When life gives you lemons...

... make lemonade.

God knows life isn't easy. Sometimes, it's downright difficult, painful, depressing.  

But, like with most things, it's mostly what you make of it. 

So I say when life gives you lemons, simply add a little sugar... and make lemonade.

And the sugar that I speak of is laughter.

A friend of mine paid me a great compliment the other day. He said he always knew where I was because all he had to do was follow the laughter. Actually, he said the loud, honking laughter... but I digress.

They say laughter is the best medicine for a reason, zer! 

"We change physiologically when we laugh. We stretch muscles throughout our face and body, our pulse and blood pressure go up, and we breathe faster, sending more oxygen to our tissues." According to scientists laughter acts like a mild workout, increasing blood flow, raising the level of infection-fighting antibodies, boosting the levels of immune cells, lowering blood sugar levels, decreasing pain and improving sleep.   

All that and it's a hoot too! 

In order to ensure that y'all get your daily dose of medicine laughter, here is a compilation of things that made me laugh this week.

Miley Cyrus' best moments on SNL

Apparently Ms. Miley is now under fire from The Stroke Association for a joke she made about why she can't seem to control her tongue, "I'm having tiny strokes, yo!" but I personally thought it was high-larious.  

What are you going to tell me next? That you can't laugh at mental illness? The Silver Linings Playbook proves otherwise. 

And then there's this...

Classic Anderson Cooper (giggling like a little girl)

Cupcakes and Cashmere is a personal blog I try to visit on a regular basis. One of Emily Schuman's newest columns, Links I love, provided a well-deserved laugh this week. And without further ado, here it is: 22 Outstanding Neighbour Complaint Notes. LOL! 

For a guaranteed chuckle, I head on over to my other spirit animal's AOL online series, Candidly Nicole. In it, Nicole Richie brings her "unfiltered sense of humour and unique perspective to life" in a series based on her Twitter feed.

My other, other spirit animal, Chelsea Handler, is an author and comedian who totally cracks me up. Her irreverent late-night talk show and books have provided me with countless guffaws. And a few snorts.    

While the Kardashians are not exactly known for their sense of humour (especially Kim), Kourtney Kardashian has come out with some zingers... including a few that end with kabob. Douche kabob and slob kabob are two prime examples.

Proverb: If you're too busy to laugh, you're too busy...

Let's go to Paris' I wanna rob

After literally months of waiting I finally did it.

Watch The Bling Ring, I mean. 

The reason I waited so long was not because I enjoy delayed gratification, or cognitive control, but because it never came out in theatres.

In Ottawa or Montreal.

No wonder it bombed. 

From the moment it started, like the fame-obsessed teenagers it portrays, I was hooked.

And the opening song, Crown on the Ground by Sleigh Bells, didn't hurt. Not one bit.

Directed, written and produced by Sofia Coppola and inspired by real-life events chronicled in a Vanity Fair article by Nancy Jo Sales, the movie provides a not so pretty look at the people who crave, and those who have, the pretty things. 

The Bling Ring was a group of seven teenagers, also referred to as the Hollywood Hills Burglar Bunch, who lived in and around the celebrity mothership: Calabasas, California. They were a bunch of fairly wealthy, fairly confused and fairly adderalled teenagers who figured that being infamous was second-best to being famous.

And they had a taste for the finer things in life.

In total, they stole over 3$ million dollars worth of celebrity loot, including designer handbags, shoes and clothes, makeup, perfume and even underwear. Not to mention booze, drugs (hello five grams of coke found at Paris Hilton's crib!) and a gun (Brian Austin Green's).

There favourite "victim" was Paris but they also helped themselves to crap owned by Miranda Kerr, Megan Fox, Rachel Bilson, Lindsay Lohan and Audrina Patridge who was particularly miffed at having to replace her custom-made denim, "jeans made to fit my body to my perfect shape."

Poor her.

Paris allowed The Bling Ring crew to film in her home and I was honestly shocked to see how much stuff she actually has. Rooms and rooms and rooms of stuff. An entire room dedicated to sunglasses. 

It's pretty gross if you ask me. And don't even get me started on the cushions depicting... what or who else?

Herself.

Narcissism 101.

In the end, The Bling Ring provides a fascinating "behind the closets" look at Hollywood's most wanted. It's well written, nicely filmed, and the music rocks.

 
As for the people it portrays... well, they're a pretty sorry bunch. Criminals and victims alike.

The Bling Ring was Rachel Lee, Nick Prugo, Alexis Neiers, Diana Tamayo, Courtney Ames, Johnny Ajar and Roy Lopez Jr.

Feeling fruity and nostalgic

What do you do with more fresh, garden-grown tomatoes than you can shake a stick at?

Make old-fashioned, home-made ketchup, what else? 

After a long, hot summer of planting, watering, twining, tending and, the moment we were all waiting for, picking, I was left with... lots and lots and lots of tomatoes! 

But one can only enjoy so much insalata caprese.

So, instead of wasting the bounty (as opposed to the Bountiful), I decided to contact the beau's mother for an old-fashioned, home-made ketchup recipe.

And she did not disappoint!

Made with (approximately) six tomatoes, six peaches, six pears, six white onions, three green peppers, 5 cups of granulated sugar, two cups of white vinegar, two tablespoons of salt and a teaspoon each of cloves, cinnamon, black pepper and celery seeds, the resulting fruit ketchup has a slightly darker hue than the store-bought variety and a complexity of flavour that is a joy to behold (and savour).

The entire process took about three hours with two pushkins (the mamita and I) working double-time. 

What was most time consuming was peeling everything. To properly peel a tomato, for example, you must first score it with an X before dropping it into boiling water. After about 30 seconds, you can take it out and immerse it in ice water. It is then ready to be peeled.

While peeling the tomatoes I was reminded of a particularly gruesome bris scene from Seinfeld.

Moving on...

After peeling, slicing, dicing, combining and bringing everything to a simmering, slow boil - while stirring often - we were left with lots and lots and lots... of fruit ketchup. Go figure!

Move over Heinz. There's a new ketchup boss in town.  

Walking the (fine) line

There’s a fine line between madness and creativity. It's hard to know exactly where it is, but it becomes pretty obvious once it has been crossed (think of Vincent Van Gogh lopping off his lower lobe, Ernest Hemingway pulling the trigger or Sylvia Plath turning the oven on).

I was perusing a friend's Facebook page the other day when I noticed a link to an article titled 'Creativity - similar to schizophrenia?' The article states that studies have shown "striking similarities in the thought pathways of highly creative people and those with schizophrenia." As someone who has known both highly creative people, as well as those with varying degrees of mental illness, I can't say I disagree.

While watching The View the other day (that's right, you heard me, The View!) author Stephen King made an interesting statement. He said that when he sits down to right a book he goes into a kind of trance. Once he's done, he's not even sure where his ideas came from.

He goes into an altered state of consciousness, one might say.

It's not surprising (to me, at least) that people able to write sentences poignant enough to elicit tears, paint paintings beautiful enough to take your breath away, or write music so powerful it literally brings you to your knees, have a little more going on up there than the rest of us.

We are all assaulted with a battery of sensory information - some might even call it overload - on a daily basis. Both schizophrenics and creative geniuses have a lower level of latent inhibition (LI). This means they don't filter, or discard, the information as readily as most.

The difference between schizophrenics and creative geniuses is what they do with the surplus. 

The creative ones are able to manipulate it without being overwhelmed by it while the truly mad ones simply allow it to seep into their consciousness, unable to distinguish between internal and external stimuli.

Creativity does have it's dark side though, with creative types more prone to depression, bipolar disorder and even schizophrenia. "People who have mental illness in their family (also) have a higher chance of being creative." 

As my spirit animal Jack Kerouac wrote in The Bible On the Road: the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.

Cue tears.






    

Tonight's the night

I absolutely hate blood, have a bit of a phobia about it actually, yet my favourite shows - apart from the Kardashians - literally revolve around it. 

Ooze with it.

I'm referring of course, to Dexter and True Blood.

Dexter, for those of you who have been living in a bloodless cave the past eight years, is a Showtime series that revolves around Dexter Morgan, a blood splatter spatter analyst with the Miami police who also happens to be a sociopathic killer.

A killer who kills according to a strict moral code established by his late, adoptive father Harry and Dr. Evelyn Vogel, a neuropsychiatrist who specializes in psychopaths.

As you do.   

Dressed to kill (ha!) in cargo pants and an army green thermal shirt, all Dexter needs to do the deed and then take out the trash is his trusty set of extra sharp knives and an inordinate amount of Saran Wrap. Easy peasy lemon squeezey. 

What I love most about Dexter is the dark comedy aspect of the show, as well as the complexity of the character in itself. 

For example, after having his son Harrison, Dexter says "I'm killing for two now," totally deadpan.

High-larious!

That kind of black humour really cracks me up. Kind of like this, which is totally inappropriate but also completely hysterical... for some odd reason. Holocaust ring... snort!

ha!

As for Mr. Morgan... he isn't a good guy or a bad guy. He is, as the show's official website states, "a man in profound conflict with the world and himself."