9 May 2007
My Vanity Tag One Day: NUGETZ.
More stupid vanity tags! Kool-aid pickles! The story of the Crispy Elf!
• Coming back from Memphis on Sunday, I didn’t want to write down these vanity tags, but there were so many I felt that the universe was going to keep sending them to me until I did:
DR TUBA
TIRE RN
COSMOQN
BEOWUF
TIRE RN got me all riled up: does the driver fix tires? If so, why isn’t he/she the TIRE DR? Why is he/she doubting his/her ability to truly heal the sick tire? Or is the person a tired nurse? Or does that say “tire iron”?
I checked the BEOWUF car just to see if my ex-husband was driving.
• There’s an article in the New York Times today about Kool-Aid pickles. I wish I could say I’ve never heard of them, but I know a guy who owns a convenience store and he’s been selling them for years. I am very devoted to the anti-pickle cause – I have a theory that I may actually die if I ever ate one – but I am intrigued by the Kool-Aid pickle. Is it still sour? Or is it like eating a defrosted, yet still solid popsicle? Does it still smell like a pickle? Anybody tried one?
• This weekend I found myself slightly drunk and telling my in-laws about this guy who was my dance partner in my folk dance class in college. He was a lot shorter than me, but I snagged him on the first day of class because there were only 4 guys and I didn’t want to learn all the dances backwards. His name was Chris, he was an ok dancer, and we became friends. He sort of looked like an elf, so I referred to him as Chris the Elf. One of my friends thought I said “Crispy Elf” and as that name is awesome, that’s the one that stuck.
This is sexist, but Crispy Elf was sort of like a girl in the way he analyzed his dealings with the opposite sex. He met with his math TA and she wasn’t wearing her wedding ring! She must be in love with him! Or that blonde girl wore her hair in a ponytail three days in a row! He loves ponytails! She must be in love with him! This = awesome.
We took another dance class together in the fall, and then I graduated and moved to Starkville. If you’ll remember how the internets worked in the mid-90s, email addresses were sort of hard to come by. (At least that’s how I remember them.) When I moved to Starkville I had an MSU account but still had access to my old college account. Crispy Elf was into some online game and needed an extra email address so I let him use mine.
Then one day I logged into my old account and found 4 billion drippy love letters from some guy! And my replies! Which Crispy Elf wrote. Today I would find this endlessly entertaining and would’ve printed them all out and then secretly monitored my relationship’s progress with my boyfriend, but at 22 I sent him an email and asked why he was pretending to be a girl and we pretty much never talked again.
I can be such a dick sometimes.
May 9th, 2007 at 3:47 pm
As a devoted lover of the pickle, and all things swimming in delectable pickle brine, I would like to sign up as a official taste-tester for our household. I think cherry or tropical punch would have to be my first choices. I despise fake strawberry.
May 9th, 2007 at 5:46 pm
Please say that you kept these emails and replies that Crispy Elf wrote and are planning on posting them!
I, too, am intrigued by the Kool-aid pickle. But it has to be disgusting – there’s no way such an evil combination can be tasty.
May 9th, 2007 at 5:56 pm
You didn’t mention it GETS WORSE in the NYT article.
“And ‘Have you ever tried one with a watermelon Blow Pop?’ followed by a pantomime of how the Blow Pop stick can be inserted so that the candy appears as a knob at one end of the pickle, allowing the eater to alternate between bites of sour-sweet pickle and licks of sweet-sour Blow Pop.”
May 10th, 2007 at 12:39 pm
I love pickles, but that Kool-Aid thing sounds like hell.
So, um, the Crispy Elf was gay, right?
May 10th, 2007 at 2:55 pm
Dude, I only WISH I had those emails.
I’m not sure if pretending to be a girl makes him gay. Transgendered maybe? I don’t know.
May 10th, 2007 at 9:24 pm
Is it clear that he was pretending to be a girl? An elfin folk dancer, girlishly analyzing invented relationship signals… maybe he was closeted and the Inter-Net tubes were his only outlet for his gaiety. Too bad the socket for that outlet was your email address though.
May 11th, 2007 at 8:29 am
If he was gay, he wasn’t in the closet. He was in the basement, under a pile of blankets.
May 14th, 2007 at 9:00 am
…and women’s undergarments.