FIVE by FIVE

Well apparently I've been tagged by a meme - which makes me feel like I'm officially part of the blogosphere. That and getting listed as a newbie of the week on Best Gay Blogs. Big fat kisses to all those involved over there and to everyone who stopped by via that site.

Of course, I was unaware of my tagging, as I am rather sporadic about checking my friends blogs. Shame on me. My undergraduate friend ED, one of several gay Asians that graduated from my alma mater tagged me a couple of weeks ago. I just found it now. *sigh*

I had been to his site recently, but alas, I hadn't gone farther than his lovely posting about the fried white trash food items available at SF Gay Pride. I had seen the funnel cakes booth (which was a first sighting for me in the bay area, I had never seen funnel cakes out here at the street fairs in San Francisco, and I had always wondered why that was, as I LOVE funnel cakes and partook of them often in St. Louis - probably a reason why I so husky back then). But I did NOT seen the FRIED TWINKIES/DEEF FRIED HOHOS/CHOCOLATE DIPPED OREOS booth.

DAMN.

So when Ed blogged about it, I stopped reading and thought to myself. DAMN. DAMN. DAMN. I missed another chance to rediscover my white trash roots (AJ is often telling me that I am the most white trash Asian boy that he has ever met, and having met some of the Asian boys that he knows in SF, I probably would agree with him. Apparently I am also the butchest Asian boy he's ever dated - and again after meeting some of the Asian boys that he's been with, yeah, no contest there - talk about nelly).

So no deep fried Hostess treats for me. It's just as well. I'm on my LFBFSF (Lose Fat Before Folsom Street Fair) plan - not that I'm sticking to it. I just had Spicy Louisana Fried Chicken for lunch today with Peter. Rita would be so proud, as I ordered my leg and thigh with mashed potatoes and extra gravy. The gravy wasn't as great as I remember the old school Kentucky Fried Chicken gravy use to be - when they would give you a container of mashed potatoes (with that totally runny completely-uniform-made-from-reconstituted-potatoes consistency) and a same size container of gravy - which, try as I might, I was never ever able to finish off. I mean who uses a one to one ratio of gravy and potatoes? Not even I could justify that. Gravy, alas, is a condiment, not a beverage. But that gravy back then was the best. It had that unappealing gray brown matte look - but tasted so darn good. The Spicy Louisana Fried Chicken place had decent gravy (and the potatoes did have that uniform consistency that only comes from potatoes flakes), but it was no competition to those memories.

But back to the meme. Here's the dish:

5 items in the freezer

• 12 Quiescently Frozen Confection Fudge Bars by Lucerne (the Safeway House brand). During a random one-day heat spell here in SF (O.M.G. it's 80 degrees in SF!) a couple of weeks ago, AJ and I were at Safeway and went a little crazy in the frozen novelties section. The Fudge Bars are currently sitting next to the Original Brand Popsicle Firecrackers (they are red cherry, white lemon, and blue raspberry, and very very phallic), and the Breyer's brand All Natural Pure Fruit Swirl Bars (in blueberry-lemon, strawberry-blueberry, strawberry-orange, and strawberry-lemon) in our freezer. The heat spell (of course) ended and we haven't open any of the boxes of frozen treats (anyone want a popsicle?)

• Belvedere Vodka. AJ loves a good martini. His brand of choice is Belvedere, while I prefer Hangar One (but mostly because it's so exclusive - I'm a sucker for anything hard to find or available only for people in the know. When I was a child I used to eat Boo Berry cereal not because it tasted better than its brother cereals Franken Berry and Count Chocula but because it was harder to find.) AJ acquired his taste for martinis in New York a couple of years ago, where he realized that it was the most effective way to get drunk in the NY bars. A martini was only one or two more dollars than any other cocktail, but it was ALL alcohol. So he switched to martinis and he's never looked back. He likes them dry with lots of olives and slightly soiled - that is - not dirty with loads of olive juice but just a hint of olive juice. Shaken not stirred, of course. Note the image of Boo Berry cereal and not the image of vodka. That tells you how much I really drink and where my true interests are.
  

• Homemade Turkey Stock. I made turkey stock over Thanksgiving with the carcass of the turkeys (yes that's plural - we made two turkeys for Thanksgiving, one for presentation and one to be carved and eaten). AJ asked me what I was going to do with all the stock, and I said we could either use it to make soup, or keep it frozen for when we wanted to make a nice demiglace. He asked me what a demiglace was, and I admitted I hadn't a clue, I was always just reading about it in my fancy cookbooks. The turkey stock has stayed in the freezer ever since.
  

• 1 lb Ground Buffalo. AJ is off ground beef right now, because of mad cow. He's been on-again/off-again with ground beef ever since bovine spongiform encephalopathy surfaced in the news, but right now he's off of it. So now any recipe we have that calls for ground beef is substituted with ground buffalo. After all, they don't call it mad buffalo disease.
  

• Totino's Original CrispCrust Party Pizza - Supreme and Three Meat varieties. Yes the super cheap pizza that you use to eat when you were a kid. From the same people who brought you everyone's favorite slumber party snack Pizza Rolls. The Party Pizza was on sale for a $1 each (actually Safeway had them for 10 for $10 but even I am not that white trash to buy 10. I bought 6). I guess AJ was right, I am a little white trash.

5 items in my closet (just to clarify, we have four closets in our apartment, all these items are from my personal closet, not the ones that AJ and I share - unless otherwise noted.)

• Two Wigs. I used to have three, but Peter has borrowed the afro one (along with the hair pick that I made him take to got with it) for the drag queen brunch happening up at Roshambo winery. The wigs are pretty nasty and are shoved in one of two paper grocery bags full of random halloween costumes (Pringles Guys, Crayons, Wham, a mime shot to death, a china man, a pantone swatch book page and a few others, I can't remember are shoved in to those bags). I believe one of the wigs belongs to Damon who wore it when he went dressed up at Catherine Zeta Jones' character from Zorro (Rita went as Zorro) for Halloween. They gave it to me when AJ and I went dressed up as MILLI VANILLI for halloween a couple of years ago. Girl you know it's true.

• Fifteen (or is it sixteen?) Manbags. Growing up I was always envious of my mom who had a purse. She could throw tons of stuff into it (and she did - she carried EVERYTHING in her gigantic purse) while guys were relegated to a wallet in the back pocket. How I longed for a purse of some sort. The closest approximation of a purse was the backpack, and I wore mine all the time. But it wasn't the same as the stylish bags that my mom would sling over her shoulder. I need something that would allow me to carry my walkman, a book to read when I was bored (probably something girly like From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler), and maybe some candy (I always had a sweet tooth) - all in a fashionable way. I was so pleased that when it became socially acceptable in the late 90's to carry a manbag. It all started with the YAK PAK and I've haven't looked back. I believe I have about four or five more that I've retired to our bedroom closet.
  

• A Flip-n-Fuck. A green vinyl folded foam mat. Our friend Bryan coined the term for it (as he had one as well). Our friend Michelle borrowed it ages ago when she was between beds, and returned it to us awhile ago. We thought it might come in handy to keep - and hence the storage at the top of my closet. And yes, it has lived up to it's name.

• A shoe box of old 1.44 MB 3.5" floppy disks. Why haven't I thrown these away? I don't even use zip disks anymore. Who uses floppies anymore? I do have an external USB floppy drive, I don't even know where it is. How's that for sad?

• Thousands of old cassettes (in the shared living room closet). I used to be (and still am) a huge music whore. Contained in those cassettes (that I can't bear to throw away) is the history of my tween and teen life told through music. My very first cassette tape purchase (Irene Cara - Oh What Feeling and Cyndi Lauper - She's So Unusual). Mix tapes from high school featuring Erasure, New Order and The Smiths. Bootlegs of Tori Amos shows (Little Earthquake era mind you). Random rarities like The Cure's Entreat - a live album that was released as a promotional item. And complete throw away trash tapes like Stacey Q's Better Than Heaven (you know you loved "Two of Hearts" back then, and really Stacey gets extra props for guest appearing on not one but TWO episodes of Facts of Life). I keep on telling myself that one of these days I'll convert them all digitally and burn archive audio CD's or compressed lossless audio files (FLAC) archive DVD's. But who knows if that will ever happen.
  

5 items in my car (Damn. I don't have car. AJ has a car, but really, it's his car, not mine. Oh well, I shall pretend that I have one and this is what I would have in it.)

• A cassette tape converter to an audio jack for my iPod. My pretend car would be old and beat up and wouldn't be fancy enough to have a CD player, much less an actual iPod jack. Nope. It would be oldschool, stick the tape in with the wire hanging out and plug the iPod in and rock to a tasty mix of Gnarls Barkley, The Stars, the new Yo La Tengo (hey, it's a pretend car, so I can pretend I have the new YLT album), and whatever disposable pop star I currently am listening to.

• AJ's fingernails and eyebrow hairs. AJ, of course, would ride in my car every now and then. And inevitably he would get nervous and start to peel off his fingernails and pick at his eyebrow hairs. And inevitably they would end up on the car floor. Yes it's disgusting. But I love him anyway.

• Cheap emergency sunglasses. Probably an old pair of retired sunglasses would have migrated to my glove compartment in case I had forgotten to wear a pair. That or I would have forgotten them in there. I love sunglasses. One can never have enough accessories.

• A sweatshirt in the trunk. You never know when you might get stuck somewhere and all of sudden become exceedingly cold. I probably would throw an old polartek shwag pullover shirt from the dotcom era (I'm thinking of the blue one from a defunct dot com company called TimeDance.com that I had help design the collateral for back in the day).

• A bunch of cassettes. You never know when you might forget the iPod. And listening to the radio in this day and age is not an option (not counting the occasional NPR show). So I'd probably have a couple of old school tapes in there too. Probably mix tapes now that I think about it. Because who wants to listen to the same musical group over and over again?
  

5 items in my purse. (See! Having a purse is cool. But I have a manbag. The difference - a manbag strap is worn across the chest, while a purse is hung from just one shoulder - unless you are a paranoid tourist that is).

• A Thursday Next novel. Right now I'm on the second book - Lost in a Good Book. I'm obsessed. I keep on giggling through the book, and I think even AJ would like it, but then AJ is illiterate so I doubt he would actually read it. Shout out to Felisa whose blog profile turned me onto them. Oh and RITA - if you haven't read it, you'd LOVE them.

• a bag of cough drops. I have a sinus infection. In fact I've had this sinus infection since Memorial Day weekend. It has not gone away. I have extreme post nasal drip. Which makes me cough a lot. It is not pretty. I have always had bad sinus issues. It is why I earned the nickname in college of "Phlegmy Spice."

• Two iPods. I have an old school 4G 60GB Photo iPod. Six months ago I got the "sad iPod" face. Three weeks after my warrantee expired. I've been living on borrowed time ever since. I bought a shuffle soon afterwards via Craigslist to work out with and to go skiing with. I will never go skiing without music again now! Whoo hoo! I figured the shuffle would be a good thing to tide me over when my iPod died as I waited for the long talked about "full screen" video iPod. Luckily my iPod has not died yet, as said rumored video iPod has not been released. Oh yeah, and the video iPod to left is totally a fake mockup. I just thought it was fun to show it.

• Gum. I used to get free gum from my friend who works at Google. She would sneak me a pack from their snack room whenever I sent her an email reminder about it. Usually my emails go something like this "Hey. I need gum. My breath stinks." Alas my gum of choice (Orbit) is no longer available in the snack room thus leaving me with the ugly business of actually spending mony on gum, or chewing the boring Wrigley's that Google still has to offer. I've opted to spend the 89¢ per pack because no one like haliotosis and Juicy Fruit does nothing to help my breath.
  

• Puffs Plus with Aloe Vera Lotion Facial Tissue. See sinus infection above. I never leave home without some sort of tissue.

Tag 5 people

• AJ at White Trash Hors d'Oeuvres
• Rita at rhcrayon: The Blog!
• Damon at DJ 52 Stories
• Felisa at Silly me, what was I thinking?
• Megan at The Minkz

Wow. That was really boring wasn't it?