Dinner Table Etiquette for Young Children and Childish Adults

                                

1) If you find yourself sat at a place setting with more than one set of silverware, make good use of those spare suckers. Any kind of food can be given ears with some well-placed spoons and you're two forks away from being a walrus with nose-tusks.

2) If you have a wardrobe malfunction during the second course, just be confidant and disrobe completely. If you are at the table with someone who acts with such excellent manners, it is only polite to follow suit. Or should I say, birthday suit.

3) Instead of disgracing the chef by not eating your veggies, hide them. Some classic hiding places are smooshed under your plate, swimming in your glass, discreetly snuck onto your neighbor's plate, into your clothes and/or shoes, and into your dinner neighbor's clothes and/or shoes. Don't worry about hiding them well, its the thought that counts.

4) If the food is really good show your appreciation and make sure you stuff all your food in your face. All. of. it. AT ONCE. NOW. DO IT.

5) All this polite etiquette nonsense is exhausting but manners are important, even in sleep. So, when you're yawning and feeling a good nap coming on, seize the day. Food is the perfect pillow. *Beauty Bonus*: Go for the bread basket! The butter makes your hair silky and nothing is more attractive than the scent of garlic.

6) Single and ready to mingle? Turn any dinner into a speed dating event! When everyone is settled down and enjoying their food just jump into the lap of the person next to you and eat the food off their forks as its en route to their mouth. As romcom movies illustrate there is nothing more romantic than sharing food. However, if the person is rude and does not reciprocate your feelings, just hop into the next person's chair and so on. Don't worry, theres a lot of courses and always more fish in the sea. Or on the table.

7) It can be very awkward to go to a dinner party where you don't know anyone (Or alienated everyone by sitting in their laps and eating their food). But I digress. If you're in this situation, make your own friends out of food. Ignore those haters when they give you strange looks for having philosophical conversations with your mashed potato fella. They're just jealous of your friendship.

8)  Just like many ancient cultures, burping is how you show your full approval of the course. Know how to burp in words? You're practically Martha Stewart.

9) Ever been in a situation where you want to secretly communicate with your friends but you're sitting at a table of keen-eared strangers? The solution: animal sounds. Owl hoots, horse neighs, whatever sound a fox makes: doesn't matter. Your friend might not understand you but neither will anyone else, and thats the important part.

10) Often at fancy dinners controversial subjects such as politics, religion, and bedtime negotiations will arise. If you find you are uncomfortable with the way the conversation is going or that your argument isn't being heard, make a swooshing sound and slide under the table. No one will debate distasteful subjects when its possible that their opponent could nibble on their toes at any moment.

NOTE: While all these are based on observation of my younger sister's past acts of etiquette at the dinner table, they don't act with such decorum all the time. Usually they are rude to an extreme: chewing with their mouths closed, making polite conversation, and eating all their carrots and brussel sprouts. Honestly, its embarrassing to be seen in public with such ignorant eaters. But I love them anyway.

Elbows on the Table,
- Hannah

Home Alone

Attention All Villains and People of Unsavory Character: 

Just to make something clear, I waited to publish this and am no longer home alone. I may be dumb enough to add the sauce packet to the macaroni noodles while they're still in the strainer but I'm not dumb enough to advertise to the internet that i'm home alone. Just to be clear to any would-be robbers who got really excited for a second. I'm not sure what you would want to steal since the main and most notable contents of my living room right now is my mother's growing family of kombucha in mason jars and the house plant that is slowly but surely eating our piano. Actually, please do take some of the kombucha jars off our hands, they've grown into the double digits and the floating bacteria sponges are a little freaky.

Ahem, onto the blog.

                                             

You think differently when you live alone than when you live with people. I've found this out this last week when my family went on vacation and I, the studious student who couldn't skip her college classes because of tests, stayed behind to hold down the fort and take care of the house. This has given me a window into the world of living alone, and here is what I've found:

                              
The first thing to change when you're home alone is that as other people leave, paranoia moves in. Every unidentified creak and gurgle of an empty house becomes suspect. As time progresses your paranoia increases until you've half convinced yourself that there is a stranger secretly living in the air ducts sneaking food and watching movies on your Netflix account. How else am I supposed to explain to my parents where the gallon-size ziplock bag of chocolate chips disappeared to last week?



Another thing that changes is my relationship with my dog. Generally we keep to ourselves; I peacefully live my life and he lays in a comatose state on his doggy bed, snoring. Like many pets and their owners we enjoy a symbiotic relationship where he leaves me alone and I let him eat food that falls on the floor.

This week, though, as the only other living being in the house (not counting my little sister's fish and our equally-intelligent house plants), he has become my loyal (albeit old and lumpy) bodyguard. I go outside, he goes outside. I sleep upstairs, he sleeps upstairs. I turn Pandora way too loud while doing dishes, he pees his pants in surprise.

Speaking of health and safety, you've got to be more cautious living alone. Every time I reach for milk in the fridge and nearly graze my hand on the edge of an open can of coconut cream I have a surreal vision of being found, dead, and how horrible it would be for my cause of death to be a Trader Joe's Coconut Cream can. Does this give me enough motivation to move the can? No. But its ok, I'll probably just melt the coconut cream with some chocolate chips for lunch.

                

Doors become unnecessary and clothing, optional. Your home had become a judgement-free zone and there is no one to tell you to not wear your sweatpants all day. Or pants at all.  After a few days of living alone your brain will begin to entertain thoughts such as, "What are pants, really? Society-contrived prisons that we only wear to satisfy the demands of others, thats what! The only good thing pants are for is not skidding when you go down slides."

                                                
Thats what I was beginning to think until I was making dinner and the doorbell rang. My heart zoomed up into my throat and I hit the floor, rolling out of sight behind the counter in about 2 seconds, flat, and then hid there until they went away. You have never experienced fear until you're making tacos in your skivvies and someone rings the doorbell.

                         

My already strange eating habits were only magnified by eating alone. You stop having to worry about adjusting your eating habits to other people's schedules and its a dangerously liberating feeling. Pickles and peanut butter for breakfast? Why not! Cinnamon roles and popcorn for lunch? Sounds delicious!Chilli eaten out of a teacup? I'M A FREE WOMAN!

                       

I tend to talk when i'm alone. To my dog, to the computer, to various inanimate objects. Every meal becomes a Rachel Ray worthy cooking show episode, every mundane household task is a narrated thriller, and I've had some very deep conversations with the plastic duck on the piano (Whoops, there I go tempting thieves again.) Stop looking at me like a crazy person, you know you do it too. When my family returned home from vacation it took some effort to stop including Amos into our conversations.

                  
Let me start by saying I got a lot of work done this week. Without screaming sisters and the white noise of co-habitation I managed to do all of my homework and write a kick-butt English paper. But I think I also watched every feel-good dance movie ever made and made the mistake of watching a Ted Talks video on youtube while inevitably led to an hour of learning bizarre, interesting things that made me feel smarter but actually accomplished nothing. If anything it just made me very contemplative and wonder about the mysteries of the universe, like why yogurt is only marketed to women.

I must depart. My fearless guard dog has wedged himself behind the couch for some unknown reason, probably because he saw the mystery person living in the air ducts. Scratch that, he is now rolling on my feet in fear. The air duct person is getting closer, its the only explanation. Still, even with the freaky sounds my fridge makes, my invisible house guest, my cowardly bodyguard, nosy neighbors, eclectic diet, and newly developed 2nd personality to hold conversations with, I love living alone. The real concern is how many times I'm going to sing Phantom of the Opera ballads before I remember that my family is back from vacation.

Talking to myself,
- Hannah

                               

The 3 Things I've Learned in College (So Far)

                                                
Before the thought even begins to tiptoe about the corners of your mind, no, I'm still not writing about Turkey or Africa yet. There are some subjects that are just too large to write about, like love and poverty and how far my heart drops when I'm making a pbj and learn, too late, that the peanut butter jar is empty.

                                         

Its been nearly a month since the spring college semester began and so far, I've learned 3 lessons. Not three things in total, of course, I've also learned loads of trivial information about the balance of pathos and ethos in arguments, utility equations, the function and anatomy of neurons, the saturation point of polyunsaturated fatty acids, and that including lesson-related doodles in your graded notes will score extra points (this is rule #3 in action). What I mean is I've discovered three laws of life and the universe at large in the course of these classes, usually at moments like when watching the clock hands stretch the last 15 minutes of class like bitter taffy.
So, without further ado, the 3 things I've learned in college (so far):

                              

#1: Every textbook you read is still a rough draft.

Education is full of rules. Rules from how to structure essays to how gravity works. The master rule about rules, however, is that every rule has it's exception; no "fact" is 100%. Think about science, in particular. There is a set of principles we call "scientific law" however none of them are concretely factual. When it comes to the way our bodies work or the planets stay aligned we have love to pretend that we've figured it out and have printed a final draft on the way the universe works, but the truth is we haven't. Every textbook you read is still a rough draft. If it wan't for a few skeptical students trying to not fall asleep in their classes a few hundred years ago we wouldn't have busted myths like that the Earth is flat or that 'bloodletting' is a safe medical practice.

Think of all the other currently accepted (if unspoken) laws of the universe that we live by:
- The law that something isn't true until posted to social media
- The law that a girl's Halloween costume has to be in some way sexy
-The law that you can't wear white after labor day
- The law that you have to read through 2 pages of personal anecdotes on foodie blogs before you can get to the ingredient list (seriously, has anyone else noticed this?).

All these laws and more could be completely re-written in the next edition of Life 101.The world isn't the final issue of a textbook, its an easily hack-able Wikipedia page.

                         

#2: Nearly everything is influenced by $$$

Take any subject you're studying and you'll find there is a 90% chance that it is somehow influenced by money. The want of money may be the root of all evil but its also the root of education. In Nutrition the way the food pyramid is stacked is largely to do with the money-hungry food manufacturers who funded the stacking. Economics is literally the study of societies make decisions in pursuit of money and the goods people can buy with money. In art history we learn to value paintings by how much money they're worth, even though the teacher cannot really explain why one painting is worth a million dollars and another, $10.

Think about the decisions you make every day, from what to eat for breakfast to who to marry. We go to college to get jobs to make money, we eat food from stores with lower prices, and even our choice of spouse can be rooted in our estimation of their ability to someday provide for a family.

When evaluating this rule I'm comforted by the fact that rule #1 exists, because there are exceptions. Just as humans unconsciously build our lives in pursuit of money, we are capable of selfless acts and strive for things far more valuable like love, forgiveness, and mercy. And writing this blog post, because I'm certainly not being paid to do this. (Though if you'd like to pay me, feel free.)

                                   

#3: How to Sound Like I Know What I'm Talking About 

Don't worry, I've stopped spouting pseudo-philosophical theories for now. The final lesson is far more beneficial to you and has helped raise many a grade: how to sound like a smarty pants student even if you don't really understand the concept. The difference between a B or an A on an essay could be chalked up to choices such as using the word 'conflagration' instead of 'fire'. A few tips for sounding smartical:

                                     

-Refer to yourself in papers as "this writer" and to other people by their last names. (e.g. "In the end of the blog post the reader began to wonder how sleep deprived Musick was when she penned the words.")

-Sprinkle relevant technical terms onto your homework like bacon bits over a salad: just enough to add academic flavor without making the consumer question if its truly nutritious.

-The thesaurus isn't a kind of dinosaur, its your new best friend.

- READ. The words you pour into your head are going to spill onto your homework, so choose wisely. If your persuasive essay is titled, "Who Wore it Better: The Red Coats or the Blue Coats?" then you might want to ditch the yahoo articles and visit the library. (And not just because libraries have free wifi, and sometimes, little cafes with scrumptious muffins.)

                                        

One of the best parts of being in college is this: You FEEL Smart. Sometimes after struggling through a tough chapter or watching Youtube instructional videos until you understand a concept, this rush of smarty pants chemicals rush into your body and a warm, fuzzy feeling of, "Yeah, I KNOW STUFF." is released. Be warned, though, as a side effect of these temporary educational-highs you may begin unconsciously signing Dr. in front of your signatures and write rambling blog posts about the unspoken laws of the universe.

A+,
-Hannah