ME: Bear . . . cougar. Same difference.
LAURA: There was no attack. She’s fine.
ME: I think someone should ask the owners how many cougars they keep on the property.
LAURA: I already asked the owners what it could have been, and they said there are some feral cats around.
ME: I’m pretty sure “feral cats” is code for “vampire cougars.”
ME: [to everyone else who came to breakfast one hour later] So last night I was attacked by Sasquatch. It was like a smaller version of the Loch Ness monster. But on land. So, yeah. It was pretty fucking terrifying.
No one really responded, but it didn’t surprise me, because it’s hard to know what to say in those situations. It’s like when someone tells you they got stabbed. There’s not an easy response in that situation. Unless it just happened. Then I suggest, “Lie down and tell us who the murderer is,” because that way it’ll save the homicide detectives a lot of time later.
The morning I found out that we were all going to wine education class I felt like I was in some kind of finishing school and I’d missed all the prerequisites. Our teacher was an author who’d apparently been on the Today show a lot. There were five full glasses of wine in front of me, but the wine teacher told us that we were not allowed to drink any of them until after we finished the lesson. I imagine this is how dogs feel when you put a biscuit on their nose and tell them not to eat it. Except I totally stole sips of the wine when the teacher wasn’t looking, because I’m really shitty at being an obedient dog.
We spent a lot of time learning how to swish the glass of wine. I’d always assumed people did that to seem snotty, but apparently the more oxygen you get in your wine, the better it tastes, so when you swish it, it spreads out all over the glass and gets more air. I felt sorry for the girl sitting on my right, because apparently I’m a bit of an overachiever when it comes to wine swishing, and so she was sloshed by me several times. Luckily she was nonchalant and simply licked the excess wine off her arm, a move that I considered both ecological and classy. Our teacher looked displeased, so to distract her I asked why people don’t just serve wine on large dinner plates with straws to suck it up, and she smiled at me stiltedly and told me she’d never been asked that before. I was pretty sure that was code for “I am totally going to steal your brilliant idea.” I wrote my number down on a napkin and told her that if she started marketing wine plates I wanted a cut. She agreed but then left quickly. I’ll probably never see any of that money.
Five vans of chicks took off to visit wineries for wine tasting. Only four came back.1
By my tenth glass of wine I started to wonder whether there was something wrong with my palate. Everyone else was marking the wine list with notes like “Pleasant finish. Robust spices.” Meanwhile, I was doodling pictures of vampiric cougars. Then I noticed people staring at my doodles, and so I started writing notes next to the wine. Things like “Tastes of NyQuil, but in a good way,” and “This one will get you all the way fucked up.” “I can’t feel my feet anymore.” “Did I leave the garage door open? I wonder whether the cat is on fire. I should probably stop drinking now.” Everyone else there had a sophisticated palate. I had one that needed therapy, and possibly an intervention.
The last winery looked totally haunted, and the ducks outside reminded me to be on the lookout for hungry-looking homeless people, but I was quickly distracted when the servers brought out cheese. I whispered to the girl next to me that I was very excited about having my first cheese tasting because I love cheese. Especially cheddar. I like all the flavors of cheddar. Sharp, very sharp, smoky sharp. I’m kind of a connoisseur. But then when the cheese came it was all unrecognizable and THERE WAS NO CHEDDAR AT ALL. I was all, “WHAT KIND OF A FUCKING CHEESE PLATE IS THIS?” but I just said it in my mind (or possibly only with my indoor voice, because I was tipsy but still trying to be a professional). The servers explained that they were a bunch of “art cheeses” that had won contests, and truthfully they were pretty delish except for one of my pieces, which had a Band-Aid in it. So I said, “There is a Band-Aid on my cheese,” and the Asian girl I’d offended earlier bent forward and was all, “No. That’s bandage-wrapped blah-blah-French-something-blah,” and I thanked her, but I ate only the end farthest from the Band-Aid just in case she was still trying to get even with me for being unintentionally racist. An hour later, though, we bonded when we got lost in a labyrinth of wine casks in a desperate search for the bathroom, and she assured me that she was not trying to make me eat a Band-Aid. The desperate need to get rid of your urine is the great equalizer.