Well, I’ve just gotten over quite the hot wing hangover. All I have to say is that the next time I say, “No, let’s not BUY PRE-MADE stuff for the Super Bowl Party. Let’s do it all from scratch!” then someone needs to stop me. Because there’s a new fryer in the house and the biggest jug of canola oil I’ve ever seen. Does some small country want to use the rest of it? I have plenty left over. But there are a few things I’ve learned about making hot wings and they are as follows:

1. Do a salt-soak marinade. Do this accidentally the first time and then by the time you get to batch four you’re all THESE ARE THE BEST BATCH YET but you can’t even speak those words. They are spoken in your head as you have two thoughts going on at once: one, about the best batch yet and two, about how your stomach ‘feels funny’ because you haven’t bothered to put a vegetable in it for the entirety of the day.

2. Don’t screw around with fake hot sauce or bourgeois hoity toity crap you get from a gourmet place. Hot sauce. From Louisiana. Otherwise? You’re doing it wrong.

3. Crispy wings is the key. So is butter. Butter is the key to so very many things in life. Crisp up the wings, mix up the sauce (with butter) and then put them in a frying pan with more butter and cover each individual wing with the sauce.

4. Cure cancer. You just might do that with this little magical recipe. Wouldn’t that be grand?

One of my new apps for my phone is the Hipstamatic. I blame listening to other people wax poetic about their apps for buying this one. It’s just retro photography stuff. I took this picture this morning of my back patio covered in snow. Kinda weird and freaky looking colors, but I like it.

So! This year for the game I actually watched it and paid attention. DO YOU HEAR THAT, ADVERTISING JERKS? I’m not at all thrilled with the ignorance with which the commercials were played nor was I happy with their lameness. LAME. I got up more times to check on the hot wings than I cared to stick around to find out why some football player I’d never heard of wanted to throw a thinly veiled opinion about my healthcare out there.

Mallory is a Colts fan. It’s weird, but she comes by it honestly. Her boyfriend is a Colts fan. So, naturally, when she’s home on a Saturday and there is a Colts game on, we’re watching it.  In any case, I was enough of a fan to be paying attention to the game that it’s taken me 25 years to understand. Because I now understand it I make up fully one-third of all football fans. I’m pretty sure the NFL knows this data, but can someone send that information over to the neanderthals in marketing? Anyway, this was a particularly difficult game to watch because my family are New Orleanians. (Is that the word? Or am I just supposed to call them ‘heathens’?) (Ha! Ha! I joke!) (No, really. I have to put that in there. My family owns guns and I shouldn’t joke about them.)

Speaking of owning guns, I sorta wished I did so that I could shoot the person responsible for that horrid Dodge commercial during the Super Bowl. I wouldn’t hurt them, because I’m not a violent person, but I would surely shoot them in the buttocks a la Forrest Gump for this. The best roundup of the ads was on Salon and I particularly liked this description of the that purposefully emasculating ad:

“I will shave. I will clean the sink after I shave. I will be at work at 8 a.m. I will be quiet when you don’t want to hear me say no. I will take your call. I will listen to your opinion of my friends. I will put the seat down. I will carry your lip balm.” Oh you will, asshole? Wow, I didn’t realize being a grown-up was soooo challenging. And as you glumly stare at the camera until your eyeballs look like they’re about to explode, all you demand is that you can zoom around to some fucking James Bond music in your dumb Dodge as you boldly take “Man’s! Last! Stand!” Way to stick it to us. The Charger: delusional masculinity’s reward for having to put the toilet seat down.

Oh, and have you read Margaret and Helen this week? Simply delicious. I should have snacked on that instead of 52 hot wings.

It was more like 58. Or 15,000. It was a lot.

I wrote this two weeks ago and couldn’t bring myself to publish it.

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When you get a new job and you meet new co-workers and spend new time with them it’s normal for conversations to go from ‘Wow, we like the same things and I had no idea you were a Libertarian and did you even know that we had a re-cycling program here?’ to ‘There’s nothing wrong with using the term light colored-negro’ and then your brain explodes because OH MY GOD, WHO STILL SAYS THE WORD ‘NEGRO’?

It didn’t happen to me, but someone I’m very close to and someone who is actually a person of color. A person who passes. A person who looks like me and finds herself incognegro in situations where people think she’s all white. They think she’s all vanilla.

So. You know. She probably shouldn’t say anything. Or, if she does, what should she say? Because we are in a recession here and it’s not like you can just get up and leave a job. You aren’t a Vanderbilt and you don’t use the word “summer” as a verb.

What’s a girl to do?

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That’s where I ended it because I couldn’t finish the thoughts there. Then, President Obama addressed the nation and Chris Matthews “forgot” that Obama was black for an hour. Now, it’s February and the time when most Americans a handful of people celebrate Black History Month. So I won’t say anything.

I’ll just say that I’m having a contest sponsored by Clever Girls Collective and See’s Candy where I’m giving away some CHOCOLATE and no, it has nothing to do with Black History it’s just that it’s closing in on Valentine’s Day and CHOCOLATE is the theme for that, too, so hey! Coincidence!

Enter here.

Don’t mind me, though. I’m really not going to say anything. Except maybe one more word.

CHOCOLATE.