Cinnamon Flavored Death

Cinnamon Flavored Death. No that is not the name of some gritty 1970's grind house movie. That is what I call anything cinnamon flavored that is not a pastry item. That covers your Red Hots, Hot Tamales, those terrible red "sprinkles" that people hide on Christmas cookies because they just want someone to ruin the holiday dinner with vomit, Big Red gum, and the rest. It's gross, it's unappetizing, and it is a mere facade of what candy is supposed to be. It is disappointment in its purest form.

I have a handful of very specific, very unique food aversions. We all know I hate when sweet foods are warm, I've never had a PB and J sandwich, and dark chocolate is Satan's aphrodisiac. What makes my distaste for non-dessert cinnamon flavored items interesting is that it was born not of natural causes, but of one night of bad decision making.

My senior year of college, when I was 21 (really, I'm not rounding up for this story), my best friend and I visited a mutual friend at another college. In proper host fashion, my best friend and I were offered extensive amounts of libations, including the dietary culprit in this situation: Goldschlager. If you are unfamiliar, Goldschlager is a cinnamon flavored schnapps with little gold bits floating around in it. Imbibing in enough of this potent potion makes you feel warm, cozy, and very very very...relaxed. After becoming increasingly "relaxed" my body decided to depart with my gold lined stomach contents. It was the first and only time that an alcoholic beverage has taken the initiative to remove itself, forcefully, from my insides. A few trips to the porcelain puke receptacle and I was doing alright. Unfortunately, to this day, I cannot tolerate the faintest scent of fake cinnamon flavoring. If someone pulls out a piece of Big Red gum during a meeting, and I am privy to its dominant scent properties, I have to force my tongue to the roof of my mouth in order to keep myself from making a scene and actually releasing my lunch all over the floor. Once I was leaving a sushi restaurant with my brother and went to grab a mint from the host podium. I was just crossing the threshold to the parking lot when I popped the mint in my mouth and was met with my scenes of my life flashing in front of my eyes. I spit out the after-dinner abomination and began to dry heave in the parking lot, like a true class act.

The only moderately pleasant thing about this whole experience is that fake cinnamon items tend to be dyed an equally unappealing red color, so they aren't particularly challenging to avoid. Tasty cinnamon flavored items (pies, rolls, cakes), that involve use of the actual spice, not its reject sibling, are brown...like cinnamon.

In summation, faux cinnamon is bad and if you enjoy it then you should feel bad you plebeian waste of space.

CK Reuber

I am going to tell you a story about how my mom is a motherfucking rockstar wizard from outer space with infinite wisdom, humor, and compassion. I like to describe my mother in those words because those are the closest I can get to an accurate written description of her. The only other way I can think to describe her is as the nice version of me, which is also pretty accurate. My mom is a fucking sorcerer and could destroy Gandalf McDumbledore in battle. She is just rad as fuck.

When I was growing up, CK Reuber and I had the typical mother-daughter relationship, maybe a bit more amplified than average, but typical nonetheless. We got along rather well, for the most part, although I did go through the "asshole teenager" phase which put small strain of the relationship. When I left for college our relationship really solidified itself and we have been #besties ever since.

What makes my mom so awesome is her limitless ability to deal with Yours Truly. I can be a little much...all the time. I require constant attention and reassurance while simultaneously acting like I am completely okay without those things. Can you imagine trying to raise a feisty child who is a complete contradiction of herself 100% of the time? I am always whining for mozzarella sticks or coffee and expect her to drop everything to give me a hug on demand. I am super annoying and she deals with that.

Perhaps one of my favorite things about CK is that she inspires confidence in me. She has never made me doubt myself or anything I was doing. She was supportive when I decided to major in the 3 most unemployable academic fields. She let me dress and do my hair and makeup like I was on fucking crack and meth popsicles. She was never that mom who had backhanded commentary about my outfits, my weight, or my interests. That shit makes all the difference.

One of my other favorite things about CK, as it relates to her relationships with others, is how she makes everyone feel like they matter, because to her, they do. (That is important to clarify because I still hate everyone). My mom can know someone for ten minutes and they are confiding in her about their biggest life stressors. She listens, she relates, and she cares, and that is some seriously rare shit to come by.

Continuing on with things I love about my mom is that she doesn't give two and half fucks about any conceptions of how women with kids are supposed to act, dress, and what they can enjoy. Homegirl wears black and white polka dot Converse and Doc Martens to work. She swears like a sailor and secretly enjoys Keeping Up With the Kardashians.

CK allows me to let my freak flag fly and I think she should be knighted or given sainthood. She is fucking amazing. I'm sure your mother is good and all, but mine is 100 fucking times better.

Questionable Taste

I have quite a few unique quirks and idiosyncrasies that I like to think are more endearing than annoying. One of those peculiarities is my fixation with terrible horror and sci-fi movies. Think Two Headed Shark, Piranhaconda, Rubber, Dead Snow, Tusk, Deep Blue Sea, and the like. I don't like them for the sake of being weird and/or interesting because I'm not a douche like that. I like them because they are so fucking ridiculous they are magnificent bastions of cinema. Don't judge a movie by its horribly photoshopped publicity.

I started watching horror movies at a very young age. Perhaps a young enough age to cause people to question my parent's tactics for raising a child. Regardless, my dad and I would watch Tales from the Crypt on the regular and we bonded quite closely as a result. It was our thing. Some people build model airplanes with their dads, others harbor resentment over a missed dance recital, but I built my father-daughter memories on a foundation of severed heads and disemboweled corpses. Our affinity for horror meant that early in my adolescence I had already seen most of the classics (Freddy, Jason, Michael) so I had to tap in to some "creative" subgenres to quench my blood lust. This meant that the Sy-Fy channel and I became well acquainted. 

At first my tolerance for these god-awful movies was the same as anyone else: I seriously questioned how the funding for these movies was generated and exactly how many drugs each actor/director/writer/producer was on during its inception. The more I watched and the lower my standards became, the more interested I was in the next anthropomorphic-animal-hybrid creature feature. My tastes became weirder and weirder and it wasn't long before I understood the socialist underpinnings in movies like Dead Snow 1 and 2, or the global warming skepticism in Mega Shark Vs. Mechashark. Now, in the present day, my Netflix queue is filled with one-star rated films and their  C-list celebrity actors. 

One of the first movies that fit in to this category and I loved unironically was Deep Blue Sea. It is still one of my favorites. The movie takes place on a marine research rig in the middle of the ocean. The scientists on board are studying mako sharks and their aggressive nature. A severe storm and failed rescue attempt (because of course), along with a breached rig, leaves the crew trying to escape against uber-intelligent sharks with a penchant for mindless slaughter. This movie even features Samuel L. Jackson and Ice Cube. Another one of the "classics" is Anaconda featuring Jennifer Lopez, Owen Wilson, Ice Cube (he knows how to pick 'em) and Jon Voight. Lopez and Wilson, among others, are floating down the Amazon River to shoot a tribal documentary. They encounter Voight who manipulates them in to taking a specific route that will allow him to track a massive, record-breaking, person-eating, anaconda. Then there is Dead Snow which chronicles the escape and defeat from Nazi zombies protecting their treasures in Norway. 

Aside from my history with these movies, I am not sure what continues to draw me to them. It isn't because I enjoying telling people that I spent my weekend alone in my apartment, without pants on,  watching Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus (seriously, why don't I have a boyfriend?). The CGI is just as bad as the acting and the plots are always remarkably shallow. I would like to think that I derive so much enjoyment out of these movies because it gives me a chance to let go of any semblance of critical thinking. For an hour and a half all I have to worry about it how Brooke Hogan is going to escape a sinking island and outsmart a shark with two heads at the same time.