Post Category → Humor

I am writing a book.

As I sat on the bus this morning, I came to the conclusion that I must chase after my girlhood dream of publishing a book – namely a premature memoir that will bring revolutionary wisdom unto the world.  It will extrapolate heavy philosophical and near-Biblical revelations from the stories of my formative years.  It will relay insights so profound in publication that, inevitably, I will be considered a viable GOP presidential candidate among other positions of negligible political power (i.e. City Comptroller).  It will elucidate, it will expound, it will launch my seventeen day marriage to the Heiress of the La Quinta fortune.

Ergo, I have begun the production of said book the way that most pieces of classic, canonical literature have been conceived: By writing a series of possible titles and choosing a cream color pallette as the backdrop of the cover.  Mmmm, Cornsilk.

Proposed titles:

  • Choosing laundry over sex: A lifetime of counterintuitive productivity and neatly folded underwear.
  • Eating exceptionally crunchy saltines during a particularly intense meeting: A memoir.
  • Grab somebody sexy, tell them hey: Vicarious dreams for my children, as told by major recording artist, Pitbull.  And a few puns!
  • If the crotch of your sweatpants feels particularly restricting, indeed they are on backwards:Elucidations from a Sunday morning.
  • Collisions with colleagues as you cradle a decadent Spongbob Square Pants Piñata in public: On character building and alliteration.  
  • Sea otters:  Marine mammal friend, grade-school resemblance foe.  How to rear your children away from gawkiness and toward social success!

I am going to a wedding.

For much of my life, I have associated weddings with tea ceremonies, Celine Dion, and witnessing my old Chinese uncle getting blasted after a tea ceremony, singing a karaoke version of a Celine Dion song, and puking in the back of a Honda minivan.  I was rather young when the aforementioned happened and, until recently, such a memory became as quintessential to weddings as cake, dresses, and my mother’s posse of friends filling up an entire table and eating a whole duck – without the full consent (or invitation) of the bride and groom.

This past weekend, I experienced a wedding from a different perspective: as a close friend, a member of the bridal party, and a witness to event that is difficult to process in words.  This is a rare instance in which the language that I depend on for capturing the colors, the vibrancy, and the emotions of such an affair is insufficient – even petty.  To describe the haze that was violet dresses, a luminous couple, a formidable Southern California sun, and frequent declarations of beauty, love, and family, is to write in a series of understatements.

I cannot accurately depict the glance between the bride and her mother mere moments before we walked down the aisle – a glance so silently powerful that, even in its brevity, elicited tears from both a fellow bridesmaid and I.  I cannot adequately portray the collective awe of the congregation as the bride entered the nave of the church or the delicate, yet assured manner in which the groom took her hand.  I cannot and thus I will defer to photographs (which ultimately will defer to my memories).  At least I can now replace the image of my uncle yakking Remy Martin and Chinese food onto the seat of a small Japanese vehicle with something far more bearable and more splendid.

And just as my notion of weddings has changed, this weekend has, appropriately enough, reinvigorated my love of writing.  Very few people know how tumultuous the relationship is.  I actually liken the medium — my passion — to quite a few negative attributes: pretentiousness, self-righteousness, being a space cadet, self-indulgence, non-productivity, James Franco, a vacuum of time and space in which 100 hours of thought is condensed into 20 hours of work, which results in a piece that can read in 10 minutes.  Perhaps these are just the worst qualities I see in myself, particularly when I write.

For this wedding, however, I was given the opportunity to contribute through writing.  The parameters were simple: take a bunch of words that few people have heard of and write party-related sentences under their respective definitions.  Each table at the wedding would be given one word, functioning as a table number.  I was given the creative space choose the words and to construct the sentences, so long as I relegated myself to only a few Jesus jokes and Nelly lyrics.

Over the last few weeks, I looked through hundreds of words, piecing together sentences as if they were puzzle pieces – moving commas to add rhythm, turning declarative statements into interrogative sentences, adding quotation marks as I felt necessary.  It is a project that I enjoyed very, very much — in part because the writing was, for once, able to add to an event that was greater than writing itself.  13 of the 22 sentences below:

1| Vernicle [vur-ni-kuhl] noun: Cloth with image of Christ’s face impressed upon it.

“Look, I know people may feel a little weird wiping their hands on these, but they are soft and were on sale at Target,” Jess informed Ronnie of the vernicles she purchased for the wedding reception.  

2| Wegotism [we-go-tism] noun: Excessive use of the pronoun “we” in speech.

In an unfortunate case of wegotism, Austin’s and Mark’s best man speech took an awkward turn as they concluded, “We love you two, we adore you guys, we support the both of you, and we hope that we’re going to have a great wedding night.”

3 | Koan [ko-an] noun: Nonsensical question given to Buddhist students for contemplation.

Jess and Ronnie decided not to hire the monk for their wedding when he began the interview with the koan, “What you gonna do with all that junk? All that junk inside your trunk?”

4 | Parousia [par-ou-si-a] noun: The Second Coming of Christ.

“Look busy!” The wedding guests screamed upon hearing that the paraousia would occur in 15 minutes. 

5 | Wasserman [wah-sur-muhn] noun: Man-shaped sea monster.

The media speculated that it was wasserman sighting, but it turned out to be merely Lady Gaga in the frozen fish stick section of Vons. 

6 | Callipygous [kal-uh-pahy-guhs] adj: Having beautiful buttocks.

“Yeah, callipygous is not really a first date kind of description,” Ronnie told Jess after she tried to compliment him on their first night out. 

7 | Epithalamion [ep-uh-thuh-ley-mee-on] noun: Song or poem composed for weddings

Upon hearing him belt, “Good gracious, ass bodacious,” Jess and Ronnie were appalled that the wedding singer chose Nelly’s “Hot in Herre” as inspiration for their epithalamion.

8 | Prosopography [pros-uh-pog-ruh-fee] noun: The description of a person’s appearance.

“Yeah, I’m not sure ‘Shawty had them apple bottom jeans, boots with the fur.’ is the best prosopography of Jess for this occasion,” Jen suggested to Ronnie while reading a draft of his wedding vows. 

9 | Viripotent [vi-rip-o-tent] adj: Fit for a husband; marriageable

“HOW IS THIS SUPPOSED TO TEST MY VIRIPOTENCY.” Ronnie yelled at Jess, as she handed him a map and released him in the forest wearing a bear suit. 

10 | Reniform [ren-i-form] adj: Shaped like a kidney

In a terrible bout of misunderstanding, Jess and Ronnie had insisted that their cake be as beautiful as a “giant Renoir painting” — while the baker had heard “giant reniform pastry.”

11 | Sabrage [sey-ber-eyj] verb: The Act of Opening a Bottle with a Sabre.

 “You know, those bottles are twist off,” Jess said to Ronnie after his sixth act of sabrage.

12 | Janker [Jan-ker] noun: Long pole on wheels for transporting logs.

 “So, we weren’t able to book enough cars to take you all to the reception, but we hope you enjoy these jankers that we made last night,” Jess announced to the wedding guests as they stood outside the church.

13 | Eirenarch [Ei-re-narch] noun: Officer in charge of keeping the public peace

Jess and Ronnie could not believe that the security company’s version of a wedding eirenarch was a man in a Carebear suit who offered free hugs and threw neon glitter at pouting guests.

I am a mutual friend at the potluck.

The “potluck” is a concept that has permeated every part of my life as of late.  This is, perhaps, because I am a twentysomething (i.e. poor.), a vast majority of my friends are social workers and/or artists (i.e. poor.), my colleagues are servicing public education and the non-profit sector (i.e. poor.), and we all live in San Francisco (i.e. hella poor, yet in rather significant self-denial.)

The etymology of “potluck” is supposedly 16th Century English, derived from the term “food provided for an unexpected or uninvited guest, the luck of the pot.”  I, of course, operate under the firm belief that that the name was developed by a young urbanite who, upon pouring herself a bowl of generic brand frosted cornflakes while doning an embarrassing arrangement of fortune-cookie pajama pants and an oversized cartoon sweatshirt, decided that she would invite several people to gather in her quaint living space under the condition that they bring a dish of their own (thereby minimizing the cost and allowing an inconceivably delightful spread of seven types of pies), lest she be reminded that it is, indeed, a raucous night for all except she – she who is at home eating a bowl of generic brand frosted cornflakes and wearing a pair of fortune-cookie pajama pants and an oversized cartoon sweatshirt.  Henceforth, the “potluck” became a celebrated holiday affair because “Jen’s typical Thursday night as a single 23-year-old” was rejected by the administrators at Wikipeda.

All kidding aside, for all its financial benefits, the “potluck” is challenging and complicated concept that posits itself to be an apocalyptic social disaster.  The very foundation of the “potluck” counters the core of human nature – you mean you want me to show up on time, bring a dish that is both edible and magically fits in with the balanced composition of the other unknown dishes, and interact with the invited cooks of each dish who are as random as the assortment of foods on this very table?

Moreover, there is an unspoken echelon associated with “potluck” items – a spectrum of dish types (entrée, appetizer, dessert) with assigned qualifiers (made from scratch, semi-homemade, store bought, something I saw on Rachel Ray’s show five years ago) and adjectives (delectable, good, mediocre, food poisoning).  What one chooses to bring is a gateway to the soul, an unconscious association of who you are as a human being.  On one end of the continuum is the immaculate, labor intensive centerpiece turkey, meticulously cooked by those who are time efficient, thoughtful, and worthwhile cooks.  On the other side are the non-alcohol beverages – the cases of Diet Shasta Cola purchased hastily at the nearest Safeway 30 minutes prior to said “potluck” out of absentmindedness by people like, well, me.

(Editor’s Note: I fear that I will never be invited to a social event ever again after writing this entry, but I will make that sacrifice for the truth – as true as true can possibly be if it is what it is).

I write in jest because I actually adore the “potluck” despite scoring appallingly low on what I choose to bring.  They are my favorite form of social gathering – more conducive to conservation than bars and an interesting tapestry of people brought together by the assumption that you, like your food, have a complementary place.  They are a microcosm of socially incestuous major metropolitan areas, incubators of new friendships, bizarre reminders the bonds already forged.  I have met some of my favorite people at potlucks and have mapped the numerous connections to the people that I know.  This evening, I was invited to a gathering with guests that reinforced how weird and wonderful potlucks (and life) can be:

  • The Neighbors: One evening, after a few drinks and encouragement by my roommates, I felt compelled to meet the neighbors in my apartment.  I wandered downstairs, walked into their party, and somehow became the unofficial sitter for their cat, Oscar.  Five blocks down and a few weeks later, in another apartment, they were forwarded the invite of the potluck from a friend who was friends with the host who is friends with me.  They brought lentil soup and we talked about grad school.
  • The Friend of a Friend of a Friend: During my senior year, a girl (now a good friend) took a semester off from school in New York to sublet a room in my apartment in DC.  Today, in San Francisco, I met one of her best friends from high school who also went to high school with the host of the potluck who is friends with me.  She brought pie and we talked about our mutual friend.
  • The “So Do You Know [Insert Long Shot Here]”:  I met a girl who grew up in a Massachusetts town that sent quite a few people to my college – one of whom is my friend.  This girl was familiar with the name of my friend, but also randomly met two guys who went to her very high school, who also graduated the same year that she did.  She brought brownies and we talked about San Francisco.

I brought delicious, store-bought pear and fig tart pie (and brought the self associated with such a purchase) and talked about everything I never get to say in bars, to people I would not have otherwise met, in the kind of event that, despite its peculiarities, should happen far, far, far more often.