The Fab Disaster

People are always emphasizing the importance of moderation. “Don’t go out too much,” they say. “Don’t watch too much TV.” But as we know by now, moderation is not my strong-suit, nor do I find it remotely interesting. And if there is one thing I love more than drinking too much, it’s television. 

I’ve spent a good chunk of the last few days absorbed in Gossip Girl, which recently became available on Netflix instant. My interest came as somewhat of a surprise, since the show’s debut at the end of my high school years made me nauseous at the time, but having rated over 1000 movies on Netflix (a number which I am sure qualifies me for at least one rehabilitation program) and being physically addicted to the sexual tension that drives television drama, I decided to give it a shot. Immediately, as I should have guessed, I became enamored with all those rich, beautiful, disgusting people, the places in New York I will never go, that Brooklyn loft I won’t be able to afford, Blake Lively’s speech impediment, and Penn Badgley’s existence (which I subsisted on for the entirety of last Spring by re-watching Easy A over…and over…and over. What, it’s well written). 

Even Joe was almost moved to tears during the Christmas episode in Season 1 where Serena gives Dan the gift of fake snow in his dad’s art gallery. 

Okay, so maybe being obsessed with Gossip Girl, which is kind of a silly show, when i’m kind of an adult, isn’t anything to be particularly proud of. But I find the drama, in all its tackiness, pretty fulfilling. Plus, now I know who Taylor Momsen is. 

The only other thing I love as much as television and partying (besides cats and sex and leather boots) is food. 

Every so often, between episodes, hangovers and minimum-wage job shifts, I’ll get motivated to do something entirely domestic, like organize my closet or cook a delicious meal. Monday night, the choice was to make green bean casserole for a pre-thanksgiving potluck with friends. It’s not a particularly painstaking preparation. you basically just dump four cans of things into one dish, stir, and bake. BUT I will say that i have been making this simple thanksgiving dish every year my entire life, and have a few tricks up my sleeve to perfect the recipe. 

That being said, 

no matter what you do to it,

green bean casserole is one of the most delicious foods ON THE PLANET. 

Here’s a blingee I made of it to demonstrate: 

^That cat dancing in the bottom right corner is supposed to represent me, doing my happy-as-fuck dance, because I am about to eat the living shit out of that entire thing, probably including the pyrex. 

or at least I thought I was. 

It had just finished cooling, and we were just about to load it in the car when we (I say “we” but it was really “Joe”) set it on the ledge of the front porch where it immediately toppled to the brick steps and became a pile of mush and ceramic. 

I nearly cried. Not because I had worked so hard making it. Not because the dish that broke was handmade by my aunt in the 70s. But because I was so. fucking. hungry.

It all worked out in the end, for the most part. There was an ample supply of homemade squash casserole at the potluck, and people gave me beer. Of course, I still get a gleam in my eye when I think about those french fried onions. But then I remember that Thanksgiving is tomorrow, and in just a few hours I’ll get to fill my very own horse trough with an array of casseroles, curl up in my bed, and watch as much Gossip Girl as I damn well please.

Before I begin, allow me to make it very clear that I do not actually know how to do this successfully, per se. That is, I have absolutely no idea how i manage to survive this physically trying and often embarrassing combination of all-around excess, an affliction that I am almost certain is narcolepsy, and spending a good 6 to 8 hours a day on my feet, pretending I’m someone I’m not and talking to old people. One can only “work hard and play hard,” as the t-shirts of college students everywhere have been proclaiming since the end of prohibition, for so many years before one of those things starts to suffer, if only slightly.

In my case it’s the “work hard,” because we all know I lack a certain self-control so prevalent in your successful middle-management employee. Instead, I’m that girl who went out to the monthly #NB4R at Underground on Friday night, started early so that I would get drunk early and go home early (which never works), and ended up spending all my money on long island iced teas, gripping them with such pitiful limpness that each of them was smacked to the floor by a neighboring dancer. And I still managed to get drunk enough to start a fight with my best friend in the parking lot about something that may or may not have even happened.

The next morning, I gasped myself awake 15 minutes before I was supposed to arrive for an 8 am brunch shift, and no more than 10 minutes after actually being on time, I was confronted by one of my managers.

“You smell…like you’ve been out partying.”

“Really?” I responded, in what was probably the most obviously feigned astonishment I was capable of whispering in that level of dehydration. 

“I’m only telling you because i would want to know. You need to do everything you can to find a breath mint.” 

Instead of taking that well-intentioned rude advice, I proceeded to drink 3 large glasses of iced coffee while making intermittent trips to the bathroom to wipe the smeared eyeliner from beneath my bloodshot eyes, and returned to earning tips by cleaning tables without vomiting on myself.

You all do this every day, too, right? No one needs advice here. And I can’t say that I have any to give. Oh, what I wouldn’t give for a compelling desk job right now… But something tells me I won’t be going to bed early and sober for a long, long time. 

Especially not on a damn weekend.

It began as it always does…a vision. Specifically, a vision of what costume I was going to wear for this particular event (moogfest) of this particular month. You see, most people go to places like Party City (Farty Shitty) once, maybe twice a year. Somehow our group manages to find some celebratory evening/weekend/entire week about once a month that makes it completely necessary to pillage for things like fairy wings, bunny costumes, wigs, adult diapers, vampire fangs, clown makeup and the like. 

In the last couple of years i have been a fairy 3 or 4 times, a bunny twice, Space Ghost, a skeleton, a skeleton fairy, Lil from Rugrats, a “glitter princess” (?) and something with a giant diamond on my head.

Usually though (and I tend to do this without even realizing it) I end up just dressing like the Plastics in Mean Girls, combining what’s essentially underwear with… some sort of hat. 

ANYway, it was already the wednesday before moogfest, and I was pretty sure I wanted to be some sort of Catwoman-esque creature. But of course, having left it to the last minute spent about 4 hours the next day at ~Hallowen and More~ fighting a teenage asian girl for the last slutty catwoman costume in stock, waiting in a line about 3/4 of a mile long to check out and shopping at Hot Topic. 

The last part was unrelated, I had just never been to Hot Topic before and was very impressed with their selection of kitschy promotional accessories. I also accidentally stole a necklace. 

The next morning, after finally completing my contribution to our annual “fall mix cd exchange” (we’re a cutesy bunch of dorks, aren’t we?)  and spending two hours trying to pack all of the clothes I might maybe ever need into the same disgusting duffle bag i’ve been using since high school, I ventured to Carrboro where the five of us (carlos, mary, bill, patrick and myself) departed with our ridiculous costumes and a handful of weed crumbles. 

By this time, I had been pumping vitamins and lozenges and ibuprofen into my system for about three days. There is a rule engraved in a golden tablet somewhere that every time I want to do a single fun thing ever, I have to either start my period, get seriously injured, or be overcome with a highly contagious degenerative illness. 

It is hard to really say what happened next after we got to Asheville. I remember getting to Sarah’s, being exhausted, going downtown to buy liquor and disposable cameras with Carlos in his Pinocchio costume, and that it was FUCKING FREEZING the entire time. Up until last weekend it had been in the upper 60s in the Triangle. We arrive in Asheville and immediately succumb to sub-arctic temperatures, losing what little control we had planned to have over our bodies and minds for the rest of the weekend. It was the beginning of the end. 

A review of the actual shows, written by our beloved Patrick, will be posted on brightshinymusic.com later today. The details that I remember are more ambient. Like drinking vodka out of redbull cans for three days, freezing to death on the roof of the Asheville civic center dressed like an Anime prostitute, Bill painting his beard purple and not really looking much different than his usual self, that group of people dressed up as fast food mascots…I pretended to give fellatio to Mary in the crowd of a show. Joe got kicked out of the Orange Peel and hid his “belongings” in a bush, leaving a trail of mulch to find them later. Carlos dressed as a can of Four Loko and completely lost his mind. Linnea reinvented the concept of “bondage” by making her costume completely out of tape. Bill and Patrick contracted narcolepsy, I’m not really sure what happened to Kate, and I lost what was left of my last vocal cord, sounding like a not-so-sultry, sand-eating Marge Simpson by the end of the weekend. 

Great vegan restaurants, though. 

Monday morning, after everyone else had gone home and Mary and I managed to pull ourselves out of our luxurious, below-freezing concave air mattress, we hit the road back to Carrboro, where immediately upon arrival I drove to Austin and Jesi’s, slaloming through the troves of trick-or-treaters who REFUSED to walk on the sidewalk, and changed back into my catwoman costume. I had gotten a total of 12 hours of sleep since probably thursday. I’m not one to opt out of things, but the next two miserable days of restaurant hosting seemed to indicate that maybe, just maybe, i could have missed out on dancing to Beyonce at Brewer Lane, and dancing to Beyonce and…some other mid-sized random house party…to repair what little was left of my health and dignity. But I’m glad I didn’t. 

After all, once Halloween has come, come, come, come again, and is then finally gone, it’s the pictures of your costume that really matter. 

I have to start getting ready for work in 40 minutes, and while that may seem like ample time to tell you all about the last two weeks of occurrences (starting with 15 minutes of stomping around at #NB4R, driving to chapel hill to crash (yet another) shitty house party only to ditch it and spend the rest of my drink money on this leopard print snuggie:

while also touching on every notable aspect of Moog, Halloween and my three day recovery period…

but it actually took me 15 minutes just to upload those two pictures of me and my cats to Photobucket because I couldn’t figure out the file names because Photo Booth uses wingdings and hieroglyphics as their cataloging system. How am I supposed to know what picture this is if i can’t see the thumbnail and all it says is “10-21-11 at 11.22 #2”

ARE YOU A JOKE? They didn’t teach us this in clown college. 

Anyway! Considering I didn’t know what day it was until about 2:30, and by then Alex Rose had already made a distraught Facebook status about how I hadn’t called or facebook chatted him about HIS 24TH BIRTHDAY ALL DAY. Keep in mind, at 2:30 pm where I live, it’s 11:30 in Los Angeles. Which is far too early to be crying on your 24th birthday. But 11:30 in LA for someone who gets up at 7 every day is ~appx~ the same time of day as 2:30, for someone like myself, who rolls out of bed bleary eyed at the crack of 1pm. At my very best. 

THAT BEING SAYETH

I have decided to do a small tribute to my friendship with Alex Rose. Small because after I googled and found (and then immediately read)

THIS AWESOME BLOG POST I DID ABOUT THE FIRST WEEK THAT WE LIVED TOGETHER

(basically the first ever Fab Disaster post of all time)

…i had already wasted another ten minutes. So now it’s 4 o clock, and i think i’ve got just enough time to find all the best evidence that Alex is the man, consisting of pictures i’ve taken of him and some that others have taken of us, and post them here. 

ready…set…

^^^this was right before we swung too hard on the hammock and broke the column off of the porch that it was attached to. About 50 people saw.

And now i’m late for work. 

Are you happy now?