Bitch, You Already Know This Cracka

Expired crackers.

That's what ended up in our food bag as we were frantically trying to leave the haphazard home of my in-laws over our ill-fated, blizzard-laden Christmas break.

While my wife and I struggle to pack dog and crate and clothes and laundry and skis and diminshing shards of sanity and cellphone chargers and sewing projects and library books into our bag, Mrs. Apron's mother is prancing around downstairs, finding stupid, random shit to stuff into our bags. We make a trip to the car in the driveway, in goes a pair of socks. Or a McCalls pattern from 1972. Or a small stuffed animal. Or some food-related impulse-purchase from T.J. Maxx.

This time, it was a pack of "Kraft Macaroni & Cheese Crackers."

"The hell," you say?

The hell I say.

On the very good chance that you did not know that such a product existed, which, hopefully, you didn't, I'm delighted that you get to hear about it first here. Don't worry-- they're "Made With REAL CHEDDAR CHEESE."

My mother-in-law, who never purchases anything unless it has one price already crossed out, purchased this packet of cheesey hum-dingers from Building 19 (a cut-price warehouse-style chain store in New England) for $0.97 (crossed out) $0.49!!!!

Yo. Don't say she never bought ya nothin', smart-mouth.

Whilst packing my lunch at some obscene hour yesterday morning, I blearily grabbed at bags in the cupboard and, when I opened my lunch yesterday, I smiled when my eyes fell upon this silly-looking blue bag. I had packed the macaroni and cheese crackers. How fucking fabulous. Even more fabulous than the inanity of the product itself was the Sell-By date.

December, 2009.

Nice.

I put one of the "macaroni shaped" bits into my mouth and one word popped into my head:

"Cheez-It."

It was a fucking reshaped, repackaged, rebranded Cheez-It. To say that I was crestfallen would be, well, accurate.

Though it's not really my style, I decided to do some investigating. I wanted to know if my taste-buds and neuro-receptors were, in fact, correct. Now, obvs, the Kraft Macaroni & Cheese Crackers are manufactured by Kraft. Cheez-Its, Sunshine.

I was stunned to find that, first, Kraft does not own Sunshine. It owns everything else, from Stove-Top to my left testicle.

To further this probe (heh, heh) I knew I had to go to the ingredients. At the risk of sounding like one of those insufferable foodie pedants who blogs about food then makes millions of dollars by turning it into a book (Oh, please, God, let it be me) here we go:

CHEEZ-IT BAKED SNACK CRACKERS

ENRICHED FLOUR (WHEAT FLOUR, NIACIN, REDUCED IRON, THIAMIN MONONITRATE [VITAMIN B1], RIBOFLAVIN [VITAMIN B2], FOLIC ACID), SOYBEAN AND PALM OIL WITH TBHQ FOR FRESHNESS, SKIM MILK CHEESE (SKIM MILK, WHEY PROTEIN, CHEESE CULTURES, SALT, ENZYMES, ANNATTO EXTRACT FOR COLOR), SALT, CONTAINS TWO PERCENT OR LESS OF PAPRIKA, YEAST, PAPRIKA OLEORESIN FOR COLOR, SOY LECITHIN.

KRAFT MACARONI AND CHEESE CRACKERS

Enriched Flour (Wheat Flour, Niacin, Reduced Iron, Thiamine Mononitrate {Vitamin B1}, Riboflavin {Vitamin B2}, Folic Acid), Cheddar Cheese (Cultured Milk, Salt and Enzymes), Soybean Oil, Partially Hydrogenated Cottonseed Oil, Whey, Tapioca Dextrin, Salt, Leavening (Baking Soda and/Or Yeast), Sour Cream (Cultured Cream, Skim Milk), Cheddar Cheese Powder (Cultured Milk, Salt, Enzymes), Blue Cheese Powder (Cultured Milk, Salt and Enzymes), Dextrose, Lactose, Monosodium Glutamate (Flavor Enhancer), Lactic and Citric Acids, Vegetable Color (Annatto Extract, Paprika Extract), Onion and Garlic Powders, Skim Milk, Autolyzed Yeast Extract, Romano Cheese Powder (Cultured Cow's Milk, Salt and Enzymes), Parmesan Cheese Powder (Cultured Milk, Salt and Enzymes), Artificial Color (Yellow 6 Lake, Yellow 6, Yellow 5), Spices, Disodium Inosinate and Disodium Guanylate (Flavor Enhancers), Natural and Artificial Flavor, Malted Barley Flour. Contains: Wheat, Milk.

Because you are smart and cute, you will first observe that the ingredients for the Cheez-Its are in all capitals. Sorry, that's how it was on the Sunshine website and I just c&p'd that shit. I guess they like it when ingredients scream at you. Kraft doesn't need to scream at you, because they hold the sexclusive proprietary rights to my left hair-fig.

Next, because you are pert and fine, you will notice that there are a cack-load more ingredients in the Kraft Macaroni & Cheese Crackers than in the Cheez-Its. If you look at it from a linguistic standpoint, it stands to reason. There are far more letters in "Macaroni & Cheese Crackers" than "Cheez-Its," so, really, why shouldn't there be more ingredients?

Now, similarities:

Both Cheez-Its and M&C Cracks start out the same: Enriched Flour (Wheat Flour, Niacin, Reduced Iron, Thiamine Mononitrate {Vitamin B1}, Riboflavin {Vitamin B2}, Folic Acid). I-fucking-dentical, word for word. Now, to Kraft's credit, it uses Cheddar Cheese, as it claims on the front of the bag-- well, it's a bastardized, hydrolized version of Cheddar Cheese, but it's at least different from Cheez-Its, which utilize "Skim Milk Cheese."

The Macaroni & Cheese crackers also bafflingly and barfingly use sour cream. I mean... why? To make the little children cry and pull out their eyelashes?

Basically, almost all, if not all, of the ingredients in Cheez-Its are in the Macaroni & Cheese Crackers, though in the Kraft product there are a shitload more in general. (Sour cream? Really?) Food colorings. Annatto. Salt. Soybean oil. You name it. The Kraftards use MSG in their crackers, and I blame my splitting 2:00pm headache on that and not on the screaming, feces-smearing psych-patients, thank you.

All this is to say... when you go visit my in-laws, search your bags carefully. Cracker.

Nerd in the Alley

When I was in middle school, I discovered sarcasm, and instantly I knew I had turned from a sweet boy to an asshole. Puberty’ll do that to ya. Just look at Haley Joel Osment.

In high school, I knew I was a schmuck. I quoted George Gobel in my senior picture, for Christ’s sake. Like that was going to get me pussy.

Later, in college, I was pretty sure I was just a loser—with a little bit of theatre fag thrown in for good measure.

When I met my wife, I was nearly convinced that I was a doddering idiot.

Then, when it came time to drive up to Providence for the first extended stay with the rest of her family, I was sure of it.

Certain members of my wife’s family may be socially retarded (Mrs. Apron’s terminology) or bizarre or dubiously-gazed-at in public, but one thing is for sure: when it comes to intelligence, they’ve all asked for, and received, seconds. And heaping portions, at that.

Ask my father-in-law a simple question and you will get an answer that may span the course of eleven minutes' time and you’ll need several advanced degrees to understand maybe a third of his response. Sure, he won’t make eye-contact with you while he’s giving you this answer, and you may lose some of it in mumbles, but it will be… um… really smart.

Really.

My brother-in-law is, well, not particularly worth conversing with. I once rode a bus with him and his attempt to flirt with a beautiful Asian girl he had been chatting up ended briskly when he turned to me and said, in a tone-of-voice approximately 96 decibels too loud:

“DID YOU HEAR THE ONE ABOUT THE CHINAMAN AND THE JEW?”

But he’s seriously “intelligent” in that traditional sense of the word. Physics and whatnot. Whatever.

When I met my wife’s family for the first time, almost eight years ago, I was very much intimidated by their combined intelligence. My mother never went to college. My two sisters barely graduated, for different reasons, and I am… well… hovering somewhere above the average helipad.

Or maybe it didn’t have anything to do with actual or perceived intelligence. Maybe it was the geek factor. Or is the dork quotient? Or the nerd number? Well, whatever it is, or was, they had a lot of it, and I was worried that I perhaps didn’t have enough.

“I don’t think I’m dorky enough to be in your family,” I said, forgetting for a moment that I steadfastly refused to wear shorts until I was seventeen.

Musically, there is no question that I have no business being a member of this family. Her father is a bassoonist and clarinetist. Her mother is a harpist. Her brother is an almost savant-like pianist. Her sister plays trumpet. Before her neurosurgery, my wife played bassoon as well.

Me? Oh, um, I took piano lessons from a drunk lady for three years and learned nothing and I know five chords on the banjo. Pass the veggie burgers.

“You sing and act in Gilbert & Sullivan operettas,” my wife reminded me in a reassuring tone, “what could be more musically dorky than that?”

On Friday night, as we were out driving, I found myself explaining the meaning of the sea shanty “Bully in the Alley” to my wife.

“Well, you see, when the whalers would be off the boat on shore they would go drinking, and, invariably, one of them would get too drunk and would harass passing women and such, and his friends would say, ‘Fuck this,' and shove him in an alley, and so that’s where the song comes from—he’s the bully in the alley.”

My wife stared at me. And, with that stare, I knew I had finally achieved the zenith of dorkdom.

I belong.

No Good Deed

This afternoon, my red PT Cruiser will resemble Santa's fucking sleigh.

It will be crammed full of winter coats, six of mine, three of my wife's, and will be driven to the local Burlington Coat Factory to be donated to clothe the homeless and the needy this winter.

Before your pupils get all dilated and dewy in a veritable occular orgasm of affection for me based on this tremendous act of goodwill I am doing for the betterment of mankind, um, restrain yourself.

As is, I suspect, the case with most acts of do-goodery, this holiday-time mitzvah is not entirely altruistic. I was, shall we say, heavily prompted by circumstance.

For several days, my wife and I were vacationing in Providence with my in-laws. While we were there, it was difficult for me to not feel suffocated, or at least overwhelmed by, well, crap.

My mother-in-law, an ardent anti-cussiest, eschews all four-letter words except for "crap." It is, in point-of-fact, one of her favorite and most oft utilized nouns. For some reason, crap is acceptable for her to say, without restraint, but, when my wife's ear-bud fell out of her ear and she uttered a reflexive "shit!" in her mother's presence, her mother cleared her throat loudly and announced that, "Four letter words hurt mommie's ears."

It is a funny little coincidence that "crap" is my mother-in-law's favorite cuss, because her house is full of crap. The refrigerator is crammed tighter than the fiction shelf at your local public library. Drawers overflow with random, non-sensical items such as newspaper clippings and hair-covered dog toys, lipstick containers and expired JoAnn Fabric circulars. There are lots of batteries in the freezer. The basement is, well, frightening. When at the RISD museum, my wife noticed familiar-looking silverware on display there, and she recognized it as silverware that her mother sometimes used when there were a lot of people over for dinner at their house. Sure enough, as her mother dug through a wardrobe that lives, inexplicably, in the dining room, she found dozens and dozens of pieces of this apparently museum-quality silverware. It needs to be polished for a week or two but it should clean up nicely.

For what reason, though, remains to be seen. A complete set is worth approximately $6,000. But she won't ever sell it and I fear that, in thirty or forty years, it will wind up in our house.

There are also approximately 328 coats in that house, though only two people live there full-time. There are coat hooks on the wall all along the basement stairs and there are approximately four coats on each hook. You hang your coat up and it falls down.

This situation is, naturally, distressing.

What is more distressing is that my wife and sister-in-law and I went out antiquing, (to buy my mother-in-law a display case for her newly-unearthed museum-quality silverware) I saw a U.S. Navy pea-coat hanging up in one of the antique vendor's booths. I've never wanted a pea-coat before, but I was magnetically drawn to it. I don't know why. I took it off the hanger and I tried it on. It was $28.00 and dusty. The sleeves fit perfectly. But, when I buttoned it, I almost asphyxiated myself. It was much too tight. Apparently, 17-year-old skeletons enlisted in the Navy back in the 1940s. So, it was not meant to be. But the fact that I seriously considered buying this coat at all disturbed me greatly.

I knew that I had roughly nine or ten coats at home-- why did I want this one, too? Well, it's old for one thing, and I like that. Maybe I had never wanted pea-coats before because the only ones I had really ever seen up close were the gay, cheap-looking ones for sale at GAP for $88.00. I like old things. I went to the upper-level of the antiques mall and proceeded to inspect several pocket-watches, one of which I actually considered purchasing until I realized that it was thoroughly broken.

I have at least three pocket watches. How many pocket watches does a man in the waning days of 2009 require for life? One? None?

What the fuck is wrong with me? Six or seven typewriters. 10-ish desk telephones (the vast majority of which currently reside in our garage). Am I a hoarder? I don't think so-- but am I a collector and an accumulator? Yes, I am. Do I take pleasure from purchasing things? I do. Can antiquing get dangerous for me? It can. Do I usually let it? No-- I often go antiquing and leave with nothing, and that's good.

Yesterday, I didn't leave with nothing. I bought a gift for my mother-in-law's friend. She loves and collects ice-tongs. Hey-- a pot for every lid, right? I found a pendant watch that was a set of ice-tongs clasping onto a watch, shaped like an ice-cube. The ice-cube was made of clear lucite, so you can see the watch face inside. I wound it up and it ticked, so I reasoned that it was worth the $24.00 (and I got a 10% discount because I'm so sexy). Besides, I rationalized further, it wasn't something for me, it wasn't a lot of money to make someone else happy, and where the fuck was she ever going to find something like this?

And it was much cheaper than the set of vintage 1909 ice-tongs I also saw in the store for $395.00.

And so, because of my semi-disturbing weekend at my in-laws and the antique mall, I'm going to donate a bunch of coats to the homeless. What a guy, right? As a reward for my generosity, Burlington Coat Factory will offer me 10% off a new coat from their store.

But I think I'll pass.