Author: Formaggio Bambino

Trying to fit Murderville – the new streaming reality series on Netflix – into a neat box is not an easy task. It’s part police comedy, part low-stakes improv, a sort of Who’s Line Is It, Anyway? meets Police Squad (and my apologies to those of you too young to understand either of those references. My bones, dear children, they creak). At times, it feels distinctly modern: everyone is so desperate for something new to binge, that something this weird and half-assed could only exist in the status quo. Other times, Murderville feels like an odd throwback – the imperfections harkening to a time when television programming was commercial-laden and grainy, and the crew was proudly, visibly intoxicated. But how to classify it, and the feelings of nostalgia it brings up, are all ancillary to the most important part about Murderville: it is exceedingly, astoundingly stupid.

And I cannot stop watching.

Each

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A funny and unexpected thing happened, once I was through being sad about missing the holidays with my family.

The admission comes with a hefty dose of guilt. But after the downheartedness started to wane, we sort of … had an lovely time?

I know, I know. Look, I sort of feel like a jerk typing it out. Everyone knows that as an adult, the holidays are about spending time with your family and feeling guilty. You aren’t supposed to have fun. You’re supposed to quietly navigate the minefield of familial drama that began decades before you were born.

Okay, fine. I’m being a little glib. Because there is a lot of fun stuff, like watching the younger generations open presents and hearing how school is going and sneaking sweets with them because they are the only ones who truly appreciate sugar the way I do. I even sort of wanted

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Last Christmas stands out as one of the worst of my life. Perhaps more even than the year when my father had just died, because at least then we were around family. But last year Rand’s grandmother had just died, and we were alone, and there wasn’t an end to that loneliness in sight.

Christmas 2011, New York.

I remember we tried to smile through it, but the grief and the sadness were there, hovering over everything. You can practically see it in the pictures.

This year, we’d planned to go down to California to see my family, but as omicron cases started rising, and as every single destination we’d intended to visit became a hotspot, we ended up cancelling our trip. I cried exactly once, the night I realized

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In the last few days, I wrote a review that escaped out of my hands and started running all over the internet, and it was not unlike that time when I was ten and my hamster got out of its cage and pooped everywhere. What I could not have imagined – what I at my most creative could never have foreseen, my sweet babies, was that the chef from Bros would reply to my review. I was not aware that blog posts merited rebuttals from chefs (this sort of thing never happens to Pete Wells.) (I am not, I realize, Pete Wells.) He demanded that his statement be printed in its entirety.

He began, as all good manifestos do, with a picture of a man on a horse.

I must admit, at this point, I was somewhat demoralized; I have spent an entire career trying to be funny and this punchline

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Last week, Rand and I crossed a milestone. I didn’t realize it; I was sitting at my computer, bones turning to dust, when he shouted from the bottom of the stairs, “HAPPY ANNIVERSARY!”

“Holy crap. Twenty years!” I shouted back at him. And I ran down and hugged him, and we kissed, and we did this odd little dance while shouting “TWENTY YEARS” over and over again. It’s a huge chunk of time to spend with someone, especially when you’re 41. Nearly half my entire life, and all of my adulthood. I try to imagine a life without Rand, try to imagine a world where we hadn’t met, but it’s impossible. There’s no way to It’s a Wonderful Life this. It’s like try to separate paint colors after you’ve mixed them together.

Two decades since our first date, when we sat across from one another at a candlelit Italian restaurant

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Here is the problem with having a very stylish husband: two years into this pandemic, I look like I’m about to clean the garage while Rand walks around like something out of a damn manual on how to become more dashing with every passing decade.  To be fair, the delta between our clothing has always been a little bit off – I’ve always dressed a little bit like I was recovering from a cold, whereas he looks like this almost immediately after waking up:

I mean, what the hell.

But I was determined on this trip to not be outdone, or at least, not at much. Not once would someone ask if I’d left the house in a hurry because it was on fire. This was my solemn vow. And besides,

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In October of this year, we left for Italy. Our last trip there was scheduled for March of 2020. I think about that a lot – about the alternate reality in which that trip was still possible. I remember the date of our departure approaching, and my concern about this new flu spreading across Europe. I remember Rand finally cancelling our tickets, that mixture of relief and worry.

“What if we ended up cancelling them for no reason?” I asked.

“I don’t think we’ll regret it,” he said.

This time around, whether or not we’d go remained a question until our actual departure. The hope I’d felt this past summer was gone as quickly as it came, the rates of the Delta variant rising. I kept asking Rand if it was safe, if it was responsible. Italy’s caseloads were lower than ours. They were taking precautions – demanding proof of

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It’s weird to be a travel blogger who doesn’t travel.

Actually, I don’t actually know if I can call myself a travel blogger anymore, but what’s the alternative? If I just say “blogger” without that key little word prefacing it all, it feels like I might unravel like a sweater. A blogger? No. That’s not a thing. That’s some who is simultaneously a thousand years old and also unemployed. That’s profoundly stupid.

I will put a pin in that existential crisis and revisit it later.

Last week, Rand took me to Canada. It’s not far – a three hour drive to Vancouver, closer than Portland, but in the opposite direction. From there we took the ferry to Victoria. It was our anniversary, it was my birthday, it was the first time we’d left the country in more than two years, it was so many things. The border had only recently

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I am an avid thrift shopper; I have been for years. As a kid, we went out of necessity, and I lived in fear that my classmates might figure it out. One girl (popular, perfect, so, so pretty) seemed to have it out for me – she’d interrogate me about my clothes, one time forcefully pulling the back of my shirt to examine a tag. She thankfully could glean nothing from it, but it was too much a risk for me. I needed to come clean, on my own terms, before someone else outed me.

So I leaned into it. I wore polyester shirts from the 70s, wool mini skirts from the 60s, things that had obviously belonged to someone else. I don’t have many photos from this time, because we weren’t great at documenting my life, and besides, my mother’s house caught fire a few years back, anyway. But

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