I try to draw. I put icing inside things.

I told you I'd give you some advice on how to put icing inside of cupcakes! I even made helpful drawings.

I'd like to say upfront this is totally ripped off from, er, inspired by, Hyperbole and a Half, the Old Skewl posts. But she says right here in her FAQs:

If I draw picture with MS Paint on my blog, will you think I'm copying you?

Probably not. Unless you steal my work directly or redraw/rewrite my stuff, you are good to go. I love that more people are getting interested in adding artwork to their blogs!

I even used Paintbrush (JUST LIKE HER CREEPY STARS IN EYES).

Here are some NFAQs (Not Frequently Asked Questions):

How did you get your handwriting to be so ironically and hilariously bad?

I didn't. That's just what my handwriting looks like.

But it looks like a mentally deficient five-year-old chicken wrote that stuff.

I know.

How do you function in the real world with handwriting as profoundly terribly as that?

By avoiding writing by hand whenever possible. Occasionally, I have to fill in a form by hand and people laugh at me.

Will you make me cupcakes?

No. No after you just insulted my handwriting.

First things first: I want to share what inspired my to put icing inside of cupcakes in the first place.

In the magazine section of Barnes and Noble, I saw this:

Leaving aside the sheer awesome of a magazine devoted to breakfast, let's look closely on all the various awesomeness going on in this picture:

French Toast Chocolate Sandwiches! With Bacon! And a random berry! (to keep it healthy)! For dinner!

Blogger eats things! And they are not as delicious as my cupcakes.

So, my last post (a biting analysis of Cee-Lo vs. Fifty Cent) wasn't here when I checked my blog this morning. I was told that the page "didn't exist." Now it is back. I don't understand this at all, but I'm happy to go with it. Well, not "happy to go with it." "Too lazy to investigate and/or fix and happy that for once strategy of doing nothing worked out."

Since a fairly continuous stream of people seem to find my blog through googling the phrase, "How to put icing inside of cupcakes" or "how to frost big cupcakes" (because of this post), I'd like to say that 1) I made cupcakes and put icing inside of them today! 2) Too busy to post a how-to post right now, but I will; 3) This picture probably reveals how the procedure was done but, don't worry, I'll walk you through it later, anyway:

I have icing inside of me!

Oh, and the ads on the side of my blog are now pimping for a Cabbage Soup Diet. Which was apparently popular back in the day and is eerily similar to the Magical Leek Soup. Further proof that the Magical Leek Soup is a freaking crash diet.

New Celebrity Endorses Leek-y Cauldron Diet

My heart can't take this, you guys.

Pamie (Pamela Ribon) commented on my blog. She tweeted the fug girls about me, who tweeted her back. She's following Yogurt on Tumblr (I said I'd get that link in every time).

Because everyone knows that the best way to express love is through money, I'm buying this right away. And then this.

So, to recap, not only has all this happened, but: Jennifer Egan is friends with me on facebook. I also know someone who knows someone who is her cousin.

I know someone who knows someone in The Decemberists.

I know someone who knows someone who knows Richard Siken.

Please don't act like you're not impressed. You're just embarrassing yourself.

Oh, and if that weren't enough, you know that roller derby I went to? I went with her and him. Yeah, that's right. ROLLER DERBY.

So now that I'm a celebrity, you're going to have start treating me accordingly.

But being a celebrity comes with certain responsibilities, such as looking your best. So I thought I'd share some tips.

First of all, no one goes on diets anymore. Diets are bad; we're supposed to enjoy and savor food. Like the Europeans do. I'm technically half-European, but I'm half-British and, for complicated historical reasons, people don't treat you as a gastronomical expert if you're British. When you try to serve them delicious things like marmite on toast, they get all squirrel-ly with you. (Sigh -- you Yanks. Marmite is delicious, y'all).

But if you're French, people listen to what you have to say about food, which is where this comes in. It's not a "diet" you see -- it's a commitment to wellness and savoring food and making things that taste good and are good for you. I made this in the past from her website, and I liked it. And in the process, I discovered this: the leek soup kick-off weekend.

So, you make this soup out of leeks (called "the magical leek soup") and you live on it for a weekend:

Leeks are a mild diuretic, and 48 hours or so of leek soup would provide immediate results to jump-start the recasting. For me, it was the start of a lifelong commitment to wellness as well as the beginning of my appreciation, my love, of leeks, about which there is much more to say. It is a trick I still use from time to time; do try it the first weekend.

But it's not a diet, y'all! Because it tastes delicious:

Both versions are so good, and an adventure for most palates, that you will have a very hard time seeing them as prison rations. Especially if these tastes are new to you, jot your impressions of flavor and fragrance in your journal. In time, this exercise will intensify your pleasures, and you may want to keep a regular diary of your experiences gastronomiques

Things I Like Collide

My "blog list" is entirely blogs-by-friends-that-I-like; I've thought occasionally of putting up blogs and sites that are not written by friends (but rather by people who convince me through their blogging that if we were ever to meet in real life, we would inevitably be best friends).

Recently, there have been some stirrings in the world-of-blogs-I-read. There's hyperbole and a half: I introduced a friend to it and then took the opportunity to catch up. I laughed so hard that my abs actually hurt; I can thus recommend it not only as a blog but as an ab work out (it's so popular at this point, tho', it really doesn't need my wee little recommendation). My laughter at this blog has also been so intense that ON TWO SEPARATE OCCASIONS while I was reading it, someone came in from the other room, genuinely concerned that I was hysterically crying.

Anyway, friend-I-introduced-to-it was a fan and I was like "I know! She's so great! Why she doesn't have a book is beyond me!" Then the next morning, hyperbole and a half announced that she was, indeed, coming out with a book.

[Insert joke here about how now is the appropriate time to ask the universe for a million dollars, etc.]

I've also read pamie (comedy writer Pamela Ribon) for many years. I've even bought two of her books, as a thank-you what-not for all the free content she's provided me.

Anyway, I went to the Tucson Roller Derby championships the other day (bear with me, THIS IS ACTUALLY AN EXCELLENT SEGUE JUST WAIT). Anyway, Roller Derby has recently come into popular consciousness because of Whip It, which I have not seen (but plan to!) and round about the same time, Pamela Ribon came out with a book, Going in Circles, which is a fictionalized account of her experiences with roller derby and divorce (which I have not read, but plan to!)

So I went to roller derby, which reminded me of pamie, so I checked it, and she has a really excellent piece about being a female writer in comedy, sparked by pilot/tv staffing season and Tina Fey's Bossypants (which I have read parts of).

Then today, I checked jezebel, a site I frequently read, and the first post is all about female writers in TV, and it quotes Pamie's post.

So. Do I:

(1) Have my finger right on the beating heart of popular feminist consciousness;

(2) Have clairvoyant abilities;

or

(3) Way too much time on my hands to surf the Internet.

Next, I expect Go Fug Yourself to write a piece on Supernatural that references Marcel Proust and romance novels and all of my obsessions will come together in an explosion of sparkles and rainbows (Go Fug Yourself is also pretty good at addressing my obsessions, from their eerily-similar-to-mine preoccupation with Brenda on the original 90210 [edited to add: I cannot find this on their new, advertisement-heavy layout! Boo!] to their Britney Spears Monologues.)

So, I guess I'll put these blogs on my blog list, seeing as how there's clearly a psychic link there. I should put a permanent link to Bossypants up there, too, seeing as how I've mentioned it so much, despite only having read sections. Oh! Oh! I can also link to Yogurt for the billionth time! [Note: Billion = four]. Because her latest is about a female-written comedy! Ha ha! (Let's see if I can figure out a way to link to her in every post).

Finally, have some pictures of roller derby:

Reviews, Literary; Failings, Personal

I've written this and this for The Review Review, a website that reviews, well, reviews. Literary reviews, that is. And lately they've gotten some pretty sweet media attention, from the LA Times, and The motherfucking New Yorker: mostly for this piece by Lynne Barrett, which is succinct advice to aspiring submitters to the literary journals.

The Review Review editor/creator, Becky Tuch, sent all reviewers and interviewers (which included me) a "thank you" email for their contributions after the website received this attention. This of course sent me into a guilt spiral, as the last assignment they gave me was one at which I failed parlously (dude, Blogger, PARLOUSLY is so a word! Go Away, squiggly red lines!). I was sent this issue of Ploughshares to review and failed utterly (oh, so THAT word is okay with you, Blogger?) to do so.

I failed utterly because the stories included in this fiction issue included a story by Charles Baxter, my onetime professor and thesis adviser, and a story by Ethan Rutherford, my onetime MFA cohort. It was edited by Jim Shepard, who wrote a really good introduction to this particular Ploughshares issue about "weirdness" and fiction writing and once said cool things about weirdness and Yogurt's writing when he visited the University of Minnesota and gave a talk, which I meant to go to but forgot what day it was.

Anyway, I was overcome with anxiety about reviewing an issue to which I had several--admittedly, some of them somewhat tenuous--connections. So I employed the tactic easily recognized by all Passive-Aggressives everywhere: I emailed Charlie, Ethan, and Becky and told them about the connection and asked them if they had a problem with it? To which they all sensibly replied that no, of course not, as long as I put a FULL DISCLOSURE: I KNOW SOME OF THESE FOLKS thing on the review.

What I was hoping for, in true Passive-Aggressive fashion, was for someone else to read my mind and say: "No, no, I have a problem with it," thus absolving me of all responsibility.

Just About to Lose My Mind, Honey, Honey

Really? Really? First this and now this? :

Of course, I discovered these on a shopping expedition during which I bought (and only bought):

1) Diet coke with Splenda

2) Diet coke with Lime

3) Red Vines

Ze judgments, I should not be making zem!

ETA: The above is not entirely true. I also bought a bottle of wine.

Accidentally Racist Cupcake Arrangement?

The disadvantage to boasting about your fabu skillz/love for baking things is that sometimes you can get asked to bake things. Cupcakes were requested of me, meaning that there was a push-pull between narcissism and laziness:

Narcissism: I love praise and attention! It feels like love!

Laziness: But I'm so laaaaaazzzzzzy.

But desire to please won out, so I made cupcakes! And put them on my awesome stand. I realized afterwards that the way I had arranged them was inadvertently a little racist:

Why are the minority white cupcakes at the TOP of the stand, towering over the majority chocolate cupcakes? Am I trying to visually illustrate apartheid through baked goods?

In truth, I just had some leftover vanilla frosting to use up and made a new batch of chocolate.

Because I'm determined to become a complete cliche/caricature of myself, I made the cupcakes while listening to Lady Gaga. After complete indifference/annoyance when it came to "Born This Way" and general irritation at the Catholic guilt/spirituality/whatever-whatever she is going through right now, I am completely in love with "Judas." I'm gonna have to buy the album when it comes out, aren't I? Damnit, Gaga, I cannot afford this! I caved and bought Britney's Femme Fatale (which is awesome) but her dead eyes and catatonic dancing make me feel weird about it! I don't want another pop diva album that I have ambivalent feelings about right now, please.

Excuse me while I go listen to "Judas" one more time.