1 glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice, made from organic Valencias procured from a helpful neighbor
Egg white garden omelet made only with vegetables harvested with your bare hands, with a recipe gleaned from a website that is 25% ads, 70.9% about the writers’ kids’ friends’ little brothers’ opinions on the omelet (“He actually liked it!”) and 4% the freaking recipe. (.1% margin of error.)
Chives and sesame seeds! Not for eating. Just for staging because chives make social media look better. #MoarChives
A slice of some kind of fresh artisanal bread made from your own vaginal flora because we all know that the stores haven’t had yeast in weeks
Coffee (1 gallon)
Lunch:
2/3 Family Sized Bag of Doritos, eaten shamefully next to the radiator between Zoom meetings. Good thing you made a video loop of yourself nodding intently as a virtual background video so your boss can’t see how low you’ve sunk. Put on some pants. You disgust me.
Diet Dr. Pepper that expired in 2011.
Some kind of abandoned “child food,” i.e., some smashed animal crackers, chicken nugget stars with the nubs bitten off, bifurcated string cheese, and/or a juice box with the straw trapped inside of it.
Coffee (dregs from breakfast, mixed with bitter tears)
A single, slightly-deformed, rock hard marshmallow Peep.
Dinner:
The remaining ⅓ of the Family Sized Bag of Doritos
Doritos dust from fingers. (It’s okay because you’ve been washing your hands thoroughly, right?)
A glass of Créme De Menthe that you inherited from Nana’s medicine cabinet because she thought it was mouthwash.
Halloween candy because who cares?
Self-satisfaction from the “likes” you got on your fancy breakfast picture. Not all of your meals can be winners.
1. Get some exercise! Take a walk (as long as you keep a safe social distance.) If you’re totally quarantined, look up workout videos on YouTube. You can even burn a ton of calories deadlifting your children, pets, and/or tasteful 3-piece sofa.
2. Raid the closets and do a fashion show! Take fun photos and share them with your friends. Bonus points if you can come up with some kind of Mad Max-fishnet-and-bandoleer situation. #NewWorld #NewLook
3. Hammer incessantly, like my next-door neighbor, Rebecca. For what reason? No reason!
4. Have someone in the house with a March birthday? Invite everyone they know into a virtual chatroom on Zoom, Skype, etc. Crank the volume and get them to yell, “Surprise!” This works best when the birthday person is sleeping, pooping, or in the shower. They’ll be so surprised.
5. Two words: Prison Tattoos.
6. Train the dog! Teach it to sit, stay, go fetch a handle of bourbon and some Extra-Strength Tums, commit petty larceny, defraud the U.S. government, rollover.
7. Set up a treasure hunt. Things you can hide include iPhones, iPads, treasured sentimental items, grandma’s ashes, life-saving medication* - really, anything to get those jerks out of your hair for a while, right?
8. Paint your nails! Paint the dog’s nails! Paint the nails on the wall! Spring is coming: Everything must be Pinktini and Samba Blue.
9. Do science experiments! If you put you heads together, you can make anything from a baking soda volcano to high-grade crystal meth in a matter of hours.*
10. If you are Rebecca, make an elaborate throne out of the N-95 masks, toilet paper, hand sanitizer, and food that you hoarded. Take sexy selfies and post them to your Facebook, laughing about how you don’t need any of it. Tag it #sponsoredpost and link your bio to some kind of Yoni Steamer.
11. Sharpen all of your pencils. You’ll need them for when the vampires come. (Vampires love to draw!)
12. Have a contest to see who can make the most creative meal out of items found in the back of your cabinets. Perhaps a can of corn spread across a cookie tray to spell, “Help me,” or maybe a jello mold made with plain gelatin, hot dog water, and additional chopped up hot dogs. #WasteNotWantNot
13. Start a rivalry with a local squirrel.
14. Redecorate the guest room or drab home office using stuff from around your house. Your own feces can make a festive faux finish. Or paint an accent wall with Rebecca’s blood. Who’s hammering now, Rebecca?*
*Don’t actually do this, you sociopath.
Speaking of sponsored posts…sincere thanks to the anonymous friend(s) who sponsored this post because they thought that it could bring you a few laughs/support my writing.
I will not, however, endorse any kind of Yoni Steamer.
1. Play a game. boardgame, video game, etc charades. There are a bunch of free games right now on Steam. If you have any extra cash, support indie games!
2. Read a book. Many libraries will let you check out eBooks instantly for free. It also helps to buy eBooks of indie authors, who can also use your support.
3. Binge that TV series or movie franchise that you’ve been meaning to watch. Or watch your friend’s web series, even though it has terrible audio and you’re not buying that their 15-year-old friends are FBI Agents named Sculder & Mully. At least they tried. Give ‘em a “Like.”
4. Take turns drawing each other. If you don’t know how to draw that well, simply make a facial expression like you’re drawing super hard and put a bunch of random lines on the paper. When your loved one questions your depiction of them, tell them gravely that this is how the world sees them. Walk away sternly. You’re an artist.
5. Have a tea party with all of your stuffed animals. Who cares if you’re 40? These stuffed animals aren’t going to tea themselves.
6. Pretend you’re a bee. Pollinate something.
7. Make an elaborate breakfast and eat it in your underpants. Your tears make an excellent salt substitute. 8. Feed your family a bunch of beets and see whose pee looks the most horrific.
9. Play tic-tac-toe with your pet. Flip them off when you win. Your pet is not the boss of you. Upload it to Tik-Tok to sit amongst the 10,000 other similar videos. Know that I will still watch it. I love those videos.
10. Make a sacrifice to an Eldritch God.
11. Take a bath with all of your stuffed animals. Pretend to drown one of them. Make it look like an accident.
12. Make clothes for the figurines on all of your trophies, complete with tiny face masks, to commemorate this incredibly weird and shitty time. If you don’t have any trophies, make one out of old dolls, an empty jar of spaghetti sauce, and gold paint. You’re a winner.
13. Combine every soup you have in the panty into a super soup. Demand that everyone in your family consume it while wearing homemade superhero costumes and yelling “Super Soup!” with every slurp.
14. Put googly eyes on everything in your house, except your toilet if you have pooping anxiety. We wouldn’t want you to get constipated because the toilet is watching you. Unless that turns you on? Then I guess add extra googly eyes? It’s a free country.
I wasn’t surprised when I heard the knocks on the door. I was expecting UPS or a neighbor who was helping me put together a food donation box.
But it was a dog. A very large dog - sort of like Max from The Little Mermaid has but black, with 50% more mange.
It ran into our living room and I became hyper-aware of how many extra-rectangular glass surfaces we own. For the first time ever, my husband and I do not have roommates or guests with big pets and/or random small children running around. Our apartment is a death trap of mini-ecospheres, aquaponic systems, and dangling champagne glasses.
I’ve always admired dogs from a distance, but having never owned one, I had no freaking idea what to do. It had a long purple leash on it. Do I grab it? Will I hurt it? Will it hurt me? Is this my life now?
Its human finally arrived and stood in the doorway. She took her head and called the dog a Yenta while it Bull-in-a-China-shopped around our small apartment. I guess I was unclear that I needed help. Or maybe she was a vampire who needed a clear invitation.
The dog took out the Bart Simpson as “The Predator” statue from our Shelf of Atrocities. Then it licked the dust off of our trophies before it ran back to its human. The human claimed that the dog must like me because it “smiled” at me. I awkwardly had to close the door on them to prevent the dog from Round 2 of destruction. Neither the dog nor the human apologized.
Only when I locked my door did I remember the bag of Ummy Yummy Chicken Jerky Fillets and organic grass-fed sweet potato dog food on my floor. If this were a sitcom, I would have rejected this scene for bad writing because I, as a non-dog-owner, should not have dog food of any kind. But no. So allergic am I to wasting a single ounce of food that I’ve ended up in a situation where I’m running an amateur food pantry out of my living room. (Shoutout to my ladies at Buy Nothing Sherman Oaks, Los Angeles, CA. Woot woot!)
Is it possible that the dog had such a sensitive sense of smell that it knew that there were unattended Ummy Yummy Chicken Jerky Fillets on my floor? Did it somehow learn the exact knock of my UPS guy to access the aforementioned Jerky? Or is this some elaborate Truman Show situation, since this week has been kind of weird?
::Gasp!:: Did the dog thing that I was being rude? Normally, I offer a glass of water to visitors, but I didn’t want to encourage this kind of shenanigans. Was it expecting a tip for its trophy-cleaning services?! Is it weird that I kind of miss the dog?
Anyhow, thank you for asking how my day was, Steve from UPS. My tracking says that my rechargeable lint shaver arrived yesterday, but it’s not here yet.
And on another episode of “Life with R.S.F. (Resting Smiley Face)”:
Matt and I were minding our own business at the grocery store. A dude dressed in all black barreled up the produce aisle. I figured it might be some kinda kale emergency, so I moved way off to the side. He turned the corner and ran towards me with the speed of Dino the Dinosaur about to jump on Fred.
Matt and I have a bit of hypervigilance, so we both reflexively got into our “gonna Riker-punch this guy” stances until the dude yelled, “DID YOU HEAR ABOUT THE COTTON CANDY GRAPES?” Oh my gosh, he was so excited.
He stopped short of us to grab several grapes out of the package, “Here, take some, you have to try them!” He offered me two unwashed grapes with his bare germy stranger hand. I noticed that he was wearing a Ralph’s uniform, so my politeness kicked in and I accepted the grapes. But then it occurred to me that this might be a modern Evil Witch/Snow White scene with Branded Designer Fruit.®
I mean, you can probably get a Ralph’s nametag anywhere, like a dead employee’s corpse or Aisle 9 (Office Supplies.) Trying not to look too panicked by what might have just been a simple random act of kindness, I replied, “Oh, thank you, I’ve had them before, have a good night.”
He continued, looking deep into my eyes, wanting me to partake in the grapey goodness, “TASTE LIKE COTTON CANDY! Don'tcha think? Do you think they inject them with cotton candy or regular candy or-”
I replied, “I believe that they are hybrid grapes. Just fun with genetics. Only available seasonally.” I half-pretended to eat a grape. Satisfied, he said, with a mouth completely filled with stolen, unwashed grapes, “Oh. Well. They’re expensive!”
He galavanted back up the aisle through a set of doors labeled “Employees Only.” I waited for the flippy doors to stop moving so I could be certain that he couldn’t see me. Then I carefully placed the two grapes that he gave me back into their container. This is why you should carefully wash and inspect your fruit.
Growing up, one of my favorite things to do with my family was “sample lunch” at Costco, even though I don’t think my family ever had their own Costco membership.
For those of you who are not familiar with Costco, it’s a wholesale warehouse store where you can get a mega-size of anything from storage sheds to a year’s supply of emergency food to actual coffins ( (if the apocalypse prep doesn’t work out for you.) I think the coffins are regular-sized, not mega-sized, but I digress.
The deal with Costco is that you have to pay a small annual membership fee in order to access their extraordinary savings/10-pound tubs of butter. I was told that you had to also be a business owner - which is why my family pretended to be our business-owning neighbor. Honestly, I think we were just frugal. It was easier to commit these small crimes back in the ‘80s/’90s. Early digital photo technology was so bad that my mother, Anyu - a perpetually worried, statuesque brunette Transylvanian woman - somehow managed to pass herself off as Humberto Jose González-Villaseñor - a barrel-chested, long-haired Latino man with an infectious grin. If questioned, she’d say that the picture was of my grandma, Nagymama, who had not smiled since 1955. Anyu said that the picture was just really, really old. At 24 pixels-per-inch, either the Costco greeter either couldn’t tell the difference or did not want to risk angering my Nagymama.
I have included a rudimentary illustration to indicate how ridiculous this was:
I’m the little one in the hat dancing because Costco had ice cream samples that day.
I’m not actually sure what the heck we bought at Costco. We were a small family, so I doubt we would have been able to go through five gallons of 100% Pure Vegetable Oil or afford the 10-pound bag of fish sticks. “Vild caught!” Anyu would say, “Just like your fadder and the po-lice, ahahaha.”I’m pretty sure that the number one reason for going to Costco was for Sample Lunch. You see, Costco has vendors come in to do product demonstrations, which usually comes with a free sample. We could have smiled, thanked the vendor, and enjoyed one sample per item per person like normal humans. The thing is, there is no limit on how many samples you can take. So per usual with my family, there was always some kind of scheme.
Here’s how it went - my mother would “distract” the person handing out the samples. Meanwhile, I would pull out my oversized sweatshirt like a sort of parachute so Nagymama could load up sample after sample into my shirt. (Though unrelated to the scheme at hand, it’s worth mentioning that she’d always check first to make sure that my undershirt was tucked into my underwear so no torso skin would ever be exposed to refrigerated air, lest I catch a “kidney cold.”)
When my mother was done being distracting, we would combine the samples into a piece of tin foil that Nagymama had been saving since the war and go for a loop around the crate of frozen peas. I’d usually eat a few before they went into the tinfoil and Nagymama would yell at me for eating too fast because the sample was too hot/too cold. Only room-temperature foods were safe. Then, Nagymama would put on her glasses, thinking that she as a 5-foot-tall lady who looked exactly like George Washington in a babushka wasn’t enough of a disguise, and we’d round the sample aisle again. And again.
We did this so often that the vendors started to get to know Nagymama. She even asked if she could bring the perfume sample vendor, Marlene, to my choir recital, even though I have no idea why she hung out in the perfume sample section since Anyu was allergic to perfume. “Vrap them up in a plastic in case we can give them as a gift to somevon,” Nagymama said. As little as we had back then, Anyu and Nagymama were oddly generous about collecting as many things as they could so they could give gifts to other people.
A part of me also thinks that Anyu knew that we could get as many samples as we wanted without all the trickery, but simply welcomed the time to commiserate with another adult human being. Sure, they were paid vendors, trapped behind a booth and forced to be nice to her, but isn’t that also what 90% of therapy is?
Anyu: “Nobody appreciates how hard I vork.” Vendor: “You do work hard. Why not treat yourself to Totinos Pizza Rolls™?”
Anyu: “…and I told him, you get out!”
Vendor: “The great thing about Totinos Pizza Rolls™ is that your deadbeat husband can take them even when he’s on the go!”
Anyu: “…and you know vhat? He doesn’t even pay child support ”
Vendor: “The Totinos corporation understands that money is tight sometimes. That’s why it is just three dollars for 150 Totinos Pizza Rolls™. And yet, they technically qualify as food!”
I poked fun at all of this even at the time, but flash forward 20 years and I am not any better. This is my food diary entry from today:
Bibigo Steamed Vegetable Wonton (½)
Kirkland Orange Juice (2 ounces)
Dark Chocolate Coconut Almond (3 almonds)
Organic Chickpea Puffs (2 & ¼ puffs)
Haagen Dazs Vanilla Milk Chocolate Almond Ice Cream (like a thumb size?)
An indeterminate number of sausage pieces (each skewered with ½ pretzel stick! This is a good idea. Remember to do this at parties so people don’t waste plastic forks. Add to a different list of things that I’m supposed to remember)
Weird Chicken Salad Thing ( ½ oz)… man that sucked, why did I even get that? I knew it was going to be bad but there wasn’t a line. Now I know why. Who wants to lap tepid chicken salad with low-fat mayo out of a cupcake liner? I should have gone back for another piece of wonton instead, but there was a lady standing there, causing a bottleneck, talking to the vendor about her sciatica and…. OMG! I think other people do the thing my mother did! Remember to write blog about this.
Etc.
At least I actually pay for my membership now, and I never take more than 2 at a time - one for me, one for my husband, who I swear exists (even though he refuses to wear an oversized sweater.) I may or may not do multiple laps.
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I recently won a $50 gift card to TJ Maxx/HomeGoods. I asked my husband to come with me to pick out some stuff because he’s never been to a TJ Maxx. He left absolutely haunted.
He was immediately uncomfortable because there was some kind of beeping toy permanently turned on and hidden in a towering stack of women’s underthings. The place reeked because someone had exploded a bottle of Jean Nate in aisle 5 and instead of cleaning it, they wrapped packing tape around the seeping bottle.
In an attempt to escape, he went to the only empty aisle and looked at an arbitrary pot for 1.4 seconds. Sensing that someone in the store might have found savings, a gaggle of shoppers poured over him, shouting, “Is it Teflon? Stainless? Areyougonnagetthat?!” Before he could even reply, the pot was plucked from his hands and swept into the alley of precariously perched rugs and lamps.
He called the place, “A post-apocalyptic wasteland where your own grandma would club you to death with a mannequin leg for 75% off an overpriced birthday cake-scented candle covered in sweater lint.”
This is 100% accurate.
–
I have 32 cents left on this gift card, and I have vowed to never take him to TJMaxx again. But since I know I have some fellow shopping warriors nearby, let me know if you want it (if I know you IRL.) My old-world Nagymama will haunt my dreams if I throw any amount of money in the trash. :P
My husband and I got in an elevator with no buttons inside of it. Noticing our confusion, the young lady riding with us explained that you have to tell the elevator where you’d like to go *before* you enter it.I got out and said into what looked like a speaker, “Ground floor? Hello, Elevator?” Nothing happened. Because it’s an elevator, not freaking Siri.
Sensing my burgeoning senility, the young lady got out of the elevator and directed us to an iPad-like device, where she scrolled through the colorful logos of several destinations supported by the elevator. Embarrassed from my mistake and not accustomed to this level of hospitality from a stranger, when she asked, “Where you headed?” I panicked and blurted “Coffee Beanery.”
But there is no Coffee Beanery.
Yes, I made a stranger scroll through a terminal looking for a fictional coffee shop before panicking and running down the stairs.
And you guys, this is the FOURTH time I have told someone that I am going to a Coffee Beanery. What the heck is wrong with me?! Is it simply that the question, “Where you headed?” bores me so much that I auto-generate Lorem Ipsum?
…Or maybe…in a past life, I lived in Flushing, Michigan, where there actually *is* a Coffee Beanery (I Googled it.) Perhaps the soul of my former self is trying to get there to resolve some sort of Macchiato-based issue?
…Or has years of my old-world family discussing the government spies made me paranoid? Am I subconsciously creating false flag coffee places to protect me from perfectly nice people trying to help me?
And speaking of spies, how much did this Smart Elevator app company sell this technology for? You know they’re tracking where all the elevator users are going. Then again, we do have tracking devices in our pockets, so they know anyhow. Google doesn’t even tell me to turn left anymore; it says to turn slightly at the Pollo Loco. And that bastard knows I love Pollo Loco.
This has sort of gone off the rails a bit. Probably because I’m not sure what the name of the coffee place I’m looking for actually is, and I can’t do complex things like use the Smart Elevator to get to the coffee place because I am sad and confused without coffee.TL; DR: Smart elevators don’t work for dumb people, so we took stairs. Got my steps in to enjoy guilt-free Pollo Loco, which is to the left of the “Coffee Beanery.”
I’m between writing gigs, so one of my mentors suggested writing steamy romance novels under a pen name.
I’d probably be bad at that, so let’s skip straight to the reviews that I’d get:
“Fill in the Blank,” an erotic romance based on a true story, by Yephanie Stuhas Tagline: He pulled the wool over her eyes.
⭐ ⭐ ***Contains spoilers**** Got halfway through the book before I realized that the love of her life was really a fleece blanket that she got on sale at Kohl’s. Now I feel sexually confused and kind of clammy. Way to go, Stuhas.
⭐ Click my profile for discount vⓘ@g®@
⭐ Tat sucked. Pirate site I downloaded it on gave me a virus.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Team Afghan FTW! In fact, if the protagonist doesn’t end up with the knitted Afghan in the end, I will murder the author and her family. Cute cover!
