Meisters Forever

Meister and Meister: Labor Day Weekend 2011

I wasn’t always middle-aged. I wasn’t always a mom. I wasn’t always trapped in the suburbs, fighting for air in a cubicle 5 days a week. I used to be free, dangerous, and utterly idiotic. I did amazing things. I once set up camp in my car, just a few blocks away from the French Quarter during a full-blown Mardi Gras hellraiser riot. I drove to the top of the highest mountain I could find, just to cry at the distant, cloud-shadowed beauty of the world I left behind. I shut down bars. I broke hearts. I smoked a pack a day. I was indestructible. In short: I was young.

Meister was not only there with me, but many of those amazing things were her idea. She, too, was free, dangerous, and utterly idiotic. For a short, yet memorable span of time during the Clinton era, we embarked on what could best be described as a bromance with boobs.

Friday Goulash (Sunday Edition) 10-10-10

Simply overcome.

Once upon the 1980’s, a divorced working mother in the midwest performed the same ritual every Friday: she would collect all the dinner leftovers of the week and toss them in a pot with some elbow macaroni, Clamato, and a mysterious thickening agent.  She would refer to this concoction as  “Goulash.” “Friday Goulash” is a tribute to this woman and her potful of weariness. It’s in her spirit that I serve up a week’s worth of tidbits slow-cooked to dry-yet-strangely-sticky perfection.  In the words of  oatmeal militant Wilford Brimley: “It’s the right thing to do, tasty way to do it!”

Awkward Strikes Again:Update!

This Just In: From this week’s Onion AV Club: “In a challenging dual role, Michael Cera toys with his adorably awkward man-child persona as a hormone-crazed teenager who uses his mastery of language to compensate for his fundamental powerlessness.”

The correct (sorry, language descriptivists), I mean *classic* use of the word “awkward” pleases me, as does the idea that awkward people can overcome the power imbalance they typically endure by hitting  the squares with some snazzy vocab. 

Nobody’s Perfect, Superman

Attack of the Misplaced Genitalia!

The gays have long enjoyed a playful relationship with gender.  And why not?  Since many of us have already disregarded rules like “That’s an exit, not an entrance”, “No spitting tobacco juice on the sidewalk”, “The booty dance is not for white people”, and “Go to church!”, it’s not hard to understand how the social mores that rigidify and categorize human experience wouldn’t be much to our liking, either.  Gender rebels abound in the gay world, in fact.  Witness drag maven RuPaul and her Drag Race dynasty, a reality show that takes boys and turns them into men who will kick your ass if you have a problem with them looking like fabulous flamingo women.  Witness the mullet, a manishly short in the front, lady-long in the back hairstyle popular amongst rural lesbians that says “I fix trucks real good, hoss.”