis balls. So today I'm grateful that I have nose hair bodyguards that defend me against the miscreant Coco Puff riffraff.

15. The End of The Bush Era: I'm not referring to the Presidency, I'm referring to 70's womens crotch hygiene. Gone are the days. Grateful beyond words.

16. Dysfunctional Families : Without them, America's Thanksgiving, family get-togethers would be as bland as, well... turkey.

And lastly,

17. America: Because if I lived in some third world country, as a woman, I'd be so set on fire for writing this.