And we are back from a week off! By “we” I mean “me” and by “a week off” I mean “me forgetting to write a newsletter last week.”
And let me tell you, when I don’t post a newsletter on Wednesday, I get a text from my mother that evening all, “Was there no Breathing Space this week?” She is my number one fan. Get at her if you want in the fan club. I think she has buttons that say “GIN IS IT!” Don’t tell Pitt.
This Thanksgiving was the year my sisters and I stood in my kitchen after dinner, every inch of counter space and island space looking like a thousand cornucopias* exploded, children running, four dogs barking, football blaring, 17 people in various states of turkey comas, and we said, “Why are we doing this again?”
By the time the last person sits down to eat, the first person is done. It’s not relaxing; it’s just pumpkin-themed chaos. At least for us women in the family. So we said, “Next year, let’s go to Ohio Sister’s house and go to a restaurant for Thanksgiving. Let someone else do this and let’s just relax and be thankful for things like William Zabka, dry shampoo, and cheese.”
It was decided.
Then two days later, my sister Pens Fan sends the rest of us a picture of her leftovers and says, “I’ve eaten this for three meals a day. It’s the best.” So we decided we are probably having the Cornucopia of Chaos again next year just so we can gorge ourselves into stupors three days straight afterward.
Hope your Thanksgiving was lovely, and if it wasn’t, I hope you at least got some delicious leftovers out of it. Let’s talk!
*Cornucopi? Wait. Is that a Pokemon?
1. Sally Wiggin and Joe Dinardo and Lynn Cullen, oh my!
This right here is my childhood, and I realize by me saying that, my actual real-life friend Sally Wiggin* is going to text me or call me all, “I hate you for making me feel old.”
But in 1983, I was nine years old, our sole TV had three channels, and these people were on it every evening.
What a throwback. Enough to give me the warm fuzzies right before I go, “1983 was fifteen years ago, right?**”
I hate time.
* Oh my gosh do you need ointment for that name-drop falling on your head? So sorry.
** I just did the math. It was actually 20 years ago. Math isn’t real.
2. CTE has entered the chat, prob
So, yikes?
Y’all. Yinz. One time a few years ago* while we were playing a family game of football in the ocean, my brother-in-law and I jumped up for the ball, I came down first, he came down second, he elbowed me directly on the top of my head as he came down, and I …
Blackness came for my peripheral vision. I nearly passed out. Crawled out of the ocean like a shipwreck survivor — dazed, confused, and with possibly half-a-boob hanging out of my bathing suit. I fell to a beach towel and wondered if my brain would explode if I napped. Now, my family, all 23 of them, you think would have reacted like his teammates:
Instead they were all …
Just yucking it up. Luckily, I didn’t have any issues other than a bump on my head. My family loves to comically imitate my dramatic flailing to this day. Bitches. I’m not inviting them to the Cornucopia of Chaos next year. Just me and dogs.
Anyway, brains are delicate. Skulls crack. That shit hurts. So to see this man BASH HIS OWN SKULL REPEATEDLY INTO HIS OWN HELMET ON PURPOSE? Whew.
Football is wild, y’all. CTE is wilder, though. Stay safe, Pitt players.
*Anywhere from 5-12 years because time isn’t real either.
3. “If you don’t like the weather in Pittsburgh …”
Go ahead, say the rest of that Dad Joke*. I’ll wait.
The thing with Pittsburgh weather is, it’s A LOT. There’s always weather and there’s always a lot of it. It’s not like Arizona where the meteorologists are like, “Today is the same as yesterday which was the same as the day before. Sunny and hot. Tomorrow will be more of the same.” In Pittsburgh, it’s like, “Today will be 68 degrees cooler than yesterday, but we will start the day with rain, which will turn to hail, then snow. Then tomorrow, we’ll swing back up 45 degrees and also, maybe a tornado? We’ll see.”
And that? Is how it has always been, as evidenced by this December 23, 1913 article I stumbled on while doing school research:
So the MOST they felt safe predicting was that, yes, the sun will rise. It will also set. There will be wind. The low will be anywhere from 25 degrees to 1,000 degrees, and that’s all we know for sure. Good luck out there.
Today while I was out and about in Fox Chapel, it rained, snowed, did some tiny hail/ice balls kind of thing, then the sun came out, then I think it hurricane-ed a bit. All in the space of 5 minutes. Classic Pittsburgh.
“If you don’t like the wea—”
Oh, you tell it this time.
* “ . . . just wait ten minutes! HAHAHAH!”
4. Stand there in your wrongness and be wrong
My toxic trait is that when I come across bold claims on Twitter, I bookmark them so I can revisit them after some time to see how those claims pan out after time has passed. It is delicious schadenfreude (spelled it correctly the first time! Thank you, Duolingo German!) to see people confidently beat their chests only to eventually be proven wrong. So, if you’re ever kicking yourself over a time you were wrong, I just want you to give yourself a break, because maybe you were wrong, but I bet you weren’t THIS wrong:
Let me just check the election results real quick. Yes. I see. The verdict is that this take was …
For those keeping score at home, the Senate did not turn R, Masters lost, Walker is in a runoff, Laxalt lost, Oz lost, Mastriano lost by a gap so big you could accidentally disappear your entire horse and buggy in it.
My point is, be careful what you confidently predict on Twitter because you never know who (me) could be out there (me) bookmarking your predictions (me) just so she (me) can cackle deliciously when you’re (you) proven wrong wrong wrong wrong.
Also, I have super super enjoyed the quiet since election day. No more mailers. No more texts. No more phone calls. No more commercials. No more ads.* No more childish Oz/Fetterman meme wars. No more Levi the Dog Fetterman popping into my texts or feed all “BESTIE!”
Only an election could turn me against a dog, you guys. ONLY. AN. ELECTION.
* Hats off to the Trib for their new policy going forward that political ads in their publications can only focus on the candidate, not the opponent.
5. They give you wings!
Presented without comment. Ahem. The Pittsburgh Penguins buying you pads. Please enjoy this thread of the predicted responses of various Pittsburgh Penguins were you to text them and ask them to stop and buy you, their girlfriend, menstrual products on their way home.
Just please please please don’t be eating or drinking anything when you get to Malkin.
You’ve been warned.
6. Wait. What??
This happened earlier this month, but as you know, November kicked my ass completely. I think December will be much slower as soon as I turn in my two papers for grad school. But between school, editing my book, and travel, I never got around to posting about this ABSOLUTELY BONKERS SITUATION IN SHADYSIDE!
People who live in Shadyside say their tires are being deflated with …
TAKE A GUESS, if you haven’t heard this story:
a. knives b. scissors c. guns d. lentils
The answer is … D. LENTILS.
That’s when the viewer believes lentils were placed inside the tire cap, allowing air to leak out. A note was also placed on the windshield.
LENTILS. Who knew?! Did you know?! Like, did you know you could crime with lentils? I had no clue and this just makes me wonder what else you can crime with. Barley? Orzo? Shredded Wheat??
But that’s honestly not why I pointed this story out, even though, heck yes, I tucked that little bit of newfound knowledge into my pocket just in case I need to let the air out of Luke Ravenstahl’s tires for the hell of it some day.
Here’s why I pointed it out:
“This is a great neighborhood, and we always walk around at night. It’s always been very safe. We walk around at night, so it’s disturbing. To find out there have been carjackings and tires that have been pierced… it’s incongruous,” said one resident.
Okay, okay. I’m not trying to be a bitch.* But you know how there are those man-on-the-street interviews that are on the local news and it’s always some yinzer in a thousand-year-old Steelers hat wearing glasses that were in style when Pretty in Pink was last in theaters and he’ll say something like, “Yeah, I seen this truck come ahtta dere and go dahn and flip in da crick and I called the fahr station up dere rill quick. These roads need salted more quick, I tell you ‘at right now.”
And here in Shadyside, you grab a person and interview them and they drop the word INCONGRUOUS on you like a 50-pound bag of small-batch vegan granola. You should def go watch the video because it’s just delightful in a very artisan organic way.
Forget interviewing yinzers after snow storms. I want to hear what Shadysiders have to say, “Well, I had just finished grinding my fair-trade Ethiopian beans for my pour-over when I ascertained that it had begun precipitating frozenly and heavily. Hark, the sound of a vehicle’s braking mechanism engaging did pierce the air and I witnessed the sodium chloride conveyance striking my Tesla. I was disconsolate and did become quite lugubrious.”
God bless you, Shadyside. Never change.
*It just comes natural.
7. Wrap it up!
And I’m out of time. Space. Brain power. And I have papers to write. Words to edit. Lentils to … uh … never mind. The first rule of crime-ing with legumes is we do not talk about crime-ing with legumes. So shush. Have a great week! Be kind to one another! And yes, of course, you jag, Cornucopia of Chaos is my new band name. Incongruously, we play Christmas music.
That’s it. I’m moving to Shadyside. My vocabulary is ready.