ink, pink, you stink

It is the last day of work before Christmas, and I have a ton of work to do because I spent all week going to a million office holiday parties and four hour coffee breaks. I feel like crap, I have eaten so many cookies that my pants hardly fit, and I'm angry that there are no good leftovers from our "Winter Breeze" party at my office yesterday afternoon. God forbid we say Christmas or even holiday, lest we offend. I argue that if we are going to have a Winter Breeze party, there damned better be Autumn, Spring, and Summer Breeze parties too. But that doesn't fly with the brass. And of course, someone said grace before we could put anything in our mouths yesterday. Office politics ellude me.

South Philly is gearing up for Christmas Eve. Strings of baccala are hanging from nails outside the corner stores, and piles of calamari and scungilli sit out on the sidewalk in cardboard boxes of ice next to the rabe. The neighborhood smells like a hooker's chassis and for some reason that makes people hungry. It makes me puke. While most Americans sit around their Christmas trees on the Eve smelling sweet potatoes and pies, ham and stuffing, and whatever else it is that mom has in the oven, South Philly houses smell like the wharf. And you are expected to go inside and shove some of that stink right down your throat. A WASPy girl like me can't even fathom eating one of those wretched dry, bland Italian cookies that can hardly pass as dog treats amidst the stench, but my nearest and dearest are clamoring for the clams and snapping up the snapper as if we weren't given the sense of smell to keep us from eating food that smells like it expired before the millennium.

For all you people who say that Italian food is your favorite, I can only assume that you mean the Ameri-friendly Olive Garden variety staples. Spaghetti, lasagna, ravioli, and the like that you are hard pressed to actually find in Italy. Real Italian food is horrible. Anything that smells like a dumpster and needs fancy names to divert you from what you are really eating should not be on the menu. I guarantee if you pull aside any random Gina on the street and ask her if she likes baccala she'll say yes. Tell her you are going to feed her a piece of dry, salted cod and she'll squeal and say "Eww! I skeeve!". Then she'll put on more lip liner, spray some more Aqua Net, and go on her way, faltering on her too-high heels.

The good thing is that the eating season is over for me. The bad thing is I misplaced my clothespin, but I should be okay since I have a raging head cold and am having a difficult time breathing anyway. The other good thing is that I am gathering lots of silly holiday fodder for the Urbanity blog. The other bad thing is that I have got to get some real work done so I can't promise new and exciting posts each day, but keep checking.