#to be clear this is a PRO EGGNOG BLOG

[dannypuro]

It's completely up to you, but I think you should definitely make a holiday fic in the Something Telling universe. It's probably because I'm partial because I've absolutely fallen in love with Something Telling and think it's one of the greatest fanfics I've ever read, but I would love to read a holiday fic from it. I guess it's because I really wanna see what Enjolras' first 21st century Christmas is like. And his opinions on Eggnog. Was that a thing in the 1800s?

Hmmghn..... Much To Think About....

Thank u for eggnog question. eggnog isn’t super big in france today, actually--it’s not a really common holiday bevvie like it is in the usa. HOWEVER, courf did a semester abroad in the US during college and never recovered--he now insists on 1) halloween parties and 2) eggnog. somebody stop him. he makes grantaire make a giant batch of boozy eggnog for every holiday gathering and everybody gains like 5 pounds over the course of the night. 

enjy would actually be vaguely familiar with eggnog. not the modern type that we know today, probably--but eggy, boozy, milky drinks have been around in europe for centuries. eggnog is actually a bit of a relic, in that regard. at enjy’s time, it was likely a quite bougie type of drink, since eggs and milk and good, strong liquor were all pretty expensive, and i don’t really know if culturally it would have been his family’s celebratory drink of choice, but it wouldn’t seem too strange to him as a holiday beverage. i’m willing to bet he would have tasted a similar egg-milk-booze drink before he left for paris and got all ascetic.

THAT BEING SAID, when courf brings out the obligatory eggnog, enj gets a little excited. it’s FANCY to him, ok?? that type of rich alcoholic bevvie is permanently coded in his mind as “indulgent and fancy and special” and he wouldn’t have had anything like it in like ten years. he gets smashed. courf is just glad to have somebody else on his side. 

PRO EGGNOG COALITION: courf, enjy, jehan, bossuet, bahorel, cosette

ANTI EGGNOG COALITION: ferre, musichetta, joly

EGGNOG NEUTRAL: feuilly (has 2 small glasses); marius (excluded from the anti-eggnog coalition by combeferre); grantaire (secretly likes eggnog but complains for the fun of it)

[boyswanna-be-her]

“How My Recovering Friend Changed the Way I Entertain”

I started getting the Kitchn daily newsletters recently because I like their recipes. This article was in there today, and it made me so furious that I know I won’t move on with my day until I talk through it so... here goes nothing.

My first indication that this thing was about to ruin my day should’ve been the self-centered headline, truly. But I was curious about what the friend was recovering from and how it changed the way the author entertained. So, hell, I clicked through. 

My friend Lauren, who asked me not to use her real name, has been sober for more than two years. She was a good friend — someone I texted almost daily with news and commentary, wardrobe emergencies, and, of course, plans to have our ritual pre-dinner glass of wine. It didn't happen every afternoon. But three or four days a week, Lauren would come over around 5 p.m., after I'd had a long enough day with a toddler to think a smidge of wine sounded like a great idea, but before either of our husbands came home.

OK. So far so good.

As it turned out, that was usually her third or fourth drink of the day. 

Hey, that sucks for Lauren! 

When Lauren told me she was an alcoholic, I didn't know what to mourn first.

Here’s my first indication that there’s something wrong. Your friend who you speak to every day and see 3-4x a week has confessed to you that she has a chronic, life-ruining addiction (or disease, depending on who you’re talking to) and your first instinct is to........ mourn for what YOU think you MIGHT lose?

I wanted to mourn our time together, because certainly, I thought, she wouldn't be able to steal afternoon time with me if she became sober. But I also wanted to grieve for the friendship I thought we had; I wanted to know whether she'd actually been coming over to see me or just for the booze. And I felt sad knowing that I had no way to internalize what she must be going through — the confusion, and the shame, and the cravings, and the loss of control.

This is the most-self centered rambling I’ve read all day, which is really saying something considering I spent an hour in a waiting room reading about the Rick and Morty/McDonalds Saucegate scandal today. 

I'd suspected for months, of course. 

Cool, let me stop you right there. If someone close to you confesses something, please don’t say “I suspected for months.” If you suspect something, bring it up with your friend. I cannot imagine how humiliating it must be for “Lauren” to face this sort of smug I-knew-it-all-along attitude.

Since she house-sat and left our collection of liquor bottles nearly empty. Since she started downing tumblers of wine in a single go. Since one of her work colleagues started confiding in me that Lauren's drinking was getting in the way of their collaborations.

Hold up. If someone from her WORK contacted the author worried about Lauren’s drinking, she needed to bring this up with Lauren a long time ago. 

Sorry, but if you call yourself someone’s friend, you owe it to them. It doesn’t have to be an intervention, but clearly there was something really wrong happening in Lauren’s life at the time. Sometimes all you need to do is ask if your friend needs any help that you can provide, let them know you’re always there to listen, and firmly but warmly encourage them to seek some professional help.

But you don’t see someone 3-4 times every week and text them every day and have their work colleagues reaching out to you and just la dee dah pretend like everything is fine, then say I KNEW IT when it turns out they’re an alcoholic.

All at once, it was obvious; I felt that if I cared about Lauren, I had to put her health before our friendship. I had to ask her to get help, even if it meant we wouldn't be close afterwards. I didn't know what else I could do.

Oh, cool, so you’re, like, going to do some research on how to help alcoholic friends and family? You’re going to go to talk to her about her problems and help her get into therapy? You’re going to be a positive, supportive friend and role model for her?

We got rid of all the liquor in our house, dropping half-consumed bottles of fancy whiskeys and liqueurs off on a different friend's porch, with the plea "PLEASE DRINK THIS WITH US" scrawled on the labels in Sharpie.

Hm. OK. Well that doesn’t... really help Lauren at all. 

And it’s really creepy.

Please don’t do this to your friends.

I don’t want to hold your old musty liquor for you. Fuck off. 

Luckily, I wasn't the only one who decided to stop drinking with Lauren. Other friends had noticed, too. 

This doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, and you’ll see why below. Also, didn’t the author just state that they weirdly left liquor on friends’ doorsteps with a scrawled message about how it’s supposed to be consumed with the author?

And after a Christmas-break blow-up with her kids, Lauren agreed to go to rehab. It took a lot of hard work, but she got clean.

Glad Lauren made this decision.

Also, “clean” is a word for dishes and floors. Don’t call your friends “clean” or characterize their treatment as “getting clean.” It’s rude.

Afterwards, though, she had to relearn how to be friends with people. And like so many whose friends have been through similar break-ups with booze, I had to relearn how to hang out with her.

No. You didn’t. There’s nothing to relearn. She’s not going to be drinking from now on. It’s not a hard concept.

I didn't want her to drink, but I did want the old Lauren — the one who invited me over at the drop of a hat, to drink wine and watch part of a football game, or drink wine and share a piece of cake, or drink wine and dig to find the perfect shoes for some purportedly life-changing event neither of us would think of again. 

Thinking like this can be a huge reason why alcoholics don’t seek help. So protip: if you’re worried about your friend becoming boring when they quit drinking, you’re a shitty friend and you need to keep it to yourself, not write a fucking thinkpiece on it for a recipe blog.

Also, goddamn, if your entire social life is about drinking wine, you need to look at your social life. 

The wine-drinking part wasn't dangerous to me, so it was hard to digest the idea that it might actually be fatal to her.

I don’t even know how to react to this. It’s “hard to digest”? 

This person just sounds like a moron. 

When you're in rehab, Lauren told me, they push you to be careful about who you socialize with and where you hang out with friends. Bars are absolutely off-limits. Ditto for dinner parties, if they involve liquor of any kind.

Yup, makes sense.

Her therapist encouraged her to establish a secret code with her husband, so that if she ever felt threatened — if she ever felt like she really needed a drink and couldn't say no — she could flash the sign and he'd whisk her away to safety.

Hey, great idea! Her husband sounds cool.

At first, when she got back from rehab, Lauren avoided any social event where she knew there would be alcohol, because she knew she'd be too anxious about it to feel comfortable chatting about the most mundane things.

Hey that’s fair!

She stopped going to her wine group, which felt like a huge loss.

More on the “wine group” later...

It became clear to her that she and her husband were getting invited to fewer and fewer things.

That’s fucked up. If this happens to you, you should find new friends.

If you fucking recover from an addiction or a disease and your friends don’t invite you to do stuff, they were never your friends in the first place. It sucks and it hurts and it’s hard to make new friends, but let me repeat this:

IF YOU RECOVER FROM AN ADDICTION AND YOUR FRIENDS DON’T INVITE YOU TO DO STUFF ANYMORE, THEY WERE NEVER YOUR FRIENDS IN THE FIRST PLACE. I’m so sorry. But you need new friends to stay healthy.

(I was certainly afraid to invite her over.)

This authors wasn’t afraid to dump random alcohol on random friends’ doorsteps with a weird note on it and write a fucking thinkpiece about it, but she was AFRAID TO INVITE HER FRIEND OVER after she went to rehab?

This author is a bad friend and should be avoided.

Holidays were the worst: Her family knew what she was going through, but she didn't feel like she could host a proper Thanksgiving or Christmas meal without wine (or eggnog, her favorite). But she couldn't have them in the house, either. She gave up hosting.

Yo, that sucks and is reasonable. One thing I’ve learned in therapy is that you have to weigh the pros and cons of continuing on in your old habits. It sounds like Lauren did that and concluded that it was best/easiest/least stressful to just stop hosting. Sucks that her life had to change in that way, but dealing with it on Thanksgiving and Christmas--two days out of the year--is definitely doable.

Find new friends, the rehab therapists had recommended.

BITCH, ME TOO

LAUREN, RUN AWAY FROM THESE NARCISSISTIC WOMEN AND FIND YOURSELF A GROUP OF REAL FRIENDS WITH SUBSTANCE WHO WILL LOVE AND CELEBRATE YOUR SOBRIETY!!!!!

But she didn't want new friends.

I have a feeling Lauren DID want new friends but the author was too far up her own ass to notice. Or rather, Lauren didn’t want “new friends”--she wanted her old friends not to be such a dumpster fire because the only thing, apparently, her friends cared about was the fact that she was an easy person to have around who never needed them to do anything to accommodate her. 

She wanted a new way to hang out and socialize with the friends who had been with her through all of the other things life hands out over the years.

Again, I’m pretty sure Lauren just wanted her friend group not to treat her like a fucking leper but WHO KNOWS.

Anyway, there is more to this article because it goes on to talk about the ways that Lauren figured out how she could stick with her friend group.

SHOCKINGLY they’re all things Lauren had to do for herself, and not things that anyone had to actually change to accommodate their friend.

Re: the wine group

Make it a book club. Make it a music club. Make it whatever. You are allowed to change the content of your structured hangouts, and if you’re not an enormously self-centered piece of trash, you OUGHT TO change it when one of your integral members has a LIFE-THREATENING affliction that she has to deal with FOR THE REST OF HER LIFE. 

I’m not saying they all needed to stop drinking--and I’m really puzzled as to why that was even a reaction for the author and Lauren’s friends. You don’t stop drinking in order to support a recovering alcoholic--YOU SIMPLY SUPPORT THE RECOVERING ALCOHOLIC. 

Your friends who struggle with addiction don’t want you to stop doing what you’re doing. Their addiction isn’t about you. 

Yes, you may have contributed to it by enabling it or being present in situations that were risky for them. If they need you to change your behavior, they’ll ask. 

Please don’t do things like this author did. Please don’t give all your booze away in a weird way and quit drinking without actually talking to your friend about it. 

If you’re worried about saying the wrong thing, familiarize yourself with ring theory. Takes two seconds to learn and will help you with ALL situations in life from now on.

AND TO ANY OF MY FOLLOWERS who may be in a situation like Lauren’s? Please, please distance yourself from people like this. You deserve to surround yourself with people who celebrate your sobriety and who you are, every day, no matter how you change yourself for the better.