Dark side of the dinner party

First of all, a huge THANK YOU to everyone who weighed in (no pun intended, honest!) on their thoughts about food for my last post. I loved all of your kind, thoughtful comments; they totally made my day. I love how so many of you view food as comfort and love, or a way to honor the memory of someone who's passed away, or find it an expression of your creativity. And I can completely identify with those of you who struggle with what food means, and how much balance it requires in our lives. Ugh. I'm right there with you. And I've definitely been to that place where food is simply fuel to get me going through the day, or helping me fend off boredom.

So my gratitude goes out to each and every one of you for letting me know I'm not alone in occasionally making food my best friend, my worst enemy, my lover, or my family. :)

And speaking of food, I'm gonna hold off today on posting about what I did this weekend (hint: it was at a cemetery), but I wanted to tell you guys a funny anecdote about a dinner party my guy and I attended last week.

I made toasted goat cheese bread for the party and (okay, okay, I'll just start using his name already) Benni made some sort of divine kielbasa and cooked onion and green pepper kabobs (does anyone else have an almost Pavlovian reaction to the word "kabobs" by automatically conjuring up Bret and Jemaine of the band Flight of the Conchords? No? Okay, I'm insane). And to answer your question, Lira, no, Benni is not my Jewish Mother who yells "You're too THIN!" (that's YOUR job, girl), he's the son of a New Jersey pizza-maker. That should explain a lot.

So we head over to the party where I promptly meet my long-lost BFF, this artsy-cool chick who is about as socially inept as I am but dresses way better and says the word fuck in front of her dad, who's standing right beside her nodding when she uses it in the sentence, "UC Santa Cruz weirded me the fuck out." She's a few years younger than I am, infinitely more cool, but totally me, if, you know, I wore orange nail polish and dyed my hair black. And said fuck in front of my father.

Anyways, so Benni is talking about how he went through his rebellious (read: totally hot) phase where he got a couple tattoos and went skydiving, and I kid you not, this girl almost chokes on her bread as she starts laughing when he mentions skydiving. We wait for, you know, the crumbs to stop flying when she finally wipes her eyes and explains.

Turns out she had a friend who went skydiving a few years back with some crusty old skydiving instructor, and I should explain something about skydiving right now: the first few times you go skydiving, you go tandem, which means you are literally strapped to your skydiving instructor in case you freak out or black out or urinate all over yourself, one of which I'm planning on doing when I eventually go, I haven't decided yet which one will make the best Tweet. Probably the urine.

So imagine this poor guy jumping out of a plane, first time sky-diving EVER, tied into his flight instructor so that his back is up against his instructor's stomach, and his flight instructor growls, "You're in my world now," before promptly DYING OF A HEART ATTACK approximately 10,000 feet above the ground, and this guy at some point has to figure out a) that his flight instructor is now dead, b) how the hell he's going to land, and c) how the hell he's going to land strapped to a dead body.

So the three of us are literally crying in laughter at our table, which is about the time that other people, seeing that we are obviously laughing at something, wander over and ask, "What's so funny?" and all we can shriek out between the tears and hysterical laughter is "He had to land on the dead guy!!" and "You're in MY world now!"And people would just sort of back away and head towards the dessert table.

Sometimes, you just gotta laugh at the horrible and tragic. But man...are those not the best last words EVER?

And with that...Happy Monday, everyone! :)