Nom or Vom: Yoo-hoo that burns

December 6, 2011 3 Comments read Nom or Vom

I’ve heard that red wine and chocolate compliment one another. I’ve heard of wines that have a chocolate note, and dessert wines. Chocovine has taken these things and applied the “if some is good, more is better” logic that has worked so well for purveyors of bacon and developed a chocolatey milky thick semi-wine-like substance. It’s chocolate milk, but for adults! It’s BoKu without Richard Lewis! It’s Yoo-hoo that burns! It’s the bacon of chocolate!

Pros: The color is the same as the chocolate river that Augustus Gloop nearly drowns in, and anything that brings to mind the idea of a naughty child in mortal peril brings a sparkle to my eye. Their website indicates that it is the “#1 selling chocolate wine in America” (incidentally, I have the number one comedy blog written by a Mellzah). If you were in the middle of a desert dying of thirst, this would probably stave that off for a little while, though the booze would dehydrate you a little further and might give you a wicked case of drymouth so, you know, weigh your options. The videos on the website are funny, in a “We’re trying much too hard to be hip” kind of way, especially with that jazzy sex and the city style music in the background.

Cons: Probably not classy to bring the equivalent of an adult milk box as a hostess gift. They really emphasize using this product in cocktails, which defeats the purpose of calling it wine: wine exists so you don’t have to think about stocking a billion different mixers before a party. Sweet booze is already a road to Headache City, and they want you to blend this already sweet booze into boozy sweet milkshakes? Better set up an appointment with the toilet, you’ll be getting to know it intimately after a few of those. Who has ever had a glass of chocolate milk and thought “You know what would make this better? Heartburn!”

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An Evil What?

November 8, 2011 9 Comments read Everything is Terrible

I’ve long suspected that there is an evil puppeteer pulling strings in my brain behind the scenes, working to make certain aspects of my life as miserable as possible. Getting sick when it’s least convenient? Evil puppeteer. Low self-esteem thoughts just before having to do some manner of public speaking engagement? Evil puppeteer. However, the field in which it performs its best (worst) work is ladybusiness.

I first began to suspect the presence of the evil puppeteer in the summer of 2000. I had just graduated from high school, and my family had moved across the country three weeks before I was scheduled to fly overseas for a year. After a lot of “never going to forget you” melodramatic teenage sex in Wisconsin, in California I realized that my period was late. Very late. And there I was, trapped in my grandparents’ home with no social network to speak of, parents who didn’t know I was sexually active, no way to get my hands on a pregnancy test, and no way to privately take one if I HAD managed to get one. I left for Taiwan, fully convinced that I’d be bringing home my parents’ three-month-old grandchild by the time I returned. The day after I arrived in Taipei, I got my period, and had to pantomime to my new host parents that I needed tampons. There’s really nothing like bridging a culture gap by sticking an imaginary plug in one’s vagina in front of people you’ve known for less than twelve hours, especially when you barely know the word for “hello” and the people in question may suspect that you’re looking for male companionship instead of sanitary products. I concluded there was some sort of evil presence in my brain, trying to mess with me as much as possible, though I was relieved about the whole not being knocked up thing.

The evil puppeteer (let’s call him Balthazar) has been messing with me more lately. Sensing that one of his final ladybusiness opportunities was coming in August, Balthazar yet again convinced me that I was pregnant, days before my operation, sending Jason out to the store to buy pregnancy tests while I cried and chugged water at home. When the test came up negative, I cried some more relieved tears and then immediately started my period. At least no pantomime was involved this time.

Since I’ve had my tubes tied, I thought Balthazar would have less power over me, but so far this does not seem to be the case. If things were proceeding on schedule, I was supposed to get my period just in time to ruin our Halloween Horror nights trip to Los Angeles…and it seemed like it was going to start, but then stopped suddenly. Tubal pregnancies aren’t entirely unheard of, so I took a pregnancy test when we got home: negative. Balthazar had evidently decided that wasn’t the event he wanted to ruin. Instead he was shooting for the next weekend, Carrie’s wedding, in which I was set to be a bloated bridesmaid. Things ramped up, but when her wedding got canceled, they stopped. I took another pregnancy test: negative. Balthazar then could have taken the easy way and tried to ruin Halloween weekend, but in his evil wisdom, he realized that if he held off for just one more week, he could wreak even more havoc: he could ruin our one year anniversary. So, sure enough, three weeks late and the day before our anniversary, he threw the gears in motion and unleashed the worst period I’ve had in years. Cramps so painful I could hardly breathe without moaning, so bad I couldn’t sleep, so bad I had to keep a heating pad strapped to me at all times. The day of our anniversary, I was determined to get dressed up and enjoy the fancy dinner we’d been planning on having, so I tried to kill the cramp pain with some of the pain pills I had leftover from my surgery. While they didn’t take away the pain, they did make me nauseated, leaving me dry heaving and crying over the toilet an hour before we were supposed to leave, weeping that I still wanted to get dressed up and go because it wouldn’t be the same if we celebrated on any other day. So we did get dressed up and went to dinner at John Howie Steakhouse. I was only able to have a few bites of everything since Balthazar clenched my stomach every time I took a bite of anything, but I can tell you that tempura fried bacon is amazing, lobster mashed potatoes are equally so, and the only way I can explain why my steak was so tender was that the cow it came from must had died of happiness. I wasn’t feeling up to having any dessert, but the waiter insisted and sent us home with some meyer lemon pie and chocolate truffles, since he felt we could not properly celebrate an anniversary without it. Even the leftovers the next day were amazing.

Screw you, Balthazar.

Yo dawg, I heard you like cities so I put a city in your city

October 26, 2011 2 Comments read Attractions, California, Masticating With Mellzah, Pacific, Travel, USA, West

We took the free tram from the Sheraton Universal to Universal Studios, and were dropped off at CityWalk. Now, I’d seen the sign at the entrance of the park calling the place Universal City, but I thought they were being cutesy and calling their combination of two hotels and one theme park a city: the same way a Rite Aid, a mexican restaurant, and a Sally Beauty Supply somehow constitutes a mall. I really had no idea. Universal City itself is enormous, offering tons of dining, shopping, and entertainment options, with the Gibson Ampitheater throwing free concerts nightly. They even have an indoor skydiving facility! Had I known, we could have taken the tram the first night and skipped Hollywood Blvd…but I didn’t, so we took what limited time we had before the park opened to explore and wolf down some food. And by wolf down some food, I mean deep throat a sausage so quickly that it made Michele Bachmann look like an amateur.

I didn’t want to do much shopping, or rather, I saw a ton of things I’d want to own to wear/consume if only it wouldn’t have meant carrying it all around for the next seven hours at the park, but we decided it wouldn’t be too much effort to stuff some candy into our pockets from IT’SUGAR–especially if we found some awesome exotic candy. By exotic, I mean something we haven’t seen or tried before, instead of a giant version of something familiar (2 pound Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup, I’m looking at you!). Inside, they had a statue of Marilyn Monroe made entirely of jellybeans, and toothbrushes at 50% off:

The store was mostly full of candy you could get anywhere, but I did manage to find something I’d never seen before: Milk Chocolate Pop Rocks. Well, two things, but I’m saving the second for a nom or vom after this post. Is this really it? At twenty-nine, have I already exhausted all of my candy options?

Now that I’ve tried the pop rocks, I can safely say that I’m not a fan. In order for them to pop, you have to keep a mouthful of melted chocolate in your mouth long past the swallowing point, making them sort of awkward to eat. I don’t want to swish candy around in my mouth like wine. I’m really not even pretentious enough to do it with wine. The order of things is: put it in your mouth, enjoy, swallow. Not: put it in your mouth, wait for it, wait for it, wait for it….wait for it, enjoy, swallow. I’m a busy girl who needs instant gratification candy, lest I throw myself onto a shop floor in a delayed gratification tantrum.

After buying our candy, inhaling our sausage, and drinking an unwise amount of fluids immediately before attending an event that’s supposed to be pee-your-pants levels of scary, we found ourselves out of time and rushed off to the park entrance for the start of Halloween Horror Nights.