Labor Day Weekend Schadenfreude

American Rust

 This book I just read, "American Rust," takes place in a small Pennsylvania town named Buell. It's a fictional place where the steel mills shut down and everyone is a meth addict. In other words, it's a postcard from my youth. What I like about this book is that every character gets shafted. Shafted figuratively and even literally, as one character was in prison.

I reek with schadenfreude, you see. I rub it all over my head like glitter and boil it in my tea. It's very decadent, untoward and unsatisfactorily fleeting.

Almost immediately after indulging in any amount of black-hearted gloating, I feel the beady stare of the Evil Eye. If you are an old Jewish woman on the Upper East side, recognizing good fortune is a sure-fire way to attract demons who will take it away. I frantically ward off them off by pretending to spit three times: ptiu ptiu ptiu. There is magic power in showering spittle upon bystanders. You should know this, Bubbellah. 

But I have never been an old Jewish woman from the Upper East Side so I am unclear why my brain has so pertinaciously clenched onto this superstition. But then again, glitter is a morning-after menace anyway so it's probably just as well.

This is a long introduction to my main point: I had a really great weekend.

1. Tom and I went to see the Book of Mormon. It was a hoot.
2. I like to go to the beach and not encounter sand, sun, or terry cloth of any stripe.
3. S'mores. And fire.
4. I appreciate any conversation in which someone manages to ask, in context, "Who here hasn't looked at ornamental chickens online?" Even better when this is followed by a breezy comment about ornamental roosters, which are of course illegal in most towns. And an ingenious workaround-- fluff up their head feathers so they look like an owl.
5. Paella, grilled tuna nicoise salad, panna cotta, Kraken rum... Friends who are foodies add a layer of joy to the already high stack of joy I take in their friendship. 
6. (And now would also be a good time for a shout out to the finest chicken ever smoked, the best cole ever slawed, much thanks Tracie and Andrew.)
7. I played a card that read, "Rush Limbaugh's soft shitty body" and won a round of Cards Against Humanity. It was as glorious as being a motherfucking sorcerer, catastrophic urethral trauma and opposable thumbs.