2 Birds Investigates: Bum Wine!

First things first: T.G.I. Hagman!

As of 4:48am, Larry Hagman is...alive!

Now, I have a question for you: Why? Why is it physically impossible for me and Chris to do an investigation that goes smoothly? Like, from start to finish; everything just goes right. We have a plan, we execute the plan, and then it's over. Period. No shenanigans. No embarrassing physical pain. Just a successful investigation. But no, apparently this isn't an option, as evidenced (yet again) this past weekend when Chris and I investigated "bum wine."

First and foremost, I had no god given idea what bum wine was:

Tulane Chris: "It's malt grape wine that's popular among homeless because it's so potent and cheap."

Meg: "Oh. So like a 40?"

TC: "No, that's a 40."

M: "So like that malt beer that comes in the big cans?"

TC: "No, that's malt beer."

Meg: "Wait...so it's wine?"

TC: "Why don't you on hop the Wikipedia, Princess."

So then I spent an embarrassing amount of time researching bum wine (big ups to bumwine.com!), which reminds me of the time Ex Co-Blogger Chris tried to get me to do poppers and we got into a huge fight because I did a project in 10th grade on Sudden Sniffing Death Syndrome and that's how people die, and he said he was pre-med in college so I should just believe him that poppers are harmless and I was like, "UH, BULLCORN," so we spent 20 minutes fighting over the poppers Wikipedia entry until we realized we were fucking losers and watched Hocus Pocus instead. True story.

Once I actually grasped the concept of bum wine, we set out to find some. This task proved significantly harder than we originally anticipated. Considering I couldn't find a liquor store in my neighborhood that sold Andre last New Year's Eve, I assumed trying to find bum wine around these parts would be fruitless, so we headed east towards someplace slightly more..."spicy"—Columbia Heights.

Ah, that's more like it.

Well, actually, first we went to Target where I impulse bought a floor lamp because it was on sale and I've been living off candlelight and Hat ever since my old one died, oh, almost two years ago. As exciting as this purchase was (and continues to be!), buying it before we found bum wine turned out to be a horrible, horrible decision on my part. Why? Because we had to go to seven liquor stores before we found one that carried bum wine and that lamp was fucking heavy. I can imagine we were quite a sight: two nerdy white kids hoofin' it up and down 14th street, one hauling a giant lamp on her back, panting ever-so-slightly and muttering a unique array of swears under her breath, going into any and every liquor store all, "Y'ALL GOT MAD DOG? YES? NO? NO? CHRIST!"

At one point we just flat-out gave up and decided to buy scratch-offs in hopes that one of us would win the jackpot and doing the investigation would be a non-issue. Gold Fever, baby!

Shockingly, that plan didn't quite pan out, so it was back to bum wine hunting. Thankfully we found a liquor store that carried bum wine shortly thereafter, so we loaded it into my giant lamp bag, flicked a 10 under the partition, put our monocles on and spun our canes all the way back to my neighborhood to trash our livers in the name of a good investigation, which we proudly present to you now.

2 Birds Investigates: Bum Wine

[Chris asked me to insert an animated gif here because he's quote, "trying to get into animated gifs these days." "O...K. Did you have a particular gif in mind?" "Meh. Dancing banana, I guess."

...Christ.]

How to host a bum wine party:

Step 1: Google "how to host a wine party". Apparently the three key things to notice are color, bouquet (what we bums call smell) and taste. You'll have to wait for the next morning to rate the intensity of the hangover.

Step 2: Take out two fresh glasses and a salad plate of nine peanut M&M's to "cleanse the palette" between "wines".

Step 3: Designate a legal heir.

Step 4: Decide the tasting order of your wines. Generally you want to go from light to dark with a rosé in the middle. However, if all of your wines are the same industrial pink, order them so that you'll be a little drunk by the time you get to the ones you really dread.

Step 5: Remember to set out an extra glass to pour the wine you inevitably can't finish into. Chris and I didn't know the technical term for this, so we just lovingly referred to it as "The Bukkaki Cup".

Step 6: Take half a Xanax, go to your safe space, and begin.

WINE 1: Arbor Mist Peach Chardonnay

For the reckless Mormon divorcée in you!

Color: I appreciate that in our notes, my observation was, "It looks like carbonated urnine," whereas Chris' was, "Like the bright clear yellow of a jaundiced man's eyes." You know it's a good writing partnership when one partner's writing fixates on body fluids and the other's sounds like a haiku.

Bouquet: Like if a peach had little Chardonnay barfs down the front of its blouse.

Taste: Image you're a baby bird and mama bird comes to regurgitate breakfast for you, but instead she regurgitates a sorority initiation party and a bag of CVS Peach-Os and then pecks you to death.

WINE 2: Manishevitz Cream White Concord

The Eleventh Plague

Color: It looks like urine. We're not even trying to be funny; it just genuinley looks like human urine. Like you could take it to the doctor, hand it to a nurse and the test would show: You are comprised of 100% Diabetes, but this is definetley urine.

Bouquet: Ooof. Sniffing this got me in a way. It smells exactly like a Bath & Body Works body splash I wore in middle school. It was the crucial third leg of the Meg McBlogger middle school fashion triangle:

Taste: 6,000 years of unbroken tradition, but their wine still tastes like simple syrup and Old Spice.

WINE 3: Mad Dog Banana Red

"Take me down to the Pradise City where the bananas are red and the girls are throwing up into the gutter"

Color:

Red is nature's way of saying, "DANGER!"

Smell: Meg: "This smells like nail polish remover and banana Laffy Taffy."

Chris: "Frankly, that may be what it is."

Taste: My favorite conversation of the evening occrued directly after tasting this:

Chris: "DO YOU KNOW THAT NURSERY RHME, 'QUEEN QUEEN CAROLINE, WASHED HER HAIR IN TURPENTINE?!?!'"

Meg: "No..."

Chris: [100% defeated] "Oh. Well. Nevermind."

This, in my opinion, was the worst out of them all. It just tasted like straight-up chemicals. Like a ration of Soviet People's Holiday Drink that got left behind in a Ukranian missle silo. So much so, we successfully used it clean Thai food drippings off my coffee table and grime off my bathroom sink:

It left a streak-free shine—presumably on our stomachs as well.

WINE 4: Wild Irish Rose Red

Chris told you Ireland was the Third World

Color: It was the closest out of them all to being a real food color. It was less DANGER! and more PROCEED WITH EXTREME CAUTION!

Bouquet: Sweet like a first kiss—assuming your first kiss was with a truck stop hooker low on cash, but high on dreams and Newport Lights.

Taste: At first it just tastes incredibly sweet and you're like, "Well this isn't that bad." And then it tastes exactly like a licking a shag carpet.

WINE 5: Four Loko Watermelon

Banned at the University of Rhode Island!

[Note: Chris and I had no idea what we were getting oursrelves into with this one. We were at our 780th liquor store of the evening and needed one more wine or wine product to round out the tasting. In desperation, we went to the cooler to get a canned beverage and chose Four Loko simply because it was at eye level. The next morning, we got an email from a reader asking us if we'd heard of this new Four Loko craze and since then it seems to have exploded onto the National stage like a pink, caffeinated Christine O'Donnell. We really appreciate being 24 hours ahead of this trend because we were the kids growing up who were 24 months late on things like pogs, Airwalks and Mayim Bialik.

Here's what we were getting into:

]

Color: I was originally offended when Chris said this, but the best way to describe it really is as, "Hello Kitty's pussy."

Bouquet: It smells like if Jolly Ranchers had night sweats.

Taste: Chris and I were like the opening credits to Patty Duke when tasting this one: they walk alike; they talk alike; at times they even recoil alike—what a crazy pair! The taste wasn't that bad, but then all of a sudden there's a sleeper taste; like a fizzy, sour burn in the back of your throat that hit us at exactly the same time. You will never know how beatiful that moment was. It was like:

WINE 6: The Bukkuke Cup

"I'm not drunk! I'll prove it—I'll drink from the Bukkake Cup!"

Color: The Devil is a woman. And she's raggin'.

Bouquet: If you take a deep breath and look in the mirror, you'll see how you're going to die.

Taste: You know what it tasted like? Exactly what it was.

WINE 7: Garnier Full Control Hairspray: All Day Flexible Hold, and a paper bag

7,500 brain damaged teenagers can't be wrong

Color: Misty.

Bouquet: You can really smell the Fruit Micro-Waxes!

Taste: Headache. Dizzy. Really made us wonder how latchkey kids do it.

Thud.

Have a great weekend, guys! Lerve!

I have booty shorts and a rock collection — I could probably never be your woman.

I've lived alone in my studio for about a year and a half now and guess what? I love it. I want to be buried here. No offense to anyone I've ever lived with, but if you put a gun to my head and made me choose between repeating my middle school experience or living with a roommate again, guess what I'd chose? Cyanide pill. That's how much I love not having a roommate.

Why do I love not having a roommate? Um, gee, I don't know. Perhaps because I can eat cereal for breakfast, lunch and dinner without a smug roommate shooting me dirty looks from the kitchen while they cook "chicken", "vegetables" or other such "proteins" and "nutrients"? Or maybe because I can plop down on the couch and watch a Deadliest Catch marathon and drink grain alcohol from 5:00pm until whenever I pass out, free of judgment? Or perhaps because I can wear my Second Skin (Fall & Winter: wife beater and Jack Daniels pajama pants; Spring & Summer: wife beater, booty shorts and thigh-high knit socks.) (Seriously. Find me an outfit more comfortable than one of those two and I will blow my head off because my entire universe just folded in upon itself.) day in and day out without feeling like a total slob? Although to be fair, I did recieve the following text message last week from College Roommate Danielle:

I am totally wearing thigh socks and teeny pajama shorts dancing around the room drinking tequila. and it makes me think how i used to LOVE when you would put on your thigh socks pajama shorts and dance with your t-square! I for reals miss you.

And shortly thereafter:

Wow, I really hope you remember doing that otherwise I sound SUPER gay right now.

Of course I remember that. Because I still do it. And save for Danielle because we're kind of gay for each other, I couldn't with a roommate.

When I tell people that I live alone, I usually get one of two reactions:

1.) The person gives me a knowing look and says, "Living alone is (or, must be) awesome."

or 2.) The person looks horrified and in only a slightly judgmental tone says, "OH GOSH, I could never live alone—you must get so lonely."

I don't understand that. Because I have friends; I just don't want to live with them. And to be fair, they probably wouldn't want to live with me. Because my personality is a lot like cigarettes: not immediately addictive and hazardous to your health upon prolonged exposure. I just think it works better for all parties involved when I live alone. Which kind of worries me and adds to my whole emo "I'M NOT LOVABLE!!!!" life-fear that was seriously exacerbated upon turning 25. When I moved back home from New York, I had a sit-down with my parents (married 37 years last Thursday) and was honestly like, "How the FUCK do you live with another human being for that long?" It boggles the mind. Because as my last blog post can attest, I can't be alone for 37 minutes without wanting to break my lease if it means getting away from myself. I remember them giving me a really good and comforting answer at the time, but I can't remember what it was for the life of me. So fuck me.

But the point being, in the entirety of my living alone, I've only gotten lonely twice. The first time was, of course, during the Snowpocalypse. Because that was a long time to be shut-in alone. (Although said loneliness was quickly remedied when I threw my ironic Barack Hussein Snowbama party and when Helena snowed herself in with me for the last half of the week, bless her heart.) The second time I got lonely happened this past week.

I was taking a little break from my productivity streak to clean my apartment (being productive even when taking a break from being productive? The end is nigh.) and guess what ultra randomly came on my iTunes shuffle? White Town's "Your Woman". And I swear to god, I said (out loud and to know one in general) "HOLY SHIT" and looked around my apartment for someone to be like, "OH MY FUCKING GOD!!!!1 DO YOU REMEMBER THIS SONG?>!1?!?!" with.

That was a lonely moment. Because, OH MY FUCKING GOD!!!!1 DO YOU REMEMBER THAT SONG?>!1?!?! I mean, talk about things that transport you directly back to middle school. Fuck chamomile tea; listening to that song was like stepping into a time machine. I can remember exactly where I was the first time I heard it: I was in my mom's car, the radio was on and she was giving me and Teresa a ride to Lake Forest mall, where I was probably going to spend my allowance on rocks at the Natural Wonders store. (Yes I had a rock collection. No I don't want to talk about it.)

I have such vivid memories of being so utterly confused by that song. And apparently it doesn't take a lot to confuse the gender norms of an 11-year-old girl because I was very much like, "I DUN'T GET IT! THE WORDS ARE 'I COULD NEVER BE YOUR WOMAN,' BUT A MAN'S SINGING IT! WHHHHHAAAAA?!?!?!" This was of course before the days when you could Google song lyrics, so I distinctly remember working it out in my head and reasoning, "Maybe he's saying 'I could never be A woman.' That would make sense. Because boys can't be girls. BOYS CAN'T BE GIRLS!!!!!" Nowadays nothing shocks these young kids, what with the Katy Perry kissing girls and liking it and Brandon Flowers and his whole, "somebody told me that you had a boyfriend who looked like a girlfriend that I had in February of last year" conundrum. Back in my day we had White Town. And we were confused, thank you very much. Simpler times...

It now being 2010 and the future with our hovercrafts and meals in pill form and silver go-go boots and all, I decided to utilize our advances in technology to eradicate my 11-year-old confusion about White Town and the song "Your Woman" via Google once and for all. AND EVERY FACT I LEARNED BLEW MY MIND MORE THAN THE LAST. Behold:

1.)

That's what the gender-bending, sex pot voice of White Town looks like?! Are you fucking kidding me? He looks like Al Roker pre lap-band surgery. For some reason I always imagined him looking like Boy George, circa Worried About the Boy:

Which thereby makes me feel even more country that anybody who breaks gender stereotypes must automatically look like Boy George in my mind.

2.) According to the FAQ section of the official White Town website, this is what "Your Woman" is about:

I love 'Your Woman' *BUT* what is it about??? Are you a man/woman/transsexual?

Ummmm ...well, that's a toughie. When I wrote it, I was trying to write a catchy pop song that had more than one perspective. Although it's written in the first person that viewpoint isn't the same as it may
sound. So, these are *some* of the things it's about:
Being a member of an orthodox Trotskyist / Marxist movement (as I was for three years in the 80s).
Being a straight guy in love with a lesbian (ditto).
Being a gay guy in love with a straight man.
Being a straight girl in love with a lying, two-timing, fake-ass Marxist.

The hypocrisy that results when love and lust get mixed up with highbrow ideals :-)

First and foremost, discussing Marxist/Trotskyist ideals in the same sentence as an emoticon is sort of a hard pill to swallow.

Secondly, Jesus Christ. "The hypocrisy that results when love and lust are mixed up with Marxist/Trotskyist ideals"? That sounds like something that would come out of the mouth of someone I'd date because he's an artist and just had a show at Galapago's and we can be nonconformist and artsy together. Except when I say that I'm nonconformist and artsy, I mean that I want to be reincarnated into Tom Servo and would rather sit at home and eat Hot Pockets than go to a thumpin' club—more commonly called being a "loser"—and when I say he's nonconformist and artsy, I mean he talks about things like "the hypocrisy that results when love and lust get mixed up in highbrow Marxist/Trotskyist ideals"—more commonly called being an "asshole." And yet, I agree to let him stay with me in DC for the weekend because I haven't had sex since the '00s and why the hell not, except I forget that he talks about things like "the hypocrisy that results when love and lust get mixed up in highbrow Marxist/Trotskyist ideals" and suddenly setting myself on fire is seems like a completely viable option for getting myself out of this situation. Unfortunately, I don't have renter's insurance, so instead I make Andrew of The Great Juno Debate come hang out with us because I don't trust myself to be alone with him without stabbing either him, myself, or a combination of both of us in the eye with a salad fork and then that night when we go out, I make every single person I've ever met come with and threaten Dan and Andrew Not The Great Juno Debate with bodily harm when they want to go home at the completely reasonable hour of 3 o'clock in the morning.

That's a totally hypothetical situation, by the way.

3.) In everything I read about White Town, lead singer Jyoti Prakash Mishra makes a point of mentioning that they're a "self-financed band." I don't get that. Why would you want to draw attention to the fact that you're self-financed? Isn't that just pointing out that nobody wants to invest in your project? Although I might just be projecting because this is a "self-financed blog."

4.) The White Town Wikipedia page was last edited at 9:15pm on May 5, 2010. Which makes me laugh. Because I bet it was by someone who's name rhymes with Schyoti Schrakash Shishra.

5.)

I find it shocking that White Town has 1,481 fans on Facebook. Because that means 1,481 people are willing to publicize to the world that they are one of the 1,481 fans White Town has on Facebook. (Kimberly and Joe: I'm lookin' at you.)

6.)

How bad do I want an official White Town mug? Rull bad.

7.) You know how on Bravo reality shows, there's that jaunty little jazz music that plays when one scene is transitioning to the next? I've decided that if Bravo ever gave me my own reality TV show, this is what I'd want to play during my scene transitions instead (before you press play, close your eyes and picture me walking out of my apartment on my way to brunch with big sunglasses on and Ichabod the Rasta Pug in a Sorr About the Bag tote at my side):


I mean, am I wrong in thinking that a Nintendo-ized version of "Your Woman" is just nerdy and cracked out enough to be the soundtrack to my everyday life?

Bravo TV, you know where to reach me. (...At the Natural Wonders store in Lake Forest Mall.)