Oh boy are you guys in for a treat (you’re not). I’m combining two old blog posts featuring Henry having a grand time at two (2!!) county fairs sometime way in the past. As some of you might know, we no longer attend county fairs on account of ME NEARLY DYING AT ONE back in 2013 or some such year.

But I guess since COVID has us quasi-housebound, even a janky-ass county fair is making me feel all wistful and wanderlusty these days. Anyway, two things to note:

1. In the first recap, I got in all kinds of trouble for referencing Henry’s ex and she even texted him while we were in Tennessee after I posted it and said that she was going to knock my teeth down my throat or something and Henry was like, “Erin…what did you do?” and I mean, c’mon – it wasn’t really that bad. I can’t remember if it was worse and he made me edit it though.
2. That “new friend Seri” in the second recap turned out to be a Single White Female (or “Fingle” as I originally typed because my brain hates doing anything extra once I log off work for the day) except that she was married. But yeah, wow, she exited my life like a fucking tornado and then when I didn’t care, she sent her husband to my house to talk to me, lol. OK, cook on, psycho.

OK, so now you’re all caught up! Enjoy these wonderful Henrycentric posts because everyone knows Henry is the real star of the OHE show.

******

HENRY GOES TO THE FAIR: 2011

Henry claims to be “too busy”* to deal with my questions regarding his day at the fair, so I guess I’ll just share my pictures of him without his thoughts and dreams.

*(This might have something to do with the fact that we leave tomorrow morning for a week in Tennessee and I have done exactly fuck-all to help prepare for this.)

Remembering what it was like to have his ex-wife at his side.

Had Henry cooperated, one of my questions was going to be if he ever took his ex-wife to the fair on a date, but then I realized that was a dumb question, considering that’s probably where he met her: in the Grandstand during the tractor pull after accidentally knocking over her empty can of Schlitz-cum-spitoon and falling into her Loony Toon-tattooed saggy tits. (Henry was really into redneck things in the days pre-Erin. Thank god he met me and now knows the wonder of Warped Tour, Jonny Craig, television programming for tweens and Christmas picnics in the cemetery.)

Why so happy?

Then I was planning on asking him what had him smiling so much all day. Was it because we were hanging out with our news friends Laura and Mike and he doesn’t want them to see that he’s really nothing more than a gruff. blue-collared killjoy? But then I realized that the origin of his happiness was probably a toss-up between going a day without a jock itch flare-up and his ex-wife getting re-married.

Looking for a rabbit to boil in a pot on his ex-wife’s stove.

So, this picture was a happy accident. It looks like he’s trying to have a Hulk Hogan beard. Now I want to play around with options for Henry’s facial hair. Suggestions welcome. Maybe something ginger-hued a la JONNY CRAIG.

No, seriously—-who taught this man how to pose? Motherfucking Gumby?

Pedo Alert! Please put your non-descript shirted self back in your non-descript white van and vacate the premises.

Henry rode one ride all day! But it was just the Fun Slide. Our son was too embarrassed to stand in line with his own creep of a father, so he tried to encroach on the family behind him.

I wonder how bad this aggravated his hemorrhoids?

If I knew I would get an answer from him, I’d ask him if the Fun Slide lived up to its name, but judging by the way he was walking like he had just got done straddling a bull (or his ex-wife), I’d say it did.

And if I asked him what his favorite ride is, he’d just say “the ride home,” so why even bother.

He’s just lucky I’m at work and don’t have time to churn out a Goofus and Gallant.

THE MELON SHIRT: SUMMER 2012

When Henry came downstairs on the day of the Big Butler Fair, his torso was modeling a brand new nondescript t-shirt in a garish hue of jack-o-lantern.

“Nice orange shirt,” I exclaimed on a rocking bed of laughter and derision.

“It’s not orange,” Henry snapped. “It’s melon.”

As if that was supposed to make me stop laughing.

There are many facets of Henry’s life that I have my thighs squeezed around in a death grip, but his fashion sense is not one. I have made futile efforts in the past to get him to break free from generic, joyless threads mostly purchased from Wal-Mart but eventually I had to concede, wave the white flag, turn my attention to dressing my kid instead. Henry’s dresser full of boring, plain and Faygo-printed t-shirts is pretty much all he has left to his identity and manhood.

(It probably doesn’t help that I was trying to groom him into a singer from a post-hardcore band, swathed in Drop Dead Clothing sweaters and neck tattoos.)

My new friend Seri met us at the fairgrounds that afternoon with her husband Pete and their two sons, Aldy and Max. Apparently, Pete had originally attempted to wear his own nondescript orange shirt to the fair that day, but Seri made him change. So after the obligatory introductions were over, Pete and Henry had a special moment of “I can relate to you.” Henry’s first impression of Pete was probably a confusing cocktail of empathy and pity garnished with a burgeoning bromance twist.

Being plain.

However, when Pete was talking about his own orange shirt, Henry was quick to interject, “My shirt is melon, not orange.” My blue-collared boyfriend has turned into a color-snob hipster overnight. Next he’ll be insisting I call him my “cerulean-collared boyfriend.”

My brother Corey came out to the fair later that evening and when I texted him our whereabouts, I tacked on, “Just look for Henry’s orange t-shirt. It looks like he’s single-handedly promoting Halloween.”

And Snooki’s skin tone.

And Tang.

And the FLYERS.

No Orange Shirts Allowed on the Wacky Worm.

It was easy to spot Henry each time the rest of us lively non-old humans would go on rides; he would lumber around the fairgrounds, toting my iCarly messenger bag and wasting money on all the nearby games that he never wins and even if he did, no one would be impressed.

DON’T DRIP ICE CREAM ON THE ORANGE SHIRT OMG!

When I was on the ferris wheel with Seri, it was fun to seek him out in the crowds below, like Waldo on fire. But then I noticed that quite a few other men were also wearing bright orange shirts, though theirs were advertising plumbing companies, Harley Davidson, strip clubs and guns.

Seri mistakenly referred to The Shirt as “cantaloupe,” which made Henry snap for the 87th time that day, “MELON!”

I always thought cantaloupe was a melon, but I guess not when applied to the Color Wheel.

It’s surprising he would even let me this close to him after 9 hours of ridiculing his orange shirt.

Some day, I’m going to snatch all of his nondescript shirts (or “blank,” as Pete prefers to call them) and screenprint Jonny Craig’s face all over them.

I feel like July was a slow reading month for me because of all of the house bullshit we’ve been doing but I just counted 16 books so I guess it still pretty literary, lol. Anyway — let’s talk about the first half SHALL WE.

1. Patsy – Nicole Y. Dennis-Benn

I did not enjoy this book at all. I actually started it at the tailend of June but it wasn’t holding my attention enough for me to feel very inspired to power through it. It’s about a Jamaican woman who essentially abandons her small daughter (I think she’s 4? 6?) in order to go and start a new life in America. She leaves the daughter with her bio-dad and swears she’s going to send for her, but the real reason she’s gone off to America is to rekindle an old romance with her childhood best friend, who has moved on and gotten married and now Patsy has to start from scratch and newsflash, America AIN’T THAT GREAT.

The book goes back and forth between Patsy’s struggle in America and her daughter’s own struggles growing up in Jamaica with some major sexual identity crises. I wish we had gotten more from the daughter’s perspective because Patsy pissed me off and I truly didn’t care about her selfish ass.

2. Saints and Misfits – S.K. Ali

I was excited to read this after buddy-reading the author’s latest book, Love from A to Z, with Henry last spring. This wasn’t *as good* but I still enjoyed it. It’s billed as a “modern day My So-Called Life, but with a Muslim teen” and I think that’s pretty accurate. The main character is all up in her head for the entire book and it can get tiresome at times, and there’s also a guy who sexually assaulted her but she won’t tell anyone and that was SO FUCKING FRUSTRATING to me because he was such a fucking creep and just kept appearing and I was like SCREAM IT LOUD, GIRLFRIEND.

I think I gave it a 4 but it’s definitely more of a 3 now that I think about it.

3. Rules For Vanishing – Kate Alice Marshall

Man, this book was SO TRY-HARD. I’m not even sure I would have liked it when I was a teenager. I picked it up because I had been reading some heavier subjects and thought this would be a nice light supernatural mystery because it’s supposed to be urban legend-y with a disappearing teenager, but it was so poorly written with way too many characters, none of which I gave a shit about, and there were entire chunks of chapters that I ended up skimming toward the end because I wanted to know how it was going to end which was the only reason I didn’t DNF it, but it was pretty bad, and it had an open-ending so I’m sure we’ll get a sequel at some point and I promise you I won’t be reading it.

I wish I had listened to my Booktuber friends who said it was dumb but I always get swayed by a gimmick!

4. Felix Ever After – Kacen Callender

This is another book that everyone has been hyping lately and while the main character was kind of unlikable (for me, anyway) I’m glad that I read it because I admittedly have not read many (if any) books with a trans main character and I actually learned A LOT about this, for instance: I never knew that calling a trans person by their old name is called Deadnaming and it’s incredibly offensive and triggering for them (that part I could have guessed, but I never knew it had a term).

Felix is already very much out but this book is more about the struggle they face with trying to bury the person they were before. For example, Felix goes through great lengths to hide all of their old photos, and confronts their dad at one point for consistently refusing to call them Felix.

So many things made me cringe and flinch though. I mean, there’s a HEAVY Catfishing plotline and Felix just makes so many shitty choices. I just really didn’t like them very much at all but I enjoyed the book? Just not as much as I hoped? I’m getting worse at book reviews, if that’s even possible.

5. Diary of a Murderer: And Other Stories – Kim Young-Ha

This is, as the title suggests, a short story collection. The title story was SO GOOD, definitely the best one. Though I wonder: would I have enjoyed this book as much if I wasn’t super-absorbed in Korean culture? I’m not sure. But the vibe I got from this was reminiscent of one of my favorite Korean dramas, “Come & Hug Me,” which is about a serial killer and made me feel so tense and uncomfortable, much like this book did. Well, the first story, anyway. I already forgot the other ones.

I’m just not a lover of short stories, I think. I’m learning things about myself this year.

6. The Ghost Notebooks – Ben Dolnick

SHIT I LOVED THIS BOOK. It got very mediocre reviews though and I guess I can of understand because it’s not a ghost story in the traditional sense, but it’s very much an exploration of a deteriorating relationship. The atmosphere in this was thick, I felt like I was really in some New York farm town, but the best part was Ben Dolnick’s writing. This book is written from the POV of the boyfriend and I just felt so sympathetic toward him and, when shit really starts to unravel, I was rooting for him so fucking hard to prevail. When I’m that invested in a character, I don’t care about anything else. Honestly.

Anyway, Nick’s gf Hannah gets a job at some small-town museum called the Wright House, but the catch is that they have to live in the old-timey house-cum-museum. Everything starts out fine, they’re excited to start a new life away from NYC, but then Hannah, who has a history of mental illness, starts acting weird. Do not go into this expecting a traditional haunted house story – this is a slow burn, and it’s very focused on the relationship between Nick and Hannah, so we get a lot of flash backs into the beginning of their relationship, as well.

I just thought it was so well-written and beautifully layered. There’s another “ghost-y” book that I read later on in the month that was a bit similar except that I didn’t care about the couple at all. But this one was a full-on chef’s kiss for me – now granted, my palate is probably very different than yours, so if you read this and hate this, don’t come knocking on my (goodreads) door.

7. Sawkill Girls – Claire Legrand 

Another YA book that is well-lauded throughout the Booktube community but just fell flat for me. I liked that it had very strong female leads and featured a sapphic romance, but the story just felt convoluted and am I dense or something because this book is literally for young adults and I had a real hard time following the plot.

I don’t feel like writing anything else about this one. I’m bored just thinking about it. tbh.

8. Clap When You Land – Elizabeth Acevado 

OK, can we give it up for Elizabeth Acevado? SHIT SON she is definitely one of my favorite writers, having read two of her books now. This one, like Poet X, is also written in verse, but here we have alternating perspectives: two girls who will come to find out after their dad perishes in a plane crash, that they’re sisters. It’s actually based on the flight from NYC to the Dominican that crashed in November of 2001, two months after 9/11. I truthfully do not remember this which makes me feel like an asshole but I was 22 and quite honestly was definitely not watching the nightly news and this was pre-smartphones so I was getting tragic news alerts every hour like I do now, fml.

Anyway, this book goes back and forth between the two teenage sisters, exploring how their dad’s death affects each of them and how very different their lives are, one growing up in NYC and one in the Dominican.

(I’m actually tearing up as I write this because this story really hit differently for me, because I went 19 years of my life not knowing that my birth dad had other children. He died when I was 3, so meeting them was something I had to do on my own, without him, and…it was strange. I do not have a relationship with either of them.)

If you’ve never read an Elizebeth Acevado book, I HIGHLY recommend listening to the audio because she does her own narration, and especially for Poet X, it just feels like a PERFORMANCE. I never thought I would like a book written in prose, but Poet X turned me into a believer, and this book sealed the deal. I just got her other book from a local Little Library on my lunch break walk with Chooch on Friday, so I am stoked to compete the Acevado trifecta and then patiently await her next book like a good little reader.

Remember in the beginning of quarantine, way back in that month that some of us might remember as “March,” I was doing a Friday 5 recap of my work weeks in quarantine? And then I gave up after less than a month because it made me feel worn out and no way was I going to keep that up for what, an entire month? MAYBE TWO MONTHS? Lol, that was so super cute when some of us thought we’d be going back to work at the end of April, May at the latest.

Anyway, that was my intro for the edition of Friday 5.

FOLLOW LOOPS

Remember how Chooch and I are obsessed with getting our cats to be more popular than Blake’s dumb cat on Instagram? Well, two days after I started an account for Penelope, I found this thing called a “follow loop” and sorry if you already know about this but I have never been in this numbers game before on the ‘gram, so I’m walking on new ground over here. Anyway, if you don’t know what it is, it’s this dumb thing on Instagram where you have to tag some friends and then follow everyone the Follow Loop account is following, and then the Follow Loop account starts following you so that everyone who joins also follows you, and, and, and, breathe. But yeah, it’s dumb and tedious but I went, I mean Penelope went from like 50 friends to 500 in a day and Chooch and I were cracking up because Blake, I mean, Ham, had more followers than us before this and then we both blew past him. Henry was like THAT IS MEAN but we were like DO NOT TELL HIM! WE KNOW HE IS YOUR FAVORITE SON BUT PLEASE KEEP OUR SECRET! and it was real tense there for a while because we weren’t sure what Henry was going to do.

THEN!!! One of our dumb ass mutual friends became a HOST for a follow loop and she POSTED ABOUT and tagged HAM so then HAM joined a follow loop and got a bunch of new followers too! I was so pissed and Chooch was like, “THAT’S IT, I’M QUITTING INSTAGRAM.” Meanwhile, Chooch and I, I mean Drew and Penelope, both got added to some pet group chat where everyone posts three emojis when they post a new picture and then the members of the chat are required to go and like that picture, but some people are also like VOTE FOR MY DOG and then someone in the group chat accidentally video-called all of us and then spent the next hour apologizing and every day I say I’m going to leave the group chat  BUT I NEVER DO. I have GROUP CHAT GUILT.

Last week, I spent my entire turn in the weekly meeting whining about the Instagram drama and then followed up with an email containing screenshots of all three cats’ profiles so my coworkers could see how much cooler Drew and Penelope are than BASIC HAM but then my one co-worker missed the point completely and her reply was all about how HAM IS SUCH A GOOD-LOOKING CAT AND SHE LOVES HIS NAME and I was like NO JOYCE! INCORRECT!! YOU LOST THIS ROUND!

Meanwhile, Chooch is quitting follow loops because not everyone follows him like they’re supposed to and he only wants cat accounts as friends. “Now I have an aquarium following me! I hate it!” he cried in anguish and I couldn’t stop laughing at the thought of an actual aquarium holding a phone and scrolling through Instagram.

Anyway, my screen time is so high lately because I have to spend so much every day fulfilling like and follow promises on Instagram and commenting things like, “Hey furiend, have a purrfect weekend! Lookin’ good in that bandanna!” Ugh I hate my life. But! Penelope has been making lots of friends, like this dog who also likes Taemin, and a cat who loves the Cure, lol.

DUMPSTER DRAMA

I was on my way to the library during my lunch break walk on Tuesday, but I cut through some side streets in order to prolong my arrival time because god forbid I arrive too early for my scheduled curbside pickup time. Anyway, I was walking down a sidewalk when I passed some broad asking (aka screaming across the street) a neighbor if he knows who’s been putting dog shit in the back of Dan’s dump truck, and she was RULL mad about it, but the real question is: what cunty things has Dan done to have dog shit put in the back of his dump truck. Also, RIP to the ears of the baby she was bouncing on her hip while hollering across the street to Mike the Neighbor.

From what I gathered, this is apparently an ongoing thing.  Mike the Neighbor sadly did not know who the culprit is but hollered back that it was “rull fucked up” and he’d “let yinz know” if he saw anything.

Isn’t a dump truck just a giant garbage can anyway?

I texted Henry about how I walked past neighbor drama but KakaoTalk changed “drama” to “dramatically” and Henry said that he would have liked to have seen me walking past neighbor, dramatically.

NELSON SULLIVAN

This next one is literally the biggest thing that has been going on in my life, you can ask Henry and Janna – they will confirm with a heavy sigh. So, one day last week, a video titled “Train to Coney Island” came up in my YouTube feed, apropos of nothing. Naturally, I clicked on it and was super stoked to see that it was from the late 80s! Just some friends, one of them with her two children, going to Coney Island on a train, no big deal right? But then more videos from this YouTube started auto-playing and I was like, “Oh OK so this gay dude from NYC basically videotaped his whole life, like I used to do in the 90s.” Still, didn’t think too much of it but left it on in the background.

Something made me look up and pay attention though when this one video came on. Well, not just “something” – it was titled “Nelson’s Last Video” or “Tape,” I can’t remember. It was just him, his dog Blackout, and his friend walking around on July 3, talking about the cookout that’s going to happen for the 4th of July, and how much the piers have changed since the 70s, nothing too life-shattering….until the video ended with a note that said it was his last video BECAUSE HE DIED OF A HEART ATTACK LATER THAT NIGHT OMFG. It made me feel totally rocked, for some reason, I can’t really explain why — I obviously didn’t know him, but just watching a handful of his personal home videos felt so intimate, like some kind of boundary had been breached. Anyway, I started poking around the YouTube channel where his videos are uploaded and learned that he was a videographer/documentarian of his friends and NYC in the 80s and his video collection has been digitized. That’s when I started to notice some of the titles of the videos included names like RuPaul and Andy Warhol…so I googled him and he was actually really good friends with RuPaul before RuPaul was a superstar, as well as Keith Haring and music journalist Michael Musto (pictured on the right up there) who I am now obsessed with after watching hours upon hours of these videos.

I never really knew too much about the Club Kid scene but Michael Alig and James St. James appeared in a bunch of these videos too and I was like….wait, isn’t that Party Monster? So I fell down deep and started watching Geraldo episodes with the Club Kids and then made Henry watch Party Monster with me last weekend and I have been having nightmares about Michael Alig ever since and also I had no idea that DJ Keoki ran in that circle and was Michael Alig’s boyfriend!?!? I used to love DJ Keoki!?!?

I keep texting Janna and making her watch these videos and it’s just crazy to me because he was literally vlogging before anyone else. He even has a video where he says his resolution is to put the camera on himself more often and he wonders if people will think that looks weird…in the 90s, I was always shoving my camcorder in everyone’s faces. I have a boxful of 8mm that need to be digitized, and I’m sure it will be excruciating to watch these now, as a 41-year-old, hearing myself talk in my weird, fake-ditzy babydoll voice, but I am so glad that I was so into recording shit back then (no sex tapes, shockingly!) and watching Nelson’s tapes reaffirms that sentiment.

They also make me feel an ache in my heart that I can’t quite explain because how do you miss a scene that you were too young to be part of? I certainly wasn’t going to drag shows and Michael Alig’s Outlaw Parties when I was 8.

OR WAS I.

I think also it just makes me sad on a really deep level to see all of these people hanging out without cell phones up in their grills. actually talking to each other. Strangers knew how to talk to each other back then! And it makes me have a vague recollection of how outgoing I used to be at one time and I think I would have really loved being part of that group. :(

WINE BOTTLE

Well,  this is timely. Remember in my last post when I mentioned that Chooch’s punishment for breaking his phone screen is to read vintage Oh Honestly Erin blog posts, starting with my infamous Vegetarian Dinner Party from 1996. If you read that post, you know that SPOILER we had to call the cops because someone was stalking me and by doing so, we panicked and dumped out the bottle of white Zinfandel that I had been saving for 10 years, having received it as a kid from my godfather who said, “For the girl who has everything.” Or some kind of sappy sentiment like that, but I remember REALLY latching onto this gift because I was…what…6 or 7? And a bottle of wine was such an adult gift! The idea behind it was to obviously save it for a special occasion when I was old enough to pop the cork and I really felt like this “adult” dinner party I was hosting at my house senior year while my family was out of town was a totally special occasion – I mean, right? It was all of my closest friends!

So yeah, someone was like, “Yo we’re a bunch of teenagers with no adult supervision here with an opened bottle of wine and the police are coming” – I mean, why didn’t we just hide it? I dunno what we were thinking and I don’t feel like re-reading that damn thing to see if it explains that thought process at all, but the point here is that one Twitter, one of my friends replied to the post and said, “I’m angry about that wine!” or something to that effect and I was about to reply and tell her that I actually still have the empty bottle after all these years but thought, “Wait, I’ll go and take a picture of it too so I can add that to the tweet” but I couldn’t find it in any of the spots where I could see it in my mind, which I thought was odd, but didn’t feel like doing any deep investigation into the matter because it was late and I’m not very good at looking for things anyway.

This morning, I was emptying the recycling bin in the kitchen, which I don’t normally do because Henry has giant clear bags for the recyclables so I let him deal with it, but I was in an angry cleaning mood when I woke up and I didn’t know where he put those bags so I decided to just use small blue plastic bags. You already know where this is going, but after clearing out about half of the bin, I was going to stop because I usually only go halfway when cleaning, but something made me get one more bag to fill…

…and that’s when I saw it.

Way at the back of the bin.

I knew it without even seeing the label.

It was my wine bottle.

SOMEONE HAD TOSSED MY WINE BOTTLE AND SURPRISE SURPRISE, NONE OF THE ASSHOLES I LIVE WITH WILL ADMIT TO IT.

Honestly though – what are the fucking odds that this happened now?? Honestly, if Amanda hadn’t even said that on Twitter, I wouldn’t have even noticed that the bottle was gone, and what if I hadn’t been the one to empty the recycling bin!? Oh man, my head was HOT this morning. Both of my roommates got a tongue-lashing.

“A BOTTLE THAT I HAVE HAD SINCE I WAS SIX YEARS OLD!!!!!!” 

SIDEWALK TAG

A few weeks ago, the sidewalk near Chooch’s former school was torn up and replaced and he was so upset because his initials were carved into the old sidewalk. On my birthday, Henry and I were walking to the post office (see? I told you my birthday was a fucking snooze) and on our way there, we passed a section of freshly-paved sidewalk next to his friend’s house so I texted him and said “now’s your chance.” On our way back, we saw that he had indeed cashed in that chance, but he fucking  tagged his cat’s Instagram handle. Literally, all it said was “@that_cat_bambi.” I thought it was funny, but Henry, Sidewalk Law Expert, was PISSED.

“Oh! That’s just fucking great! Now this can be traced right back to us!” he cried, and I was like, “….is this illegal or something?” (Oh shit I just googled and it’s considered vandalism if you don’t own the sidewalk; I’m a 41-year-old child learning the laws of the land. Leave me alone.)

This sidewalk is only a block away from our house so Henry stormed through the front door and was all, “YOU BETTER GO AND DO SOMETHING ABOUT THAT” at the same time I was saying, “You should have put “@gentleman_ham is a racist.”

But Chooch only honed in on what Henry was screaming about and you could see the sweat forming a beaded chain on his brow as he laughed nervously. So he ran back up the street and apparently just scribbled out everything but “bambi” and Henry was like, “WTF IS WRONG WITH YOU” because the sidewalk is literally next to Chooch’s friend’s house, and that girl knows that he calls Drew “Bambi,” and her dad is like BIG CRAZY.

“What if she sells me out?” Chooch said, his voice quaking like Sally Struthers. “Like, ‘I know who has a cat named Bambi, [insert full ass name] living at [insert address].'”

Literally minutes later, HER DAD CAME OUT OF THE HOUSE (Chooch was watching sheepishly like a coward from our front porch) and smoothed out the whole thing so now it says nothing, it’s just a big smear.

“OMG WHAT IF HER DAD SAW ME DO IT??” Chooch cried, biting his nails. Her dad is not to be fucked with, like he has terrorized his kids in public before because one of them ate his chips and he hunted them down on the boulevard to interrogate them. Chooch was a witness and said it made him appreciate us, his lazy parents who make empty threats and dole out weak punishments, like “OH HO, NOW YOU’VE DONE IT! You will read my blog.” Anyway, Chooch was legit pacing and panting off and on for an hour after this, waiting for a knock at the door, and then he heard POLICE SIRENS and nearly broke his neck whipping his head toward the door and back to us. “The police wouldn’t come for something like that, would they?” he asked, his face blanched, lips white.

Oh shit, I was loving it. It was, now that I think about it, the only time on my birthday that I felt really good!

He’s been careful about keeping his head down lately when we walk past that house, now with weirdly-smudged sidewalk, but this morning when we were walking to get breakfast, Big Crazy was waiting to pull into his driveway and Chooch started frantically whispering, “OHGODOHGODOHGOD WE MADE EYE CONTACT GO GO GO.” Lol.

I need to shoot out some thoughts, bullet-style. Stick around – my word bullets are basically just styrofoam pellets so it won’t hurt too much if you get hit, but you mind your eyeballs on those typos. Goggles might help.

• Henry started working on my Seoul subway sign again on my birthday, per my wishes. Prior to this, I don’t think he even looked at it since May. MAY! An entire season ago! He was “waiting for a part” to be delivered and then when it was, after 2 weeks of the UPS mishandling it, it was damaged (of course) and he had to return it and then wait until he received a refund to reorder it because he’s a cheap-ass, and then (and then and then!!!) by the time the replacement product was delivered, he had already moved on to a new project, which was the coffee table redesign. So now here we are with two unfinished projects plus an unfinished kitchen!
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  LOVE TO SEE IT. Oh is that the wrong use of that? Sorry. I’m 41.

• You guys, I’m loving the fact that my local library is one of the branches that’s open for curbside pickup!! What I don’t love, however, is that I have to fucking call them and schedule a time to pick my books up, which completely negates my favorite part of the library: self-checkout. And the one librarian always acts like it’s such a struggle to check the schedule to see if my suggested time is OK and you know what? It’s always OK! There is never a line out there! But on a positive note, the library security guard is the one who actually goes inside to get the books for us readers and he is such a fucking joy, I swear to god. And he knows my name now! It feels so good to hold books in my hands again, you have no idea. I dumped them all in Henry’s lap last weekend and screamed DO YOU WANT TO LOOK AT MY BOOKS? He said, “oh boy” but he read the synopsis for each one.

• Speaking of books, one of the best ones I read this year was made into a movie and Netflix just released the trailer!!

• Chooch broke the screen of his iPhone yesterday and I don’t know what’s happened to me but instead of igniting a wildfire throughout my neighborhood using nothing but my sheer fury as a flint, I calmly told Chooch not to cry about it and we’ll get it fixed.  I mean, sure, I have ulterior motives, like making him do 5x as many chores and reading one post a day of my choosing from my blog archives.
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  (We started with this classic and he was not amused.)

• I found on eBay a copy of Soap Opera Digest from 1984 (my best year) with HOPE and BO on the cover and now I’m desperately trying to figure out how to incorporate this into my 80s kitchen.
  • Also, last week I revisited my love for Battle of the Network Stars which is basically where I binge videos of this stellar show on YouTube every 5 years or so and gush about how much I love Robert Conrad, who I didn’t KNOW DIED EARLIER THIS YEAR!? I woke up Henry to tell him and he said he thought that I knew that, that we had already dissected my sorrow and grief every which way back in February when it happened, and maybe we did? Everything pre-COVID feels so far away. Anyway, I was like, “OMG I should find Robert Conrad/Battle of the Network Stars memorabilia for the kitchen except that Robert’s last appearance was in the 1979 games!!! He came back as a commentator after that, but it’s not the same. Pictures of mid-tug-of-war shirtless Robert or GTFO. Meanwhile Chooch was like, “The fuck are you even watching?” I kept trying to get him to be interested in it, but it wasn’t holding his attention — not even the infamous Kristy McNichol obstacle course DQ!!!! (I mean, spoiler alert.)

• Chooch was thirsty the other day so he made a party punch for our household of 3, as you do during a pandemic. It was OK. He keeps insisting on using my good wine glasses to drink this in though and I get so fucking nervous about it.
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  “I’m not going to break it!” he screamed, trying to make me feel bad for treating him like a child, so I made sure to remind him about the iPhone screen he literally JUST CRACKED.

• In other beverage news, one of my fave local cafes, Black Forge, announced a new specialty drink for this month called the GOD FORBID, which has cayenne pepper in it as well as a communion wafer topper, and hoo boy did that give my throat a nice fiery slow-burn. I loved it. Spicy drinks are my thang and it makes me sad that I can’t stomach Bloody Marys because I think I would love those spicy ones, but you know, I can’t get behind the tomato part of it. My aunt Sharon used to always drink those on the plane and the smell would make me want to puke.
• Chooch showed me the “secret playground” he goes to sometimes only it’s not a secret at all, it’s part of some rec center, and I made the mistake of going on the spinny thing and then almost didn’t make it back home in time to log on to work after my lunch break, also I almost left my wallet-thing there because I clearly don’t know how to leave the house properly anymore.

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• Henry gave Chooch’s locks a covid-cut tonight and he hates it but he was dying to get it cut, and it’s not like he’s going anywhere anytime soon so I’m sure he’ll survive.

Also, he hates this picture so of course I had to post it. Also, I painted that door!

Wow, anyway, I’m going to end this here or else I won’t have anything left for Friday Five tomorrow, oh no, wow, that would be the worst.

I don’t even know where I am in this whole progress post process anymore. But here are some pictures of new additions. Things have been getting more fun for me because all of the big stuff is done (wall-painting, floor-laying, Ikea stuff-building, etc) and I’m free to add all my stupid touches.

Like a pastel Caboodle to hold all the band-aids and sundry that Henry loves to pile atop the fridge!

My friend Courtney made me those Golden Girl magnets a few years ago – they were perfect then, but even more so now! We’re also turning a bunch of pictures of ourselves from the 80s into photo magnets, so that’ll be super obnoxious.

My phone arrived over the weekend! (Sorry if that crooked photo bothers you but please note that I straightened it after I took this photo and didn’t feel like retaking it because I’m a lazy blogger whose life is anything but curated.)

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Henry the amateur electrician is going to find a way to make it light up (we think it still works, according to the eBay description) and if the kitchen gods decide to smile down on us, he’ll hopefully be able to find a way to get it to do what I REALLY want, which is to turn on a Bluetooth speaker in the kitchen when the receiver is lifted, at which point the room will be filled with the joy of 80s new wave.

But with the way things have been working out, I’m not holding my breath! In any case, it’s a fun decoration.

Another thing that we finally checked off the list was the spice rack!

This is actually how the whole thing started, btw. It was sometime last spring and I said to Henry, after watching the video for Damien’s song Cassette, “We should make a spice rack out of old tapes.” I don’t know why my mind went specifically to “spice rack,” but it did and from there, it turned into, “Actually let’s just redo the entire kitchen in an 80s theme. You know, to match the spice rack.”

It took Henry about a half dozen attempts until he finally understood my vision and built something that was (mostly) what I wanted. I mean, not that it matters, because I don’t cook and have no use for spices, but Chooch is already bitching because he can’t see what anything is, so I was like, “Uh, just alphabetize them? Then at least you’ll know a roundabout starting point.” He was super thrilled with my solution.

It just needs an LED lightstrip underneath it.  I mean, obviously.

Fun fact: That’s my favorite Cure album. That’s not my favorite Phil album though. (Come on, No Jacket Required.)

Meanwhile, if you would have told me six months ago that I’d be up until 1AM working on one (1!!!) cabinet door on August 3rd, I’d have cracked up in your face and said, “yeah OK I’ll be on the Erin’s 41st Birthday Mini Cross Country Amusement Park Tour then and also ew, I hate my kitchen, it’s a dump.” Oh, how covid has changed our lives.  I decided that only the top two cabinets will have this design and the rest will just be painted in geometric quadrants in the 4 colors of the walls. Because this is best used in small doses, I think – even I know my limits!

The cabinets, being as old as they are, have clearly been through the war. So even after Henry sanded them down, the surface was still pretty pocked on both. I was originally going to make stencils and handpaint the shapes, but I knew because of the bumpy surface it would like ass. So instead, we made vinyl stickers, which didn’t really save too much time because handcutting these were a bitch, and  then I did all the black squiggles by hand and that’s what took the longest. My hand and back hurt so much by the time I was done, but I was determined to get at least one banged out in one sitting. I made the second one last night so I’m excited to eventually have cabinets again!

This is just sitting in there right now, for picture-purposes. I think it will look even better once we make “The Coreys” cabinet pulls! Also, I need to get some old teen magazines from the 80s to make a collage inside the cabinet doors.

Still on the To Do list: Making the curtain for the kitchen door, the neon sign (which is paid for and in production!!!), whatever Henry can manage to do with the phone, the rest of the trim needs painted and reattached, and supposedly Henry is redoing the countertop but we’ll see how that actually pans out because Henry and epoxy aren’t the greatest of colleagues. Oh, and I still haven’t found a ceiling light that makes me happy.

But even in the state it’s in right now, it is a million times better than the den of despair it was as recently as June, and walking in there doesn’t make me want to put my fist through a wall anymore!

I was up until 1am working on one (1!!) kitchen cabinet FML but I still woke up early to watch Taemin’s new video and I am super delirious & giddy, ugh my coworkers are probably thanking COVID right now because I have “be incredibly annoying” punched in on today’s agenda – I guess we know what I’ll be screaming about in my weekly meeting today.

So…a new Taemin video came out today and it’s also the first day in three weeks that I haven’t spent the morning walking half-hunched with a hurt back. Coincidence? NO – THE HEALING POWER OF TAEMIN!‬

Ugh. Taemin. I’ve waited a long time for this!

Hello. I meant to write about last weekend, well, last week, but I get so one-track-minded sometimes that I wasn’t able to pull myself away from whatever other nonsensical bullshit I was doing, so here we are. And honestly, it’s not like I did much aside from – wait for it – kitchen bullshit. 

But here are the 2 standout points.

Wimbledon ’92

On Saturday, the ghost of Erin 1992 whispered in my ear, “Remember Wimbledon 1992…..” and suddenly I couldn’t get to my Roku fast enough. I NEEDED TO WATCH ANDRE AGASSI WINNING WIMBLEDON IN 1992. Because I’ve reached the next level of coronavirus which is: relive Andre Agassi’s first Wimbledon win on YouTube and cry like it’s 1992 and you still have a collection of Agassi-related newspaper clippings & drawings in a neon yellow see-through binder. What?

“Oh man, you have NO IDEA how much I loved Andre Agassi,” I moaned as Henry walked past me to go and do actual labor on the kitchen. (These fucking cabinets, man, lol oh god kill us.) 

“Um, yeah, actually, I do,” Henry scoffed, because apparently being with me for 20 years makes him an expert on my obsessive personality. 

I have a vague recollection of making congratulatory signs after Andre won and hanging them at the end of my street. Also, I posed this on Instagram and my friend Liz commented that she remembered my AA obsession fondly. We were really close in middle school and she got dragged down in a lot of my bullshit, like when I would listen to nothing but the cassingles for Boyz II Men’s “End of the Road” and Sophie B Hawkin’s “Damn I Wish I Was Your Lover” (that b-side, good lord) in my walkman on our trip to Lake Chataugua or when we go to the movies and I would have to have an empty seat next to me in which to place my Paul Coffey hockey card because I had the hots for him, which is exactly how my dad would phrase it if you were to ask him, “How did Erin feel about Pittsburgh Penguins Paul Coffey in 1992?”

So yeah, I had the entire Wimbledon finals match on that day and felt all the emotions when Andre won (and also every time he lifted his shirt to wipe his face OH MY FUCKING GODDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD) and then all these other old tennis matches played on YouTube for pretty much the entire day because no one could be bothered to change it.

Ughhhhhhhh. Full disclosure, I have been off-and-on throwing bitch-ass tantrums about this since my actual birthday on July 30th. Like, I could say something Pollyanna-esque such as: Henry and I both had the day off work so I got to spend time with him and Chooch and in the end that’s all that matters…

And ok deep down that’s true and I KNOW it’s true and five years from now I’ll look back on this birthday and think “Well, Covid canceled my plans and I was stuck at home but that’s ok because I was in good health—” OH STFU FUTURE ERIN you know damn well you’re gonna be recounting in your head then list of people who forgot your birthday and the things Henry COULDA done but DIDNT do because while he is great in many ways, sweet surprises and planned-out activities are not his strong point and yeah he spent the day working on projects around the house at my direction but it would have been nice if he was like “Get in the car! We’re having a picnic in the wilderness!” or something like that I don’t know!

But I know in the Other Deep Down that anything he would have suggested would never have been enough because it always goes back to the fact that I miss my Pappap on this day more than ever and how do you compete with the greatness that was John Stonick? I mean, really.

My childhood best friend texted me on my birthday and said “wish we were swimming in your pappap’s pool today” because she knows. Christy knows.

So instead of eating the omelette Henry made me for breakfast, I made myself toast using the heels of the bread because that was all that was left of the loaf and what a perfect symbol for the day, and then I salted it with my tears and ate it with my lip protruded.

We went back and forth like this all day. It had its good parts though.

We got take out from Green Pepper for dinner. I really wanted mul naengmyeon, which is a Korean cold buckwheat noodle dish and Green Pepper is the only korean restaurant around that had it on their menu.

(Last year on my birthday, I was having vegan naengmyeon in Insadong, I’m not crying, you’re crying, oh wait your tears are from rolling your eyes so hard that you hurt yourself.)

Of course, because it was my birthday and nothing goes right on my birthday, it ended up being more of a “bibim” naengmyeon which means it’s mixed up in a sauce (gochujang) and that was OK but the noodles were definitely not buckwheat and it just wasn’t what I wanted even though it was still good. Also, they charge extra for kimchi (???) and are super skimpy with it too. My noodles cost like $13 which is hilarious because in Korea it would have been like $5 or $6 maybe even less but whatever America sucks.

I would also like to point out that jamming your chopsticks vertically into a bowl of rice, a la Chooch up there, is extremely BAD FORM in Japan! I believe it has something to do with symbolizing death? I’m not sure if any other Asian cultures have anything similar to this so it’s probably best to just never stick your chopsticks in bowls of rice, as a rule of thumb. Look at my blog being educational! Now if only I could start proof-reading like the old days.

Ignore the mystery stain on the non-table cloth, but here I am trying to be natural, lol.

I cropped this photo when I posted it on Instagram because the way the shirt is laying, it looks like my boobs are super-droopy?! I swear to god that’s just the shirt!

I do love that shirt, btw. I wore it especially for my “birthday dinner” since I pretty much have had no reason to wear anything other than band t-shirts and yoga pants over the last 4 months.

I chose a matcha cake from Sumi’s, and it was honestly the best part of the day. Even Henry, who doesn’t like green tea, thought it was just lovely.

It even had a tiny bit of pat (sweet red bean) in it! Chooch immediately picked it out of his slice when I mentioned it, so I should have just kept my mouth shut.

So yeah, it wasn’t the greatest birthday but I can definitely confirm that I have much worse (like my 21st birthday where my friends tried to have me 302d because I was suicidal/losing my motherfucking mind – that was a good one). I would have much rather been in the midst of the amusement park extravaganza that I planned for myself but at least I made it to 41, blah blah blah, hashtag blessed, etc.

At the time of this blogging, I have spent the last three days pouting and having mood swings and being nostalgic and ungrateful, so when I hit “publish,” that means I have to officially walk away from this year’s birthday and move on with my damn life, lol. Jesus, I hate myself.