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I suggest mixing 5 types of liquor in a pitcher

As we enter our first holiday season with a Covid vaccine, we return to welcoming people in our homes to eat and drink and exhale semi-freely. Since the only thing I love more than entertaining at home is helping my friends where I can, I asked my esteemed colleagues over Slack if they had any problems in that area that I could solve for them in the space of a blog post.

Like a ray of sunshine on a burgundy message board, Kelly Conaboy typed at 2:13 PM “what is a good batch cocktail to make that is well-liked enough and can keep well in, like, a pitcher or whatever, as a party drink option?”

Great question Kelly. Although most alcohol-drinking party goers have learned the gesture of bringing a bottle of wine to every domestic event they are invited to, a good hostess should still provide enough for a baseline buzz. But you also don’t want to commit to making every single drink based on the specifications of the random cocktail recipe you found on a seemingly reputable blog.

My mom could beat up your mom.

Nature. It’s a thing we can all agree exists. But did you ever stop and think to say thank you to nature for all that it’s given you? What if I told you that nature’s love language is gift giving? Yeah you thought you could just get away with quality time or words of affirmation. Well not this year, buddy — it’s time to break out the credit card (which is plastic, which is technically nature).

Open up something special

I first started thinking of analingus as a gastronomic concern while looking up the diseases you can contract from eating ass. After landing on a r/AskMen thread called “I feel a bit sick after eating the booty this morning,” I consulted my roommate, a gay male medical researcher, who responded with a list of potential ailments ranging from the rank and file oral-to-anal and anal-to-oral STIs to parasites and bacterial infections: “I’ve heard of people getting giardia, hepatitis A, E.coli, staph, salmonella. Or it could just be a bit of overgrowth from a bolus of butt bacteria.”

A few years ago, the concept of ass-eating reached an apex of cultural acknowledgement, if not acceptance, in heterosexual communities, as both a potentially subversive sex act and an increasingly grating online meme. But I suspect the possibility of interacting with fecal matter will probably always keep it somewhat taboo. For the uninitiated, it’s easy to be disturbed by the enhanced threats of butt stuff when we spend so much of our lives carefully avoiding contact with shit — with good reason. But for the most part, our fears of ass poisoning are overblown.

“It's a relatively safe thing to do,” said Dr. Stephen Goldstone, an Assistant Clinical Professor in Surgery at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and author of "The Ins and Outs of Gay Sex: A Medical Handbook for Men" (1999) when I spoke with him over the phone.

Who is John Gift?

We all have that one friend who left his mechanic father’s Ohio home at the prodigious age of 12, matriculated at a university to study philosophy and physics at age 16, took a job at a motor company, invented a game-changing car motor powered by static electricity, and quit when the new owners decided to run the factory by collectivist principles. Who is that friend? Technically, it is John Galt, the protagonist of Ayn Rand’s classic Objectivist tome, Atlas Shrugged, whose backstory I have refreshed in my memory by way of Wikipedia.

But in a broader sense, he is the Everyman, the raw spirit of individualism and rational self-interest, a freethinker unburdened by taxes, speed limits, and the begging hand of big government. (If you have thoughts about the ideological distinction between Objectivism and Libertarianism as a whole, and take issue with how I’ve lumped them together here, please let us know in the comments.)

For most of the year, this friend poses few problems. They appear online every so often to define ephebophilia, then disappear to bury their gold bricks in the woods. But it is December, the month of giving, and that poses a problem. What do you get for the friend who “swear[s] by [their] life and [their] love of it that [they] will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for [theirs]?” In a certain sense, the bar is low; they will definitely not get you anything. But the act of giving is not about what you get in return, which again, will be nothing. So for those selfless agents of altruism, a humble gift guide for the Libertarian in your life.

He looks a lot like Spanx tights

This is my dog, a beautiful, four-year-old Jindo-Akita mix named Mars. He’s as opaque as he is long, and I often call him Baby Jindo Bear or Mr. Elegant. We’ve been together just over three years, and he’s my best friend, even though I’m not his. He’s an intellectual who doesn’t really require friendship, as long as he has a place to lay comfortably so he can ideate, brainstorm, and plot his escape from his Mama, who is always kissing him when he’s busy thinking about the concepts of impermanence or Zionism or whatever.

It hurts that Mars doesn’t necessarily ask for my affections and sometimes when I say, “Hi, baby!!” to him, he doesn’t so much as perk up a single, solitary ear. Lucky for me though, I’m not that good at putting my clothes away after I’ve worn them, and I often think that random balls of leggings and sweaters on the floor are my baby. These are all the things I’ve said “Hi, baby!” to recently, mistaking them for Mars.