trashkweeen-blog - Tumblr blog

trashkweeen-blog · 6 years

Text

Drinking and Dating - Brandi Glanville

As I was gearing up to read this book, and gathering my deeply intellectual thoughts on the 17 chihuahuas in a human suit that is Brandi Glanville, I was like, oh good, I love Brandi. Sweet pizza-throwing Brandi. She spills the tea, this should be good in a trainwreck sort of way.

I mean, I have to say that I was squarely in the Brandi camp for a moment in time - a Dream Team fan, if you will. She really won me over at Game Night. You know, that desperate attempt by Dana to be part of the show. Ugh, Dana. Dana was like The Silence from Doctor Who. Not because she was silent - oh no, if she was within shouting distance you’d hear about her sunglasses and how much they cost. No, because the second you turn around, your memory of her is completely wiped. I had to google both her actual name and the name Kim kept calling her because she couldn’t remember Dana’s name either (it was Pam).

Anyways. Game Night at Pam’s was not a cute look for Kim and Kyle Richards, or as I like to think of them, Baby Jane and Blanche Hudson in the lead up to the accident that will eventually leave Kyle bound in a chair while Kim feeds her rats and writes letters to daddy. You may remember Game Night as the night when Kim hobbled in super late, took her trenta coffee cup filled with mashed up pills into the bathroom, and proceeded to do her hair and makeup, with Kyle intermittently popping in to both tell her she’s being weird, and to be weird.

You may also remember Game Night as the night when Brandi accused Kim of doing crystal meth in the bathroom, and then Kim and Kyle hid Brandi’s crutches so she couldn’t stand up or walk. I’m citing this as exhibit 1 in Kim’s latent Baby Jane persona, just waiting in the wings.

Point is, Kim and Kyle were pacing the room like lunatics, pointing their withered fingers at Brandi, and calling her such chill things as “slut pig”. Poor Brandi, NEW TO THIS GROUP, and being called a pig by the witch character from that Nightmare VHS board game from the 90s:

youtube

(shit, do you guys remember that?)

Brandi, with the fearlessness of an Amazon warrior queen, looked up, unblinking, unflinching, and calmly said, “Bring it, bitch, color me slut”. And Kim and Kyle were shook. I live for anyone who shakes Kyle.

I also really loved when Lisa Vanderpump demanded an olive branch from her, and Brandi legit yanked a branch off of one of LVP’s trees, handed it to her, and then said, “what do you want me to do, eat your pussy?” Iconic.

Admittedly, Brandi lost me a little by Season 5, when she developed a super co-dependent relationship with Kim, where they each made it a fun hobby to enable the other’s worst behaviour. Brandi decided she was gonna replace Kyle, which like, unless you’ve endured years of Big Kathy pushing you into show biz and gold digging bad marriages, then no, you can’t. You don’t have the range.

But i was intrigued nonetheless, eager enough to dig into Brandi’s second book, which I read out of chronological order for the very academic reason that it was available first at the library.

And it started off pretty strong. Brandi lovingly told us about the HPV her cheating trash ass ex husband gave her, called Leann Rimes a cunt, shaded her album sales, blamed Adrienne Maloof for her own shitty marriage, and called bullshit on the concept of scorned ex wives. Overall, great shit. Loved it. I was like yesssssss preach through a lot of it.

Then Brandi delved into her dating advice, and girl, she was feeling her Carrie Bradshaw oats at every turn. I could basically picture her, smoking at her window, wearing a tutu, and gazing forlornly at the Chair that Aiden Made™. Which, like, all the Aiden apologists in the world need to get over. Aiden was trash. He tried to force Carrie into a boring ass engagement, pulling her away from interesting parties with porn producers, so she could like, watch him eat fried chicken in his gross underwear at 10pm????

The only good thing Aiden ever did was keep Carrie home when she could have been out making comments like this to her friends. A real service to her friends, who had to pretend to laugh at her idiotic jokes because she always got them tickets to cool stuff.

Aaaaanyways. Brandi Glanville is no Carrie Bradshaw, and if she were, I’d really prefer if she’d been the Carrie Bradshaw whose computer crashes before she learns how to backup her writing.

Drinking and Dating is a combination of bad dating advice, very personal child custody beef with her ex husband (yeah, I know his name, I just don’t care enough to type it, he sucks), and blind items about the “celebrities” she’s banged.

Apparently, she wanted to list these celebrities by name, and her publishers wouldn’t let her, for fear of being sued. And honestly, Brandi being sued is not a saga I want to watch. She was personally outraged enough when her Celebrity Big Brother alliance member Keshia Knight wanted to leave the house in order to BREASTFEED HER INFANT, so I don’t wanna know how ugly Brandi gets when she’s got, like, actual problems.

So, first things first, here’s some bad dating advice from Brandi Glanville:

pick up guys at Home Depot! Apparently, it is filled with “manly men” who want to turn women into housewives. If you roam the electrical aisle, you can “have your pick of Home Depot’s most eligible bachelors”. I hate this so much, I can’t even fully articulate it. This is by far the worst dating advice I have ever heard, and I read Class with the Countess.

If a guy has a criminal record, but also a private jet, only the latter fact is important. Like, if the assault charges and restraining order have been dropped, and he tells you his ex girlfriend was batshit crazy, it’s safe to assume everything’s kosher here, and you can proceed to fly around on his jet, where no one can hear you scream.

dump a guy if his idea of an epic party is at Brendan Fraser’s condo. I AM SORRY BUT if I had the chance to party at Brendan Fraser’s condo, I would skip my own father’s funeral. Like, yeah he’s kinda fat and weird now, but if you close your eyes, imagine him at his peak, and make him say “George love Ursula”, you could probably still come while he lazily rails you. And you owe it to your thirsty 1997 self.

But, I guess if you’re at a point in your life where relationship advice from Brandi Glanville seems appealing, it’s too late for me to reach you. Have fun at Home Depot.

I’m skipping the parts about whether Brandi’s trash ass ex husband is boycotting her relationship with her children by not letting them bring nice clothes to her house and whatever else. Cause it’s too dark, and I’m not here to contribute to the psychotic breaks any real housewives children may have when they start comprehending their parents’ exploits.

What I will talk about is the series of dating stories Brandi “coyly” relates, using cute little pseudonyms for her bang buddies. Yeah, you could comb through the 2010-2011 NBA season team roster stats to figure out who the 6′11″ suitor was, but like, who cares honestly? If it wasn’t even interesting enough for the paps, it’s not interesting enough to sleuth for.

The only one that caught my attention really, was the mid 90s TV star who was out with his more conventionally attractive co-star at the time. I do believe this to be David Schwimmer and Matt LeBlanc, so do with that what you will. (But I will say that if I had to fuck anyone from the core Friends group, it would be Ross. If we’re going outside the core group, it’s gotta be Paolo for some of that patented “meaningless animal sex”.)

Overall, this book was a fucking labor to get through; it was rough. I downloaded the audiobook so that I could listen to it while walking to work and on the treadmill, and yeah, that kinda made it easier to digest, but it also meant I had to listen to Brandi’s dog whistle of a voice for several hours.

I can’t decide what was more irritating about this book, the 7,000 hashtags used throughout, or the mind-numbing minutia of things like what grocery store Brandi prefers and why. (PS, remember when Ramona Singer thought minutia was a Yiddish word, and was probably visualizing it spelled “menusha”? Bless.)

Given the choice, I’d rather go to the Van Kempens’ housewarming party, where they didn’t serve food even though it was at 8pm, than read another chapter of Brandi’s tales.

Quick Stats:

Pages: 242

Did it need to be that many pages?: Ugh, absolutely not. There were times I zoned out during the audiobook, or just got up to pee and stopped listening for a few minutes, and I feel I did not miss anything.

Did it change my mind about the housewife?: Honestly, it made me hate her more, but that could be because listening to Brandi Glanville’s voice for several hours straight is a form of torture used at Guantanamo.

Real-ass book rating: 📖/5. This book was awful. It was so terrible. It had no structure, and was just a series of long, unedited, pointless stories, punctuated with bad hashtags.

Junk food book rating: 💎/5. Idk, like if you wanna hear about how Brandi banged an unnamed NBA player in a car in an alley, or how she had to sleep off her wine at some unnamed actor’s house because she couldn’t get her breathalyzer ignition to start in her car after she banged him, I guess the book is like somewhat amusing. But if you’ve ever listened to a middle aged woman complain about her kids’ stepmom for any length of time, you know it’s not worth it.

5 notes · View notes

trashkweeen-blog · 6 years

Text

Believe Me - Yolanda Hadid

Have you ever wanted to see pictures of a housewife’s shits? I mean, not Vicki Gunvalson’s, of course, as she does not shit. As a side note, I don’t understand why this isn’t talked about more. It’s literally my favourite thing that has ever happened on any RH episode since the beginning of time. Vicki Gunvalson does not shit. First of all, she thinks it’s gross. Second of all, her body just doesn’t do it.

The fact that Vicki Gunvalson does not ever shit is the most incredible fact I have ever learned in my life, and honestly, I think about it like at least once a week. When Vicki Gunvalson dies, her body ought to be preserved, cross-sectioned, and displayed in science museums forever. The woman who just decided it was too messy to like, get rid of the calcifying waste inside her body???? Honestly, find me a better metaphor for how Vicki lives her life.

Aaaaaaaanyways. You know who does shit? Yolanda Hadid. I know this as a full-colour, high resolution fact because Yolanda Hadid felt the need to take photos of her deformed shits in order to prove to the world that she has Lyme.

This is what we have brought upon ourselves. Or, rather, this is the price we must all pay for the sheer blessing of Lisa Rinna’s existence. That bitch came in hot, found a first season storyline and fucking ran with it (which is why she’s still around and miss Eileen Davidson is not, thank you). Yes, in order to gain Mama Rinna, we had to all experience the Munchausen arc, and now we have to look at Yolanda Hadid’s shits.

Yet somehow, in a book filled with diarrhea and ass worms (worms that lived in Yolanda’s ass, of course), the biggest piece of shit around was David Foster.

Here is a (stool) sampling of Mr. Foster’s offences:

Required Yolanda, a beautiful nymph who made him dinner every day and packed curated outfits in labeled ziplocs for his every trip, to be financially independent throughout their marriage. Just trash. If I had a wife like Yolanda, bringing me goddamn picnic baskets of lunch at work, gifting me glossy books of her bangin’ nude bod, and making me fresh lemonade from her ORCHARD, I think I’d fucking share my excessive wealth with her. The list of garbage ass husbands who encourage their wives to do the show as an exit strategy is a guest list for the seventh circle of hell.

Refused to support Yolanda’s kids from her previous marriage (you may have heard of Gigi, Bella, and Anwar?). Such fucking barf. You have a $27m house and you’re gonna be such a scrooge that you can’t support your stepchildren??????? Absolute trash of the highest order.

Got his balls in a knot when Yolanda removed her implants because they were like, idk...LEAKING INTO HER CHEST CAVITY?????

Ended his marriage ON THE PHONE like the way you break up with your grade seven boyfriend when summer comes cause you wanna be a ho at summer camp

Told Yolanda her SICK CARD was up. Because as we all know, marriage consists of counting the other person’s hardships, and tapping out at the designated threshold.

Honestly, there are more, but I cannot talk about David Foster for another second, other than to say that as a citizen of British Columbia, I rebuke thee and hereby excommunicate your trash ass from our beautiful province you horrible shit monster.

K. That’s done. Let’s talk about the ass worms.

The whole crux of the book is that this poor woman felt compelled to prove to the world that she was sick. This is a legit problem. Women are so often misdiagnosed or placated when reporting pain and chronic symptoms to doctors. It’s a thing, and it’s awful. There are so many instances throughout this book where men tell Yolanda that she’s making herself sick by working too hard, or assume that Bella is lazy because chronic fatigue isn’t real. it’s garbage, and it sucks.

Now, I get that neurological Lyme is like, a controversial diagnosis and whatever. But you know what:

What I do know is that this woman shit out a series of long worms, ass worms, worms from her ass. And I know this because she took pictures of them. So, like, yeah, she’s sick. I don’t think you can give yourself ass worms by “working too hard for your little woman body”. So, I believe you, Yolanda.

THAT BEING SAID. These rich white women have GOT to stop promoting “alternative” treatments for serious illnesses. Rinna had a point in all the Munchausen mess, which was that Yolanda was trying every possible treatment under sun all at once. Overlapping antibiotic rounds with detox centres, sketch as hell blood oxidizing in questionable Mexican alleys. And like, whatever. If no one is taking you seriously, and all you can do is get colonics and stand in industrial freezers, then sure. What else have you got?

But you know what’s not cool? Referring everyone you fucking meet to the same Lyme doctor, who diagnoses literally every person alive with Lyme, and then sends them through a suite of expensive alternative treatments by the same doctors. This is a goddamn racket, and these doctors are making a killing off all these gullible patients who think getting their dental fillings removed is gonna cure them. A lot of this gets uncomfortably close to Jenny McCarthy, anti-vax territory.

Please do not tell normal, middle class, suffering people that the answers lie in essential oils, illegal stem cell procedures, starving yourself with lemonade, and doing ayahuasca and mushrooms in Bali. This is bad advice.

Overall, this book was gross as hell and I did not enjoy reading it. It made me sad that women’s pain is so diminished that books like this exist. It made me mad that David Foster exists. It honestly made me not want to be a millionaire if it turns people into the kind of lunatics who bottle and preserve their own bodily disgustingments for research because when you’re rich, people tell you that’s acceptable behaviour. If a poor person did that, she’d be on several TLC shows and none of them good.

I truly hope that there is less diarrhea in the next book I read. Like, what an effort to get me to a point where looking at Simon Van Kempen in leather pants would be a reprieve.

Quick Stats:

Pages: 312

Did it need to be that many pages?: NOOOOOOOOO so much diarrhea.

Did it change my mind about the housewife?: Ugh. Like, not really? Who could ever dislike Yolanda?

Real-ass book rating: 📖📖/5 (It’s like, heartfelt and genuine, and kudos to Yolanda for writing through impaired brain functioning, and for being so candid, but it just kinda reads like a series of sad blog posts cobbled together with instagram screenshots.)

Junk food book rating: 💎💎/5 (like yeah, there’s some shade thrown at Kyle Richards, which I’m like, all about. But a good beach read has more shade than diarrhea.)

5 notes · View notes

trashkweeen-blog · 6 years

Text

Class with the Countess - LuAnn de Lesseps

Oh, sweet LuAnn. Where do I start?

I have a love for the Countess that I truly cannot explain. I’m struggling to think of an instance where I was ever on her side. Literally every cool thing she does is almost immediately undone by an equal or greater uncool thing.

Fucking a Jack Sparrow look alike on vacation was pretty cool. Trying to cover it up with the worst French i have ever heard come out of a French Canadian Mi’kmaw with parents from New Brunswick and Quebec was pretty uncool. I can’t really decide whether forcibly inviting herself on Bethenny’s Mexico trip that never happened, while wearing a white Armani suit, then leaving Bethenny with the bill was cool or not. I mean, it was objectively uncool, but I’m kinda here for anyone who pulls a power move on Bethenny.

She called Carole a pedophile, then couldn’t spell it to apologize over text. Like, she just can’t help herself. She’s just self-aware enough to realize the moments in which we root for her, but not quite self-aware enough to carry them through. Like the fact that she literally sends this gif to people over text when they call her out on being the worst.

You give her one inch of approval and she will use it to the worst ends. She’s at her best when she’s raw and vulnerable and decidedly un-countess, but then she’ll invariably use those cool points to do something very countess. She’s like a snake eating her own tail, and I honestly can’t figure out why I love her so much for it.

The best I can determine is that she’s like the Tony Soprano of the Real Housewives franchise. Not for obvious reasons - because our Lady Guidice wins there - but because she is such a compelling anti-hero that you kind of hate to love.

Like Tony, she’s trapped in this inescapable delusion that romanticizes a golden age she caught glimpses of during her rise. She can’t keep from referencing royalty and high society she met and idolized in her youth, skiing in Gstaad, and dining with kings. Instead of seeing the absurdity and temporariness of it all, she bought right in. She saw her trash ass husband cycle through a handful of wives before her, but thought she was bulletproof. And now she coasts on the fantasy.

And there’s hardly a moment that your sympathies don’t lie with whoever LuAnn is mistreating at any given time. You’re watching a character who can’t help but fuck up and hurt people, but who manages to mitigate our condemnation with rare moments of vulnerable confessionals.

She’s a tragic anti-hero; you can watch her get arrested while threatening to kill cops, but when she shows up in an open robe and makes you laugh, you’re like well, maybe that cop deserved it.

So, i love LuAnn, and Class with the Countess was the book I was looking forward to reviewing the most. It was published right as the second season of #RHONY was airing, so we’re in a pre-Countless era here. We’re at peak Countess, getting advice from a woman who thinks she’s locked it all down, and who has yet to bang a pirate.

I have no intention of going after low-hanging fruit here, by the way. I’m not going to count the ways that LuAnn doesn’t practice what she preaches. That’s tedious. So here’s what I learned from my “crash course in manners from New York’s favourite countess”.

The first section of the book, The Art of Being Yourself, is all about confidence, adventure, and casually moving to Milan to appear on Italian TV as a Sharon Stone impersonator? I don’t know. The first thing I truly loved about this section was LuAnn’s stated purpose for appearing on #RHONY - to expose her children to how technicians make television happen. I’m sorry, no. No, you didn’t. You absolutely did not agree to #RHONY so your kids could learn lighting and sound production. If Bravo has any footage of Victoria and Noel taking notes behind the scenes, please, I would love to see this.

As long as I’m calling bullshit (and this is, like, the last time I will), I gotta address how LuAnn insists on referring to herself as American Indian. Carole has already schooled her on the preferred nomenclature (LuAnn’s iconic response below), so I’m not touching that.

No, my beef is that the bitch is Canadian. Her father was from NEW BRUNSWICK. Sorry, countess, but I’m now claiming you. ONE OF US. ONE OF US. ONE OF US.

Anyway, here are the highlights of the Canadian Countess’ advice for being your best self:

get a hobby (Jill Zarin!), preferably tennis or cabaret singing

don’t ever brush your hair in public. who was doing this? No, you know what, probably Ramona.

when wearing Jimmy Choos, take “normal-length strides”. this is very key and very helpful. do not walk in lunges. you will never be elegant if your strides are not of normal length

have healthy gums????????

literally chew your food. I’m 100% serious, this book for real says that while in a “monastic Austrian spa”, LuAnn learned that chewing your food “thoroughly” makes it taste better. She spent the money on monastic chewing lessons so you don’t have to. stop swallowing your food whole, there’s a better way!

dramatize your look with an “eye-catching belt buckle”. i hate this so much.

The majority of this section reads like a Cosmo article that spans 82 pages, and contains about 3 pages of useful information. I’m down to hear your favourite makeup products and your go-to weekend bag staples. Why I also had to read 79 pages of LuAnn teaching me how to walk and eat like a person, as if i’m some sort of cursed beast recluse is beyond me. It is my sincere wish that we send this book to space as a reference guide for visiting aliens.

The second section - The Art of Making People Comfortable - is my favourite. It somehow covers the gamut of social scenarios from like, eating at your friend’s house, to how you should address a king when in casual conversation for the second time. I now know not to wear gloves in the presence of a king, and that you can call a queen ma’am, which, like, does not sound right.

Royal greetings aside though, this section is actually pretty legit.

Which countries air kiss, and how many kisses to give?

What are you sniffing for when the sommelier brings you a bottle of wine to taste? (cork)

How much should you tip a restroom attendant? ($1)

Which fork is the salad fork?(the leftmost one)

Where do you put your napkin when you get up from the table, but you’re coming back? (the chair)

There are checklists for dinner parties, cocktail parties, and overnight guest hosting. There are go-to dinner party menus. There are gift ideas for hostesses. There are even template diplomatic answers to awkward questions, opening lines for cocktail small talk, and conversation-enders.

This section is actually super useful and I loved it. I’m not even touching the chapter on children. I’m saving all my capacity to judge parenting advice for Alex McCord’s book.

The last section, though. Ugh. The Art of Seduction.

I guess, first of all, I wanna say that LuAnn was a way hotter model than I expected. Whenever she talks about her modelling days, I always picture something like the cover of this book - a Wal-Mart portrait studio, waist-up shot of LuAnn in a statement necklace and a sensible blouse, selling me like, grapefruit spoons, or something. But this section opens with this photo:

and she was actually such a babe! good for you, Countess!

Anyway, this section made me barf into my hands. Here are some of LuAnn’s tips for catching your man:

have the kind of sex appeal that makes strangers on vespas pinch your ass as they drive by. This is not at all a chilling example of sexual harassment, but rather aspirational, and a sign that you’re doing something right. thank you, vespa man for validating my femininity!

find a good man by playing damsel in distress at tech shops. Listen, my boyfriend is a walking tech shop, and i can tell you for 100% certain that (a) he would not recognize a damsel in distress if his life depended on it, (b) his peripheral awareness while comparing gaming keyboards is slim to none, and (c ) he wants to explain RAM to me like my ex wanted to explain football scoring to me, which is zero amount. Do not do this.

you can also find a good man in upscale men’s stores by discussing ties with them. Please do not walk alone aimlessly in clothing stores, telling men about ties. They will literally just assume you work there. I cannot fathom a scenario in which this is not weird.

Maintain the romance in your relationship by surprising your husband on his business trip by showing up dressed as a Moroccan princess in disguise????? Maybe when the Count cheated with that Ethiopian princess, he just thought it was LuAnn again?????

Keep your grooming a mystery from your husband. Apply your skin care and makeup in private, and don’t let him see you pluck your eyebrows. How large of a house do you need in order to maintain this level of mystique? What if your husband finds your secret room filled with tweezers and lotion???

Don’t try to be emotional with your man, that’s what girlfriends are for!! Men aren’t as emotional as women, so don’t burden them with your hysterics. Do like they did in olden times, and get your hysteria cured by a doctor who gives orgasms. (also, like, that’s bananas, but I do very much wish that basic health insurance still covered getting beat off by a professional for emotional release)

make friends with doormen, including those at buildings you don’t live in, because you never know when they’ll lend you a helping hand. If this isn’t the most ho tip I’ve ever heard. I love it.

Overall, this book is much like the Countess herself: there are moments of sweet, new money Molly Brown gently helping you use the right fork to keep from embarrassing yourself in front of Billy Zane.

But there are also several moments of your status-hungry mother smothering your kidneys with a girdle, and telling you to speak softly, polish your jewels and get to fucking Billy Zane.

Quick Stats:

Pages: 258

Did it need to be that many pages: good sweet god, no

Did it change my mind about the housewife? It was better than I expected, but there’s no way to change my mind about LuAnn anyway. I’m a Countess apologist for life.

Real-ass book rating: 📖📖/5

Junk food book rating: 💎💎💎/5

#rhony #real housewives #real housewives of new york #luann de lesseps

21 notes · View notes