Holiday Irritations

“Find a nice fat girl and you will never go hungry.”

I believe such advice has been quietly handed down, from one old bum to another.  Yes, I am fat. And yes, I have and will and do feed hungry people.  But, there is nice and then there is nice. I am a nice person as in generally being a pleasant person, but if you define nice as a spineless gullible wimp who will do anything to please you, I am not nice at all.

Asking me to make you a plate or a sandwich “to get me through the day” now and then is one thing.  Asking me to go all out baking holiday pies and cookies and other goodies for you is another.

I am not sure what irritates me most – an old goat asking me to bring him an assortment of homemade Christmas goodies when I do my ASSUMED baking OR the fact that he hears what I am saying but he doesn’t listen to me, as if he can veto my opinion or talk me into doing what I don’t want to do.

I said, “No, I don’t do that.”

“Not even for your grandchildren?”

“No, they have a mother.”

Asking me if the woman who brings my grandchildren over to see me is my sister or telling me that I am so sweet he doesn’t need sugar for his coffee does not flatter me.  I don’t roll like that. Giving me a list of favorite cookies will not put them into my oven.  Asking me to take his Food Stamp card to the store to buy the ingredients to bake his goodies ticks me off.  (I do not get food stamps, I do not know how to use those cards, and I don’t think I am authorized to use his card.)  That’s like asking me to commit a crime.

So here is my message to every old man out there who is trying to get a woman to bake him holiday pies and cookies:

BAKE THEM YOURSELF!

It is NOT hard. Recipes are everywhere. Stores also sell box mixes and ready to bake dough, no measuring required. All you have to do is read and follow directions.

He can’t do that… or at least that is what he said when I gave him a package of “just add water” biscuit mix to go with the tub of yummy homemade cooked in a crook pot beans  (thanks to a recipe by a blog friend) adding, “I’ll just stir it in, it will taste the same anyway.” And yes, he did RUIN good beans stirring in that biscuit mix. When he returned the container unwashed, I could see little globs of white raw flour goo stuck to the sides.  And THAT is why I am NOT baking him cookies!

This art looks how I feel.

Am I a Christmas Cookie Grinch?

No, this old goat lives like a homeless dude in an apartment.  His wife died last year and I don’t know what happened, but he did not keep anything from her kitchen.  The man doesn’t even own a pan.  He makes his rounds, playing on the sympathy of single older women, bumming things and trying to find someone to take care of him.  That is NOT going to be me… I have no use for a man who has his priorities so messed up that he cannot meet his own basic needs.  I don’t think he has even purchased a roll of toilet paper since he moved into this building.

He gets away with it because he is nice, recently widowed, and looks like Sam Elliott in an old cowboy biker kind of way.  But that helpless homeless thing he has going on gets on people’s nerves after awhile.  He is like a stray dog with big puppy eyes, but who needs a pet man?

Okay, that’s my vent… my holiday irritation.  What’s yours?

 

 

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LEEK: art therapy

Have you seen her? She looks like your onion ass all over.

WHAT?

She’s big, not like you, she don’t have a neck or nothing man, like that girl on Willy Wonka, a blueberry, like your onion ass ALL over.

MY WHAT?

You know you got that onion ass, nothing you can do about it. I know you’re losing weight but it don’t matter how skinny you get, you can’t get rid of that… you’ll always have an onion ass…

I let him dig himself into a deeper hole trying to explain why he calls my ass an “onion” when I should just consider the source and move on, like this middle aged man pronounces “vagina” as “va-jay-jay” and probably pees out of a “winky” but my mind was stuck on that onion thing. How the hell does my ass look like an onion? Onions are round and firm – he’s never touched it, never will, so I don’t understand the comparison.

I happen to like onions, buy spicy red onions to slice in thin slivers on leafy green salads (spinach is the “new lettuce” in my world) and sweet whites are good sliced. I also occassionally buy yellow spanish onions for cooking although I do prefer shallots minced for some dishes and sliced green onions for others. And, of course, we cannot forget chives with their mild onion flavor as snipped chives is a favorite garnish.

Never once, in my 52 years on this planet, has it ever crossed my mind to describe my big ol’ butt as an onion. And yes, suppose he is right in that my body type will never change, I always was and always will be “pear shape” but geez… if asses are in the onion family, I am a shallot and he is a freaking leek.

Still, it bothered me. It laid on my mind like an irritation, especially that “you will always have an onion ass” and the best way to purge my mind of irritations is with a little art therapy.

The following colored pencil drawing started out as onions until I worked over it in my typical abstract fashion. Faber-Castell Polychromos on hot pressed 100% cotton watercolour paper, 4×6 inches.

Thanks for reading today!