I had an EXTREME! Christmas. It was like super Christmas and gay Christmas collided in some sort of fiery cataclysm, leaving only the ashes of the yuletide log. Oh, we cried, piling the ashes high, you�re beginning to look like your old self again! The hopes of those in denial.
Incidentally, we came up with a name for this thing. But that�s later in the story.
My family was great. My eight - eight? I think she�s eight - year old cousin, whom I haven�t seen in about a year, walked up to me and announced, "Hey, you�re SHORT. I�m almost as tall as YOU." Then she grabbed my legs and hoisted me into the air. Somewhere in the back of my mind, while the front was busy making my mouth shriek PUT ME DOWN PUT ME DOWN, I paused to wonder what the fuck my aunt FEEDS her.
Her sister (the cousin�s, not the aunt�s, you follow) came up next. "Look at this!" she demanded, and shoved an open book in front of my face. Not just any book: The Book of Bunny Suicides. Yes. An entire book devoted to cartoons of bunnies offing themselves, each strategy more outlandish than the last.
All in all, good times were had. After a lively rendition of Bohemian Rhapsody, one of
my other aunts informed me, "Hey, you know, I used to watch them rehearse on Sunday
afternoons."
"What?" we say in confusion. "...Queen?"
"Yes, when I was living in London I used to go and see them rehearse every week before
they were famous. Freddy Mercury had huge buck teeth. And he was my height."
And that, motherfuckers, is how I am one degree from Freddy Mercury. Or maybe it�s two. I don�t know how your crazy lettering system works, but I know it�s a very low prime number and that�s good enough for me.
But the afternoon started to go downhill when my Christian fundamentalist �uncle�, who married his way into my family somewhere in the region of two years ago, started doing a striptease to I�m Too Sexy. Okay. It was funny. He was having a good time. My eyes were bleeding, but that stopped after a short while, so I'm not too concerned about permanent damage. And he was pretty fucking drunk.
Why, you ask? Well, good little Christian that he is, he had been drinking since 11:20am that morning. Good little undiscriminating Christian that he is, he, along with his spouse, my aunt, had been drinking champagne. And still wine. And beer. And shooters. And margaritas and whiskey on the rocks and black russians.
Considering what utter fucknuckles those people are, the Christmas equilibrium, though it appeared sturdy like a yuletide log, was in fact in as precarious as a stocking dangling above the voracious flames of the fireplace.
You know, in a hemisphere where they need fireplaces at Christmas time.
You ought to be patient here. This is my roundabout way of telling you how I, quote unquote my mother, "ruined the best Christmas ever."
Anyway, I don�t normally get along with this uncle. He�s a condescending bastard, and I probably should have known better than to treat him as a rational adult. Sadly, that is what I foolishly did, even though he was drunk, because he announced his intentions to let my aunt drive them home. Hey man - she�s been drinking water for the past hour and a half, afterall. When I said that still wasn�t the safest plan, they both got uber pissy.
By the time everyone else noticed that I was trying to convince them not to drive themselves home - firstly, there was room for them and my twelve year old cousin in a car that actually had a sober driver, and secondly, as the only other sober person there, I would have driven them myself - it had pretty much degenerated into a screaming match.
The point I really lost my temper was when my �uncle� announced that he wasn�t going to listen to me because I was �just a girl.� And that if I hadn�t been so �pushy,� he would have listened, but now he was going to drive himself home - in his own fucking words - out of �pure stubbornness�.
There are few instances in my life when I have ever been so angry at another person. There are two words that come to mind in that situation, the combination of which I have only ever used ONCE before in my entire LIFE.[*] For people for whom natural selection should keep, or should have kept, from contributing to the gene pool because they are simply too fucking stupid to continue breathing. And these words, I use now, to describe my so-called relative:
That DUMB CUNT.
I�m a legal adult. I�m old enough to fuck, vote, drink, marry, go to jail, travel, get a mortgage and buy a god damn house if I want. I am also a fully licensed New Zealand road user. And I just might be a little, blonde, female heathen, but if I know nothing else in this life, it is that you do not fucking drink and drive.
Anyway, they drove off. Eventually my mother stopped blaming me and started blaming them, though she was still unhappy that I was so disrespectful. I reaped some commendations from my other aunts and uncles for doing �the right thing� and apologised to my cousin - who wisely elected to stay the fuck away from his legal guardians and their swerving deathmobile - for fighting with his parents.
I�m not apologising to my aunt and - her husband. In fact, my new goal is to successfully avoid them for the rest of their stay in this country, if not the rest of my adult life. I could have been more tactful... But they behaved like assholes first, so I feel quite justified.
EXTREME! Christmas strikes again. And when it was good, it was very very good. And when it was bad, it was horrid.
The conclusion to this family-oriented tale is that I was extremely grateful to hightail it out this morning, before the return of Them, and drive back to my empty house. My parting comments from my other, less idiotic family members were that they were all glad I�d come over and spent Christmas with them, so I guess I win. And the moral of the story is that drunkards and fundamentalists can fuse together to form some sort of super Drunkamentalist.
In fact, I was back well in time to make use of the Boxing Day sales. Dvds, oh dvds, all for Leighs.
...I mean, uh, no, I�m saving my money for my trip. Oh yeah. It�s like... Savings, man. Saving rocks.
Cough cough.
And then I cooked apricot chicken for dinner. And I am the shit. I can magically cook. My skills are much improved from the last time I was homealone. You�ll never starve if I�m around, baby. Well, probably not. Okay, you might get poisoned, but it hasn�t happened yet, which as we all know is the most important thing.
And I watched more anim�. You know you have high quality entertainment when it includes the line, "I�m gonna beat your face up so bad, even kittens won�t look at ya!"
I was going to end it on that note, but I forgot... Courtney called from down south, presumably to get a dose of sane, north island conversation. It resulted in us simultaneously exclaiming, �The Yuletide Log!�, which explains the pun-tastic title for this exercise. We both agreed it was too stupid not to use. She is also afraid of what I�ve done to her website while she�s been gone.
And that�s the end, baby.
[*] Excepting my email to Cam, describing these very same events.
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