Twilight Remix

I'm not one of the Buffy people (though all you Buffy fans recommend it to me all the time), but I can't help but heart the Twilight movie, and this is so incredibly well done and hilarious that I couldn't resist posting. Seriously, it's funny.

Reviewed: Smart Start Original Antioxidants

I am a cereal person. I eat cereal pretty much every morning, even on weekends when we sleep late and much later slide into the kitchen to begin the happy work of pancakes and eggs and, maybe, sometimes, bacon. And this is true because secretly I've gotten up much earlier and already eaten a bowl of cereal.

For a long time, cereal was the first thing I thought about when I woke up. Sometimes I even thought about it while still sleeping, so that cereal popped up in my dreams. I'm kind of....obsessed.

But I'm that way with a lot of things involving breakfast, because writing is all about mornings that stretch way past their end. I have dozens of pajamas, different combinations to satisfy all types of temperatures, seating arrangements (working at the desk this morning? couch? a pile of pillows on the floor?), and holidays. I eat yogurt and fruit, cereal and cereal and cereal. By six o'clock, I haven't been outside all day. I go to water my plants and see that they're dying of thirst. The mail is lonely and waiting in the mailbox. I've missed a package from my mother. My legs are stiff from sitting cross-legged in a chair for hours on end.

Smart Start is one of those double duty cereals. Yummy in milk (and it's gotta be skim in cereal, whole milk in coffee) but almost better by the handful as a snack. I admit, in the morning I usually reach for Honey Bunches of Oats first. Second choice, Smart Start. Third choice, Cheerios. And when I'm sick of sugar, Basic 4.

Listen to me, people. I know about cereal. If I know anything, it's cereal! I am the sister of one girl who ate Cinnamon Toast Crunch every morning as long as I lived with her, the other who couldn't decide if she liked Captain Crunch Original with Crunchberries, or Peanut Butter Crunch better. I am the daugher of a man who mixed Grape Nuts and Cracklin' Oat Bran in a big cup with milk, who later ate tomato soup mixed with chicken soup for lunch. And my mother gave no pause when buying her kids Cookie Crisp, a cereal that is literally a bowl of cookies for breakfast.

My taste has somewhat refined since then.

(I love cookies.)

92 Stars.

Reviewed: The Overshare

I realize that if I'm not careful this blog is going to turn into nothing more than boring work stories, BUT....people are weird! They are really, really weird! 

A guy came in the other day and we offered him a small plate for his muffin. He got super excited about it, bemoaning the fact that the bakery down the street charges $3 for a muffin and they don't even give you a plate. 

My co-worker says, good-humored, "What do they do, make you share a napkin?"

No, says he, "but I got hepatitis that way in Morocco." 

!!!!! 40 Stars !!!!

Reviewed: Yellow Cake

My wedding cake was white--delicious and gorgeous all at once--but I have no idea where it came from. Since our wedding took place in New Orleans just 7 months after Hurricane Katrina, a lot of the details were left in the hands of the thoroughly elegant and lovely general manager of the Hotel St. Marie. The cake appeared, we cut it and everyone else ate it, so it wasn't until a week later I realized how awesome it was.  

Now I work at a bakery and it seems at least once a week someone comes in from somewhere ridiculously far away to gobble up some nostalgia. "I had this cake at my father's 70th birthday party, ten years ago!" they say. Or, "All my mom wanted for Mother's Day was to have a piece of your cake again." Our specialty is chocolate cake, the famous Brooklyn Blackout, but if that's not your cup of tea we make yellow cake. Not white cake, yellow cake. 

People want it to be named differently, I can tell. Especially the snobs in the bunch. They say, "is it vanillla cake?" or "is there a little bit of lemon in this?" and I imagine saying, "Nope, that thar's just the yeller cake" to make them flee the store. Everyone wants to feel special.

The customer that makes me feel special is a high school kid who loves yellow cake with chocolate frosting. He comes in almost every day. Sometimes I save the good slice especially for him. I wish I could go back in time and be 17 again and have him be my boyfriend. He's got these incredibly nerdy glasses and an incredibly nice smile. 

He never comes in with friends like some of the other kids do--the boys talking loud and obnoxious, asking us in their most manly voice which cookies cost 50 cents, the girls that crush on them sipping hot chocolates and giggling. If he was part of that group, I would totally flirt with him in front of them. And I wouldn't even mind if he told them he was 'doing me'. I hope some 17 year-old little lady pretty soon figures out how awesome he is.  

79 stars.

Reviewed: Applesauce Jars, Eggs, and iPods

There's been this issue at work lately. An issue involving thieving. It's irritating me. The past few years of living in New York and Philadelphia, where there is actual, real life, honest-to-god crime, have slowly jaded my naivety. (I grew up in a place where I never even thought about locking my car, where my best friend didn't even have a key to her own house.) 

My grandparents once got robbed in the small, corncob of a town in Illinois where I am from. It happened either before I was born or shortly after, and as a little girl I remember whenever the subject of jewelry came up my grandmother went on and on, mourning the things she lost, the violation she suffered. She never could forget it, and didn't replace any of the items lost out of sheer dread it would happen again. 

Recently, I've felt a little more empathy on the subject. Imagining some of the things that I've come to possess in my life being snatched away, never to be seen again starts to break my heart. Nothing I have is wildly extravagant or even close to it, but...the delicate heart-shaped pendent I wore at my wedding, my collection of blue-glass birds. Even newly acquired things, like the simple little antique ring with garnet stones my grandmother just gave me as a birthday gift. Yes, I would live without them, but there would be things...missing. Oh, ouch...just thinking about it.

This is all to say that ipods are being stolen from work. Mine was the second one. It happened a few months ago, where my previously mentioned naivety kept me from realizing the theft for a week. (I kept assuring my coworkers, "Oh, I probably just misplaced it somewhere around here" like a fool.) The third one happened recently. 

Now we've targeted a culprit, who recently showed up with a similar-looking iPod and last night I was enlisted for a mini-suberfuge: check the questionable iPod for the stolen iPod's serial number without arousing suspicion. 

Here's the thing I'm leaving out. I used to be good at this stuff, i.e. filching things. Always stupid, inconsequential things. Back in the day my friends and I (my fellow reviewer included) got our hands on quite a few random ridiculousnesses that did not belong to us: pantyhose, Tootsie Rolls, a bottle of iodine, a baby Jesus, sale stickers taken from an unlocked delivery truck. Things that no one would miss, the more ridiculous the better. Success was infinite glee. None of it mattered to anyone, we were sure.

Last night when the task required those sticky fingers, that quick reflex, that easy casualness upon completion, my heart was hammering like crazy. I couldn't even read the number. Mission: Failed. 

The youthful nerve is starting to waver, that quick abandonment of ethics starting to fade. I was thinking, what it is for. How does it matter. There have been many nights I want to throw eggs, applesauce jars at the neighbors porch. I don't do it. I would have before. 

My iPod is long gone. I want the one just taken to be returned. I want justice. Terrified of theft, I have started to hide things. A necklace goes in a little jar in the corner over here. Slip the Hummel figurine into the bottom of that pot over there. Soon I will be sewing bills into the curtains, putting my wedding rings in the freezer. Soon I will spend my afternoons being entertained by the birdbath. 

Hm. Stars. 

Reviewed: Maoz

It's Day 2 of my No-Sugar Life Betterment Plan and I just microwaved some popcorn, which is odd because I absolutely hate popcorn. A lot of things aren't making sense since I stopped eating sugar. Last night I almost burst into tears when Joe forbade me from drinking lemonade with dinner. We were having shrimp quesadillas and I kept whining, "But lemonade goes perfect with this!" 

I never realized before how much of my life is devoted to eating sugar. I work at a bakery for god's sake. I have candy all over my apartment. The answer to the question, if you could only have one food for the rest of your life what would it be, for me, was always candy corn. (Like a good Midwestern girl.) 

It's hard, I'm telling you. I feel like my mind is changing, my spirit, my body. Everything is different. It's like when Tom Cruise tells Brad Pitt, "Now look, with your vampire eyes." I want sugar all the time! I am not responsible for my actions. Last night we were woken by a buzz saw at 2am coming from the building next door and Joe had to stop me from tossing a glass jar of Mott's applesauce out the window to shatter on their back porch. (And I wasn't even the one who almost got arrested--the cop getting in Joe's face when asked to do something about it, "Are you asking me or telling me?")  

So this is all to say, before I eventually give in and devour a plate of glazed donuts and chocolate syrup, tonight we're going to eat falafel pitas at Maoz. It's delicious. They have a little bar full of cooked carrots and cabbage slaw and roasted cauliflower and sour pickles. The store in Union Square can get a little tight, and it isn't always fun to eat next door in the park next to a hobo, and one time I saw a guy use the salad bar tongs to take a piece of cauliflower, deposit it in his hand, then pop it in his mouth (which really, I suppose, because of the mechanics of it, is completely sanitary even though it made me think about germs for the next two hours.) 

Maoz. No Sugar. Life Better.

85 Stars.

Reviewed: Delivery Guy

It's been a while since I had to pull out my old college days constantly-offended feminism, and yesterday when I went reaching for it, it was barely there. I was, and remain, completely horrified at myself. 

So this delivery guy walks in and, in work-mode, I look up with that automatic tip-me-if-I-have-to-use-the-steamer smile. He says, "Hey, Beautiful." 

Revulsion. (And here's where I admit that if he looked even remotely like Jake Gyllenhaal* I would have gotten all giggly and done the lip-bite-chin-tuck thing. I'm shallow.) 

I made a face that I thought conveyed "Ew. Gross. Quit it. Now." But instead, he says, "What? You don't think that you're beautiful?"

Good God, there are so many things that I should have said. Wish I had said! Needed to have said! That's the end of the story. It doesn't get better. He hung around creepily while waiting for a signature. I busied myself making lemonade. The end. 

0 Stars.

*Oh my god, I'm so good at spelling I totally got it right on the first try.