Sterling's Weekly

I’m not anti-religion or anything, but I haven’t been to church in a few years.  Last time I went, I had a rather jarring experience—one of those that’s so impactful it results in a chemical imbalance in your brain and forever alters your senses.  You know the kind.  For example, when I was younger, just a wee little tyke, my mom made me a Marie Callender’s microwaveable chicken pot pie for dinner.  I’m not sure if it was expired, or if Marie Callender’s is of such a lesser quality compared to some of the other big names in the frozen dinner game, but I remember spending the entire night throwing up into my Legos bin.  Haven’t been able to stomach a chicken pot pie since.  Another example: in college, some pals and I made plans to go out on the town—to drop it low, to pop our collars, to partake in anything and everything that would place us firmly under the umbrella of “tearing da club up.”  That was the plan, anyway.  For the pregame, somebody b...

A while back, I dated this girl from Wisconsin.  Rose.  She grew up on a dairy farm, and her father was the county’s record-holding hand milker.  Said he could squeeze out a gallon in under a minute, that it’s less about technique and more about making sure the cow trusts you, that the more spaced out the black spots on the cowhide, the better.  He told me all of this over dinner the first time I met him.  He was in town visiting, and Rose suggested we take him out to this fancy steakhouse—said it’d be nice to show him the “other side” of the cattle industry.  That should’ve been my first red flag, this seemingly insignificant statement hinting at the fact that her father was utterly and totally consumed by milk.  But the dinner was nice, I guess, except for when her father ordered two large glasses of milk to go with his 32 oz. T-bone, threatening to send them back, too, if they weren’t 55 degrees Fahrenheit.  “Your steak, sir?” th...

I was talking to my friend Desdemona the other day—she’s cool, works the bungee jump thing at the mall—and she was telling me about this situation with one of her friends.   A situationship , to be more precise.   Now, if you’re like how I was, you’re probably saying, “Sterling, what the unfeathered chicken gizzard are you blathering on about?   A situationship?   Please explain.”   Well alright then. So, according to Google—at least as of today while I’m dictating this to my secretary, my spiritual mentor, and my best friend, the Reverend Father Alabaster Fudge—a situationship is “a romantic or sexual relationship that is not considered to be formal or established.”   Look, I’ll go ahead and admit, I don’t have time to keep up with whatever the members of today’s youth are calling their informal and unestablished (and often sinful—Rev. Al has a LOT to say about that topic) relationships, but a situationship sounds a lot like that movie with Natalie Portm...