As much as I love traveling and going on weekend road trips, it was really nice to stay home this past weekend and not have any obligations! Well, that’s not true – we had a family eye exam on Sunday except that when we got there, they were like, “Hello, we called you and left several voice mails because your insurance is denying your visit until after 12/23.”
First of all: insurance is so fucking dumb and annoying and I will never (want to) understand it. In fact, just a few weeks ago, I said to Henry, “OK don’t laugh, but what the fuck is a deductible and what does it mean when you’ve ‘met it'” and then THAT turned into a fucking snoozefest of a conversation, hoo boy.
And second of all: WHO LISTENS TO VOICE MAILS ANYMORE?! I know I surely don’t. And these rods* totally texted me twice too to confirm my appointment and I even texted back a “Y” like they instructed!!!
*(This was the first name that came to mind for some reason and now I’m laughing alone because eyeballs have rods! GOD, I crack myself up so much. I AM MY BIGGEST FAN!)
Ugh, OK fine. It was my fault. But yay! No eye exam until 12/something else now!
The weekend was nice and chill aside from that. Calvin came over Saturday morning to look at Trudy except the first thing he noticed was that his bin of toy cars (see also: Chooch’s old bin of toy cars) was gone. Henry put it in the basement until after Christmas and I said, “You know Calvin is going to have a cow over this” and Henry was like, “HE WILL NOT NOTICE.”
Yep.
Chooch and I have been labeling each other’s gifts in Hangul (Henry said he doesn’t care that he can’t read it but I think he secretly feels left out HAHAH) and this one killed me: it says to Erin from Taemin. I showed it to Jiyong and she was like, “he is so cute!” and I was like “I know Taemin is.”
Sigh.
Speaking of Jiyong, we had our weekly meet-up at Panera. I brought one of my Talk to Me In Korean workbooks with me and it’s a lot more productive this way because I always have a million questions (I sound like a toddler: “But why? Why though? Why is that way? Why?” and she’s just like “….IT’S JUST BECAUSE!”) and she challenges me to go further with each exercise too, OMG LIKE A TRAINER BUT FOR MY BRAIN. Guys, I’m going to be real honest here, I’m not sure I will ever reach a comfortable level with Korean but I am definitely learning a lot and my sight-reading is getting stronger. It’s just the part when she’s like, “Say something in Korean” and my tongue feels like it’s been cut into tentacles and tied together and then coated with peanut butter too.
It’s still REALLY interesting though and I enjoy meeting with her a lot. Especially because I can talk to her about the dramas I’m watching!
Currently, Henry and I are both watching When the Camellia Blooms and it’s a contender for the best Korean drama I’ve seen yet. IT IS SO GOOD. The storyline, the characters, the acting. The acting in Korean dramas is typically super stellar, and I think that’s why I was even more disappointed with the last several American dramas I watched on Netflix. Korean dramas have raised the bar for me!
Anyway, I would highly recommend this one to anyone looking to try out a Korean drama for the first time. It’s just really wonderful. But, as they all do, it makes me want to go back in the worst way.
The rest of Saturday was just really calm and nice. Henry finished up some house projects and started cleaning the kitchen while I dreamed of more projects for him.
Saturday’s theme bled into Sunday. We’re hosting a very small Christmas not-party next Saturday because WENDY wanted me to and I literally cannot say no to Wendy. It’s not that I don’t want to have a party, but I do not have the emotional capacity lately to be at the center of a social event, even though throwing parties is so much fun for me. So I agreed to host something small and I kept the guest list pared down to just a handful of people who I talk to regularly, and as usual, I’m panicking that other friends will get mad at me over it but…maybe next year I’ll have something larger. That being said, Chooch and I scoured the Internet Sunday morning for simple, easy, inexpensive Xmas recipes for Henry to make, but we also found some cute shit that he and I might actually be able to do ourselves?!!? It’s basically a fancier Rice Krispies treat and I think it might cause frustration but the end result will be worth it, maybe?
Since we got rejected at the eye doctor, we went to the nearby Joann Fabrics because Henry needed to buy glue since every time he buys glue, it disappears (Chooch probably has 8 tubes of it spread around his room at this point). I bought more Christmas decorations since everything was on sale, but I don’t understand sales that much so I got bored after awhile and left Henry there and joined Chooch who was at Petsmart (we were in a shopping center). Turns out, it was the day that SANTA was there so the store was poppin’ off with dogs in their best Christmas sweaters and Chooch and I were dying. One lady had this huge stroller with FIVE CHIHUAHUAS (I have never had to write/type that word before so thank you, Google, for guiding the way) all in different festive attire and my heart just couldn’t take it.
Meanwhile, Chooch sent Janna a video of two hamsters having sex and Janna was like THAT IS NOT WHAT THEY ARE DOING and we were like, “Aw, Janna is so naive.”
“I NEVER THOUGHT I WOULD BE THIS JEALOUS OF SANTA,” Chooch cried as we peered through the glass of the room where Santa was posing with all the pets. “I changed my mind. THIS is what I want to be when I grow up.”
That’s good because we pretty much spent all of his college fund years ago, so see ya never, Carnegie Mellon!
These cats would NEVER allow Santa to get close enough for a picture, that’s for sure.
Went to Target – they had the Taemin version of the SuperM album! I should have bought it for Janna’s Christmas present.
Henry went to do laundry later that evening, so Chooch and I were left to our own devices. I was cleaning this one area of the house and found a bunch of old pictures that I brought home from when we were going through all that bullshit at my pappap’s house in 2016 which caused me to lose a bunch of hair (stress is cool!) so I made Chooch come over to look them with me but it just angered him because there were lots of pictures in there from one of my birthdays and I’m standing in my Pappap’s kitchen in front of a spread of new toys, and then there were pictures from one of the Christmases at his house where the tree and living room looked like the centerfold from a Better Homes & Garden holiday issue and the presents were literally spilling out from under the tree like the living room was being invaded.
“I HATE YOU,” Chooch said, flinging the pictures away from him. HAHAHA. I had such a precious childhood, lol.
Bored with being reminded that I was born with a silver spoon in mu mouth, Chooch went upstairs and got my photo albums from after I moved out and started walking down the path of near-poverty because, well, independence is expensive you guys. He likes these albums though because they’re full of pictures of my old cats (RIP: Marcy, Nicotina, Don, and Willie) but also pictures of me and my friends at the bar or one of my many house parties, but he always flips past those pages because they’re “boring” and I’m “annoying.”
However, we got to this one album that had pictures of the time my friend Wonka and I went to see the band Cold in Hershey, PA — we LOVED Cold and were basically groupies. On this particular date though, we had the privilege of sitting in the parking lot before the show with a couple other fans and the singer of Cold himself – SCOOTER WARD. Now, for all of the times I saw Cold, I could never really gather the courage to talk to him because he was, and this is so cliche but I don’t care, a god in my eyes. Cold’s music was so prominent during those really confusing years when you’re in your early 20s and just have no idea what the fuck you’re doing or who you even are. I wouldn’t go back to those years if you paid me, truly I wouldn’t, and sometimes I think back to that time and feel so amazed that I survived because I lived so recklessly and had zero value for my life. Honestly.
Chooch tried to flip past these pages too but I stopped him.
“Wait!” I yelled. “I have a story!” And then I told him about sitting in the parking lot, listening to Scooter Ward talk about his music, and how he gave us Starbursts. “He gave me an orange one and I still have it,” I said, and I could tell Chooch didn’t believe me. “It’s actually in the freezer somewhere, hold on, I’ll go find it.” And before Chooch could stop me, I was in the kitchen, rummaging through the freezer until I found it in the back:
I keep it in there because after the first year I had it, I noticed that it was starting to melt during the summer and I panicked, unlike a regular person who would have just thrown it out.
Or, you know, ate it at the time it was given to them.
“See? I knew I still had it!” I boasted proudly.
“Wow, you sure do,” Chooch said sourly, and then promptly almost puked.
Somehow that night, I got hung up on the idea of having hot chocolate bar at my not-party, instead of making a punch or sangria like I normally do. And that is how Chooch and I fell down the rabbit hole of hot cocoa bar DIY YouTube videos, which has since replaced “birthday party videos” as our favorite thing to mock-watch on YouTube. We were really diving deep into them last night.
“Basically, anytime she says it’s going to be super cute, it’s super not,” Chooch dryly said in response to this one totally basic white bitch whose whole video was how she made a hot cocoa bar for under $25 thanks to Dollar General (I’m sure it was sponsored). This one dumb bitch basically just set out her Keurig with Swiss Miss pods, filled a mason jar with crushed peppermint, and then lined up her FUCKING UGLY RAE DUNN MUGS and THAT WAS IT?! Bitch please, get off my YouTube.
Well, that was my weekend. Hope your’s was JUST DELIGHTFUL.