Ten Signs You May Be in a Food Coma….

10. Your million year old great aunt has had more wine than is really healthy for ladies of that age and she is still beating you at Canasta, Monopoly, touch football, whatever you play after the family turkey orgy.

 

 (Note: my great aunt always tells me that it is physically impossible for me to be prettier, therefore she is my favorite relative. Furthermore, we’ve seen an old picture of her and she looked like a movie star. My cousin said she looked like a “sex fiend” which was a gross overstatement, and also just gross. I mean, damn Aunt Betty, keep your knickers on!)

9. There is a mostly empty plate in front of you, wiped clean of gravy and littered with the debris of green bean casserole, turkey, and your hopes of ever wearing a size 6. You don’t remember how the plate got that way.

8. You haven’t had sex for weeks (okay, months), but you appear to be pregnant. You regret not wearing something with an empire waist.

7. Your grandmother insists on cleaning your ears out with a q-tip and it comes out covered in gravy. You have gravy-brain.

6. A couch seems to have materialized underneath you. Your body is melting. You have become one with the couch.

5. You consider having a bit of a vom, just to clear some real estate in your stomach, but going to the bathroom would mean leaving the couch, which is now against your religion.

4. Your Dad/Aunt/distant relative whose name you can never remember is asking when you’re going to get married/get a job/have unprotected sex until a baby shoots out of your vag, but all you can hear is a slight buzzing noise.

3. You keep trying to lift the double bottle of Beaujolais you’ve been drinking from, but it suddenly weighs a ton. What the hell, man? You’ve been working out (no, you haven’t). Did someone put fucking bricks in the Beaujolais? What kind of arch-asshole would….wait, you may be drunk too. Go take a nap, wino.

2. Your English language skills have deteriorated to the point that you are communicating using only grunts and primitive gestures. Somehow everyone seems to know that "bluuuuuunggggleeeeegaaaaaahhhhhhhhrrrr" means "We've been watching Football all day, can we at least catch the news? I need to know if we're getting sweater weather tomorrow."

1. Your heart rate is slowing down, all of your movements feel as if you’re underwater.  Like, seriously, how much pumpkin pie did you eat? You probably have nutmeg poisoning. Go to the hospital.

 

Happy Thanksgiving from the cutest puppy ever, and from me.

But I guess it means more coming from him because he is cuter than me, no matter what my Great Aunt says.

 

 

 

About My Qualifications

 

Sorry. Not Sorry.

 

What, you may ask, is a folklorist? And where do you get off calling yourself one? Is it just a title you made up because it sounded cool and esoteric? No, but I can see why you might think that, it does sound cool as hell. Occupationally, it is someone who protects and collects oral and physical artifacts of culture. It isn’t just sitting around on a leather armchair smoking cigars and pondering Cinderella’s Mommy issues. Though, I have done that sort of thing. No cigar was involved, and the armchair was pleather. Nor is Folklore just a word that means fairy tales (or more correctly “Marchen”), it is a widely spanning discipline that incorporates elements from Literature, Art, Dance, Architecture, Linguistics, and perhaps most importantly, Anthropology. The study of Folklore is sometimes called Cultural Studies, which is more self-explanatory. Also, some find the term “Folk” to be derogatory, but that’s another post J

Though I do not collect Folklore as my occupation (I collect dust as my occupation…I’m unemployed), I still have the right to the title by virtue of my Master’s Degree in the field. I checked with my Graduate Advisor, and he said I am a Folklorist 4 lyfe. My degree took two and a half years to complete, during which time I lived in leafy Eugene, Oregon. I got fat on grass-fed meats and artisanal cheeses. I got drunk on microbrews and infused vodkas. Not a bad place to park it for a few years, though it was the sort of town where one would occasionally get a contact high just walking down the street. Good times.

 

 Damn, I miss Eugene now. Look at that foliage, damn! Damn.

 

I had two main focuses (foci?) in Grad School. First, I did a project about the discrepancy between literary and folkloric vampires, which led to other blood-sucking projects. Often Grad School itself sucks out your blood. You just have to replace it with caffeine and alcohol. Eventually, alcohol also replaces your self-esteem. After I took my Vampire studies to their conclusion, I branched out into other areas of Pop Culture, eventually focusing on Science Fiction for my thesis project “Folklore and Liminality on Battlestar Galactica and Doctor Who.” At some point, I realized, I was a scholar of sex and death and how people have rationalized their fear of those two things through culture.

 

Which is really fitting when you thing about it, because I am basically a huge perv who is terrified of everything (but seriously, I’m not scared of butterflies anymore) (still scared of sharks though). Folklore appealed to me because it seemed like the study of every instance of "deep magic" or "old ways" from the fantasy novels I loved. FYI, only one or two sported a glow-in-the-dark dragon. Of course, now I can tease these things out of almost any genre, to the annoyance of anyone who hangs out with me. With BSG and Who, it was pretty easy. We could probably categorize them more correctly as "Science Fantasy," even though, aesthetically it pioneered realism in science fiction, according to many. Ironic, if you have seen original BSG.

 

I want to use this blog to talk about some of those things, to focus on what is really cool, rather than super scholarly. But it's odds on that most of my content will be about making mug cakes, and having weird dating experiences, and the afternoon I spent walking around the National Portrait Gallery, listening to "No Diggity" on a loop. I may have danced a little more than is socially acceptable, but I'm sure everyone would have been cool with it if they knew I was listening to Blackstreet. And I didn't get kicked out, so score.

 

Victorian Tunnel of Tombs at Highgate Cemetery. Majestic and a little creepy, like I hope my blog will be. Or something.

 

 

The Best Thing to Happen This Weekend

This is a segment in which the authoress will attempt to identify the absolute best moment from her weekend. It sounded like a fun idea. We'll see.

This weekend I was at OKC pub, Mcnellie's, which, like most pubs in the Midwest, is basically a satire of pubs. But damn, do they have great hush puppies. Or as the receipt said, "Hush Pups." Which, incidentally, is perhaps the phrase I use (by which I mean holler exasperatedly) most often when I am at home.

 

But then they do shit like this and I don't mind the barking as much.

 

So, I don't remember exactly how the conversation went, but the gist was this:

 

Customer: So can I have French Fries with the fish, instead of chips?
Bartender: It does come with French Fries, ma'am.

Bless.

If there was further explanation, I don't remember because I turned to my friend and fellow anglophile and tried to pretend like we a) hadn't heard and were totally minding our own business and b) were not weeing ourselves with the effort of not laughing. It was precious.

I feel like if you know me, you probably know that chips= fries when you are in Britain. But, because we're friends, I also want to make sure you know that to the Brits, "pants" means underwear. If you mean Pants pants, then it's "trousers." So please use this information to avoid embarrassing English incidents. Or do what I do and pretend not to know so that all the Londoners lose their shit when you start talking about your pants! Mwuahahaha!


 



On Menfolk, Dating, and Getting Kicked in the Stomach by a Donkey

For me, finding an eligible suitor isn’t about staying true to a “type” or ticking a certain number of boxes on a list of desirable mate-traits, it’s about feeling something. In your heart or gut or whatever you want to call the part of your body that physically reverberates with your emotions. This came up last year in a conversation with my stepmother, in which I said that I didn’t think I could have feelings for a man who frequented, shall we say, performances of erotic dance? I didn’t mean that there is a box on my list for “NO STRIP CLUBS” I just meant that I thought it doubtful a connoisseur of those arts could really light a fire in me. But then again, I did once date the manager of just such an establishment. But the saga of Strip Club Tony is a saga for another day (he definitely wanted to pour his sugar on me, if you know what I mean). It’s not about requirements, it’s about (for lack of a better word) butterflies.

 

Funny story, I used to be mortally afraid of butterflies. But definitely not now. Of course not, silly.

 

I can only really remember this happening to me twice, as an adult anyways. Teenage me definitely reverberated with pretty much anyone on the cover of the teen mags I pretended not to peruse while in the grocery store checkout line. Especially the artist formerly known as JTT.

The first time was with this totally fratty guy from the college town a half an hour south of here. I met him on OK Cupid. By the way, it freaks me out when people refer to OK Cupid as “OKC” because that’s what we call my hometown. So when someone says “I met my boyfriend on OKC!” I’m like “How the hell did you find a boyfriend in Oklahoma City? That’s like actually finding a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow.” See? I said I was going to talk about Folklore.

But I digress. I can’t remember Total Frat Guy’s name, so let’s call him Matt. I think that might have been it. Anywhoodle, Matt and I had our first rendezvous IRL one morning at 2 a.m. after I and some other totally well behaved young ladies had given our custom to a totally not sleazy club in which I would totally still set foot (…no I wouldn’t). Following the established practices of our culture, we adjourned to the nearest International House of Pancakes as soon as the lights came up and we could actually see the faces and wedding rings of the men with whom we had been dancing. Matt and I had been feverishly texting and in a frenzy tipsiness and sugar intoxication, it was decided that he should join us at the IHOP. After my friends decided that he was unlikely to axe murder me, they left and he and I sat in my car talking until the sun came up. He was funny. I laughed, like really laughed, because I was amused and not because I know that boys like it when you laugh at their jokes. We kissed a little, which was excellente, and I was basically ready to doodle Mrs. Erin Frat-Guy on my imaginary trapper-keeper. But, as I was to discover, this guy had issues.

 

I think I had this exact one! It probably said Mrs. Erin Taylor-Thomas

We all have baggage, in fact, I will readily admit that I have a comically large amount of baggage. Emotionally, I’m basically the bimbo in the comedy movie that shows up to the airport with what we all recognize as far too much luggage. But, you know, its feelings rather than matching Louis Vuitton valises. Matt had issues that 21 year old me could not handle. Like me, he had just lost a crapload of weight and didn’t have his self-confidence sorted out. And that’s understandable. I spent two sexless nights at his place, exhilarated with butterflies and the NBA playoffs. That pleasant, gentle kiss we shared at daybreak in my car suddenly morphed into a tongue-led expedition to discover my uvula. My face felt bruised from how hard he pushed his skull against it.

 

This dejected pug in a London  bar obviously knows my pain. The struggle is real.

But I still liked him, because he had made me laugh.

He moved to Tulsa that same week and didn’t contact me for two weeks. When he did, I was too hurt to act like it didn’t matter. I’m still not sure if I did the right thing, but I guess the best case scenario would have ended with us married, 2.5 kids, etc. And then I would never have gotten my super awesome, but not apparently very useful, Master's degree, lived on the west coast, and then spent most of 2014 in London. So I’m calling it a win.

The second time that I felt the butterflies was this last March, and frankly it was more like a donkey-kick than a soft fluttering thing with pretty wings. One of the many cool things about London is that all of their top notch theatre and all of their film and television is all happening in the same place, as opposed to the NYC/ LA divide we have here in the States. So pretty much every play I saw there had an actor I recognized in it, even if it was just Lady Edith’s boyfriend from Downton Abbey who got (SPOILER ALERT) beaten to death by Nazis (or something? I really wasn’t paying too much attention by that point). After a play in the West End, I got to briefly speak to an actor I admired and deeply wanted to bang. I was terrified and wearing a red coat, which meant that my face matched my clothes (the curse of a Celtic complexion), but I knew I was going to regret it if I didn’t at least compliment him on his performance. The thought that really triggered the donkey-kick feeling was the fact that his eyes, a commonplace green on TV, were actually a pale, almost celadon color, just a few shades more chill than lime. BOOM. Kick in the gut. He was very polite, but in retrospect, my eye contact could have been a little less intense.

 

This is actor David Oakes, not the actor from the story, but very fine and LOOK HOW MUCH OF MY SHOULDER HIS HAND IS COVERING, DAMN!

 

There’s no moral to either of these stories, but they did instill in me a sense of “this is what it should feel like” instead of the feeling I usually get before dates which is abject dread. Dating is terrible. Hworf. (BTW, that is a vomit noise, if you couldn’t tell). I don’t expect New York to be any different from London in terms of dating, but of course, Hope, that fickle temptress, never seems to quite leave me.

It is arguable that writing a blog is not really the best use of my time. But whatever, everyone else has one.

I'm basically in a gorge right now. No, don't call emergency services, it's a metaphorical gorge. You see, for eight months I lived in the center of the universe (London, duh) and as you might expect, that didn't suck. I started this blog partly to tell stories about London. Hell, I wrote half a novel just to tell stories about London (that may not have been the best use of my time, either, but whatever, everyone else has written half a novel). London was one side of the gorge. Now I am in the middle of the gorge, which is Oklahoma City. My hometown. Frankly, there are a lot of bomb-ass awesome things about being here. Namely, my adorable dogs (get ready to see more pictures than you were really interested in seeing! And also my Mom, who has much cooler taste in music and movies than I do, and is the only person in my life who I don't worry secretly hates me. Shout out to my Mommy for watching Doctor Who with me the other day. That, ladies and gents is how you parent your 27 year old child.

But now the time has come for me to scale the other side of the gorge, and it is looking pretty steep. In just about two weeks, I will go to New York City to try and capitalize on all of the internships I did in London. Maybe it will be the best decision I've ever made. Maybe I will die in a gutter. Life is unpredictable. So I'm starting a blog to chronicle this point in my life in hopes that future me can look back fondly at it and think "Man, if she only knew how much fun she was about to have, she would not have been so scared." And also to chronicle the days when I have good hair. Too often it goes unnoticed.

Oh right, here's a puppy picture. First of many.