etp v / emily

I Think That This Will Explain a Lot

filtered by emily

Possible Titles:
Recipes for Disaster (Areas)
that was the worst party I have ever been to, and it was in my apartment
terrible parties that I throw in my apartment
Pony
Pony Up
The Dead Pony Society
Public Displays of Emotion of the In-Class Variety
If you can’t tell shit to other writers, who the fuck can you tell?
My Favorite Joke

Dear Class,

I am in rehearsal for, oh, roughly, 35 hours a week. I also have school. I also have to go to the gym so that I can survive being thrown around onstage for 35 hours a week. On Monday, for the first time since January 1, 2009, I had a day off. On January 1, 2009, I had had my first official date to a still-married man that I had met and kissed several times on Christmas Eve and the early morning hours of Christmas Day 2008 in a gay bar.


I did not know that he was STILL MARRIED when both a) he kissed me and b) I agreed to go out on a date with him. After said date, when I think both of us wanted to kill ourselves and/or each other (he thought I was 25/26ish, I am not; I thought he was divorced – he is divorced from his first wife, but not his second; additional fun fact – he has two children, ages 6 and 8 if I remember correctly), I hung out with a guy with whom I had had a somewhat contrived, early New Year’s Kiss around 10:34 pm on December 31, 2008, because he had somewhere else to be later, and I was having an impromptu New Year’s Eve party in my apartment.

So late last week, I realized that I should definitely be around some good people that I know, not some random guys that I don’t know, on my first day off in a long time. I know a hearty bunch of good people. I like to consider myself a good person, but I do have some terrible qualities (example: leading a life wherein I only have a day off every month and a half). In order to be around the highest number of good people on said day off, I decided to have a Gathering at my apartment. I will continue to pretentiously refer to this gathering as a Gathering for the rest of this story, and annoy everyone with an ounce of good taste, because that is what I did last week. I am a vegetarian, but some of the good people I know are vegan, some are vegetarian, some are lactose intolerant, and most of them are picky. Also, I have a friend who is allergic to wheat, soy, bell peppers, garlic, onions, dairy, most household cleaning products, and several other things that I try to remember but usually don’t. She has zero tolerance for alcohol. She feels sick and tired a lot of the time, particularly at inconvenient times. For example, she did not come to my impromptu New Year’s Eve party because she was feeling ill. A few days ago, her doctor discovered that she has elevated levels of mercury in her blood. Mercury poisoning. Like Jeremy Piven.


On most days, all I have to do to feel better about my life is be happy that I am not her.

So I decided to appeal to the lowest common denominator and make delicious vegan food that everyone would enjoy. I would make tomato orange fennel soup without veggie broth or onions so that my allergic-to-the-world friend could eat it, Fall in a Pot (sweet potatoes, red lentils, green apple, tomatoes, lots of dark leafy greens, curry spices), and an edamame carrot couscous thing with kumquats and olives. When I was about to start chopping the fennel for the soup, I received some terribly sad news relating to my group’s Dictee presentation and my past life and had to deal with it. Then I was way behind on making soup. So I called my emergency contact, who I am not dating (even though he thought, at the time, that dating each other eventually would not be the terrible idea that I thought and now we pretty much both agree it is), and asked him to be my can opener. If I explain why that is funny, I will not finish this story in time for rehearsal. He laughed and said he would be over as soon as he finished working in his garage, which contains several motorcycles that require constant care and attention.

While the soup was simmering, I started making the rest of the grub. I was somewhat distracted and mistakenly put edamame in the Fall in a Pot because that is what I usually do even though I told myself SO MANY TIMES to put the edamame in the couscous thing, not in the Fall in a Pot. Then I realized that I am not my mother, nor my roommate, let’s call her Marsha, because I am not a perfectionist. The red lentils weren’t going to go bad – was I really going to give myself shit about red lentils?


No! Of course not.

Then Marsha came up to me and said, “Emily, (name of boyfriend, let’s call him Martin) and I need to eat something with meat in it.” Inside my head, I very quickly noted the fallacy in this statement: perhaps she and Martin were hungry, but I was in the process of making three huge pots of gorgeous vegetables, two of which contained significant amounts of plant-based protein. Unless Marsha had recently become concerned about whether or not she and Martin were getting enough Iron, I’m pretty sure she could have eaten, oh, I don’t know, some of the food that I was almost finished making alongside some of the leftover chicken and potatoes roasted in goose fat that she had in our refrigerator. One half-second later, I cheerfully said “Sure!” and moved the soup, which realistically was ready to cool before it went into the blender, to a different counter, and shuffled the couscous thing and the Fall in a Pot onto the smaller burners of our communal stove. Then Marsha began to make the saddest, most beautiful chicken pot pie I have ever seen.


Let me tactfully explain: Marsha thinks that Martin does not love her. Whenever she thinks this, she makes something that she thinks they will both enjoy eating. On some level, Martin enjoys having Marsha make food for him, but each time Marsha tries to improve their relationship by making food, they both get a little bit sadder.

At one point, Martin came into our dining room and said, in a voice that I thought was funny but Marsha probably hated, “Mmm. I love chicken pot pie!” To which Marsha replied, “no.” “What, honey?” asked Martin. Continuing in a voice hovering closer to under-her-breath than appropriate cocktail party volume, but loud enough for both of us to hear, Marsha said, “you’ve never been in love before.” Then I pretended to go find something, maybe the bathroom, in my room.

I could go on.

I could go on for a very long time.

But I am going to skip ahead.

My emergency contact realized sometime after he said he would come over that he could not, in fact, come over, because, and I quote, so this is not plagiarism, he is “a terrible person consumed by hatred so [he has] what’s coming to [him],” ie., spending the evening being sad and alone in his house instead of happy and with good people in my apartment.

He wasn’t the only person that didn’t show up, but he was the only person that I actually cared about seeing on my first day off since January 1, 2009, so, yeah, I was a terrible hostess. I forgot to offer anyone leftovers, and even though everyone there hated that Marsha and Martin plunked down and started watching reality television and TURNED OFF MY MUSIC, I was too sad and exhausted and, eventually, inebriated – it does not take much, and I had had both a room temperature corona cut with cold diet root beer and some cheap champagne – to care.

Let’s see, what else…

Here was my favorite joke before Tuesday that I would tell my emergency contact all the time:

ME. There’s always a pony. (fake throat-clearing noises).
EMERGENCY CONTACT, in monotone, begrudgingly. Why is there always a pony.
ME. Because there’s so much shit!

Then, after our presentation, in which I inappropriately alluded to my personal life several times, we watched a video of a pony dying.


The End.