How not to do things.

There have been several different things I've been meaning to blog about lately, but it occurred to me they are all examples of spectacularly bad form, so I thought it might be nice to create a handy guide to help others avoid these situations. So without further ado...

How Not to be a Good Host

My Danish family was in town a few weeks ago. They were to arrive in Dallas on a Friday, be picked up by my mother and taken to her house which is about two hours from the airport. The husband needed to return to Dallas for a conference on Monday, so my mother offered via e-mail, "We can take him and get him after the conference if necessary, but the funeral home has to make runs to the Dallas area often and if Bjorn won't be totally grossed out, he might ride with one of the funeral home guys. I promise it won't be a hearse. Usually a Suburban." I'm not sure I've ever mentioned on here that my family runs the funeral home in my hometown, but they do. This fact is something which alone would provide enough material for a hundred blogs, but the point here is that offering to send company in from Europe on a two-hour trip with a dead body is just...well, bad form.

When the Danes finally arrived, I apologized profusely for this only to learn that Bjorn's father had made coffins when he was a child, the stacks of which had provided "a lovely badminton net" for him and his friends.

Apparently dysfunction knows no boundaries, international or otherwise.

How Not to be a Good Guest

A friend of mine - and CHAMPION hostess, I might add - moved to Seattle about a year ago. She didn't know anyone there when she moved, so she's spent the past year trying to reach out to folks in an attempt to get a group of friends pulled together which is how she ended up inviting several of her co-workers over to her place after a company party for some wine the other night. Apparently at some point in the evening (and after they'd mowed through four bottles of her nicest wine), one of her co-workers decided to pull out his balls and put them on her coffee table.

That's it. He just set them there and then he proceeded to laugh his ass off while my friend stared on in horror.

I'm sorry, but what. the. hell. I swear to God, if one of the jackasses I worked with came to my place and put his balls on my coffee table, I'd take a picture and then send out a company-wide e-mail that says, "Why you shouldn't invite Mike over. Ever."

How Not to be a Respectful Boyfriend

While we're on the subject of jackass behavior, I would like to dedicate a portion of this blog to my best friend's now ex-boyfriend. This guy, let's call him Stan, dated my best friend for a year and a half. Then he dumped her. This was shitty enough because they work together and it was extremely uncomfortable for for both of them. But after they'd been "apart" for nine months, he came back and said he wanted to get back together, this time for good. He put the full-court press on her and her friends (who had been none too pleased with him after round one) and won us all over. After dating four months and talking about rings, he'd asked her if he could move in, only to dump her AGAIN two days later and right before Thanksgiving. (Oh, the irony.)

I went up to hang out with her this past weekend; understandably, she was nothing short of a mess. We have been friends since we were eight and until this past weekend, I had never seen her cry which completely broke my heart. And because no bad deed goes unpunished, while she was at a party Friday night, I hopped on her computer to check Facebook and after discovering her retard of an ex still had all his login info as the default, took matters into my own hands:

What you can't really tell from the picture, is that I also updated his profile pic to the ass of a fat chick with "Deliciously Evil" written across the back of her shorts. Genius, if I do say so myself.

How Not to Make a Joyful Noise

For those who feel my cyber-activities Friday night were out of line, please note that karma caught up with me the very next evening, and as they say it's a total bitch. That night, we celebrated my grandmother's 89th birthday, and after dinner I invited my family over to my place to play Wii. My mother is a huge fan of Wii Sports but when she saw the drum set in my living room, she decided to give Rock Band a shot, recruiting my sister and her fiancee in the process. And so you don't have to imagine what the von Trapps would sound like drunk with a two-year old banging a pot beside them, allow me to present the musical stylings of the Taylor Family Singers: