S. Pellegrino: Wherever You Are (what about alone in bed? HUH?!?!?)

I like to watch escapist youtube videos while I’m eating. In bed. Alone. To pretend I am on a vacation, for example. And because I find TV shows and movies with plots and conflict highly stressful and too much to pay attention to when I’m trying to relax. So I watch videos about TRAVEL: trips that I will never go on, but I like the *idea* of the food that is served and the mode of transportation (cruise ships, trains, luxury VIP flight capsule-suites, Las Vegas buffet reviews, etc.). I will never go on them because I’m a bitch, of course, so the idea of being around people — stuck on a ship or plane or train or in a casino with them, half with their noses sticking out their masks or no masks at all — is a dealbreaker (on top of the lack of money, so it’s a moot point kind of but I’m enough of a bitch that I enjoy resenting people while I am taking IMAGINARY trips, so not *entirely* moot).

ANYHOO, I’ve been watching quite a few European cruise videos and this one short ad keeps popping up: an ad for S. Pellegrino (San Pellegrino sparkling water). It’s really short, but somehow after watching it half a dozen times it began to grate on my nerves. Not just because I have now seen it so many times, but also because this ad specifically represents a couple of elements that only a bonafide bitch would be in the HABIT of sneering at with irritable insecurity …

The ad has some kind of high-class Italian restaurant kind of music playing (like … a gently-strummed spanish guitar along with grapes falling from above onto another guitars strings making a festive-yet-sophisticatedly-muted plunky rhythm). The camera displays happy attractive people sitting around a big table, smiling and nodding at one another. Then this one actor I kind of recognize as being one of those elegant slender judgmental spies who thinks he can get away with espionage and embezzlement and eventually murder but isn’t young or muscular enough to play a heroic lead so he does NOT get away with murder instead even Phillip Seymour Hoffman nodding off at his fattest can put a stop to this snooty international maths-and-classical-languages-professor-turned-THEEEEEF enters the frame. You don’t know his name — god knows *I* don’t know his name even though I tried to figure out for the sake of this bitch rant — but you would recognize the thin but still elegantly salt-and-pepper hair-swoops and the know-it-all look of polite half-smirking disdain that is the guy’s signature LOOK.

He’s wearing a striped blouse with the top two buttons undone like they’ve just strolled through snootiest parts of the vineyard and are ready to dine on multisyllabic Mediterranean fare or tapas or whatever (is tapas Spain-ish or Mediterranean or is Espana part of the Mediterranean or ???) because they’ve worked up an appetite but not to a glistening sweat-level of ravenous sloppiness; his blouse is still CRISP, but not in a starchy way … in a high-quality-threads-have-stood-up-to-washing-so-as-now-to-be-quite-soft way. With the rakishly loosened collar imparting casual vineyard-strolling. I know men’s button-up shirts are not called “blouses” but fuck it man, the way the guy wears it so shapelessly, just lining his high-class privileged un-muscled healthy-svelte educated-and-wealthy-man privilege … anyway. When the camera pans away from the people at the table, this fucker is in the foreground in the lower right corner of your screen LOOKING at you, telling you how drinking this fizzy water is going to make your get-together CLASSY and upscale and exclusive and refined. He knows you don’t qualify to run in these circles, but since he is a soft-collar crook and he needs you to keep his secret yet still bow to his superior class … well, he’ll impart some wisdom to you on how to fit in: make the occasion feel rich and elegant with some of this S. Pellegrino bubble-water shit.

I don’t remember exactly what he says (even though I’ve watched it a bunch of times, all that sticks with me is the VIBE of this son-of-a-bitch), but it really rubs me the wrong way. It reminds me how much I *detested* the last part of Call Me By Your Name. Part 3: The San Clemente Syndrome. Ugh. And it all is really about not only feeling outclassed, but being an introvert which is part of why I am such a tremendous bitch (and why I am ill-suited to go on any of the vacations reported on by my favorite travel youtubers). Like … I just do not understand people prioritizing and celebrating traveling and dining together, and talking about literature and the people they know and remember that vintage and whatever-the-fuck.

I will take my S. Pellegrino in bed with my meal, where I can hear the fizzing of its bottle-green backwash fading out on my nightstand as I drift off to dreamland.

Bitch-Ass Bowl-Suction

That raging feeling when you're already pissed off that you have to do the dishes (by hand ... all the dishes I do are by hand, because I have never lived in a house with a dishwasher in my almost fifty years of life in the United States of America) ... and one of your plastic bowls gets STUCK inside another matching plastic bowl!

It would be funny to watch someone ELSE wrestling with and cursing at the obstinate thin plastic perfectly form-fitted to one of its siblings, trying to get it unstuck ... finally getting it unstuck and having soapy dishwater FLY THROUGH THE AIR and all over your shirt-front. But when it's you (okay, when it is ME, myself) it is not so fucking funny.

This is one of those menial fine-motor skill laborious tasks that do not require enough physical energy to RELIEVE some of your STEAM as it builds up pressure and more pressure and more pressure until you think you're going to blow. So you just ... BLOW. And it's all splashy and wet like some big bully in a swimming pool who won't stop "pretending" to drown you FOR FUNSIES. You are helpless. You just have to take it.

It's the kind of bullshit that makes you feel like inanimate objects are conspiring against you, fucking with you with such precision that the bowls MUST have wicked minds, or are imbued with some kind of justice engine to teach high-strung assholes LESSONS in PATIENCE (that we will never ever seem to learn, proving of course that we have seriously defective characters and are loose cannons who should never be trusted with anything breakable, let alone other human beings).

I think one of the problems is how often we underestimate household chores. We underestimate their complexity and how long they will take. We underestimate the variety of skills and strengths required to do these mundane repetitive tasks that are seriously devalued by the patriarchy. So we try to -- HAVE to -- squeeze them in between "important" work, viewing them as obstacles to completing the supposedly-more valuable work ... obstacles to being able to relax after that work is done, etc. They are these endless-feeling time-sucks that we fail to experience as intrinsically rewarding. Housework is supposed to be easy AND simple -- even a MACHINE can do it! But you know most machine dishwasher actually suck ass in my experience (albeit limited). We approach the dishes with resentment and disdain, failing to have gratitude, failing to find ways to accept the practice of cleaning up as opportunities to savor our resources, failing to acknowledge how much energy and intelligence actually is required to do a good job of keeping a clean, healthy, tidy, useful, reliable home and kitchen.

*****

I would like to wrap this up in a more polished manner, perhaps with some kind of wisdomful solution that puts my bitchiness to rest, but instead I have to just accept that doing SOME of the dishes is better than none of them. That no matter how much effort and anger I put into housework I, personally, am always going to have more shit lined up on the counter to grapple with, more crumbs on the floor, more dishwater-sopped and water-spot-stained shirts to try to patiently go through ... one. Dish. At. A time.

Pulling on the bowls when they're stuck inside each other makes it worse. You have to fucking FINESSE those bitches with a gentle side-to-side push-and-pull.

Ring-a-Ding-DING, Motherfuckers

 I think it’s fabulous – I really do – cutting down on traffic and carbon emissions and being ACTIVE and whatever-the-fuck-else by riding bicycles. I wish that the majority of people in America would stop viewing cyclists with contempt and mockery.

But come on … help us out a little. As a PEDESTRIAN we have good reason to fucking hate you two-wheeled assholes. I fucking hate you fuckers shooshing violently along on the sidewalk, for one thing, and even MORE so when you don’t even fucking bother to alert those of us that the sidewalks were MADE FOR by giving us the consideration of an audible warning that you’re zooming up behind us. DING-DING! It's JOLLY! Ring the bell! Did you not watch Mr. Fucking Rogers and learn some manners?!? It's cute, that bell! Why are you all so opposed to ringing it? I would ring one just for the pure fun of it without even needed an excuse like PROTECTING SOMEONE I'M VERY CLOSE TO CRASHING INTO FROM BODILY HARM (or even just the unpleasant feeling of being STARTLED). Do you think it makes you cool not to warn us? Like, is this supposed to impress people like you're one of those shitty waiters who refuses to write orders down because you want to demonstrate your supposedly-superior remembery-making skills?!?

Today this happened to me on a park road. I was walking doot-do-doot merrily along through the trees … kind of weaving around looking at the cedars and firs and madronas. Weaving because there were hardly any people around and I’m not paying attention to where I’m going on the smooth wide pavement so why the fuck not?

OH. Because some fucking jackasses are careening down the hill on their skinny-tired fancy-ass bikes towards me.

Fortunately my hearing is good enough that I could hear the sound of their wheels on the pavement in time, but WHY DON’T YOU FUCKING ASSHOLES SHOW SOME FUCKING CONSIDERATION FOR SOMEONE BESIDES YOURSELVES?!? LIke … a lot of people are hearing impaired. The onus of being hypervigilant should not be on people walking, it should be on YOU with the deadly hurtling meat-bags-full-of-bones on fast-as-hell fancy metal machines, you fucking skinny stringy-muscled motherfuckers. RING A FUCKING BELL to let a fucker know you’re close to mowing us down.

I wouldn’t be so mad about this particular duo of goggle-faced mofos if it weren’t such a common occurrence. So even though there was quite a bit of room today on the path (okay, really basically a bonafide road of like … a car-and-a-half wide) THIS TIME, my anger is cumulative AND I have experienced this enough to know these self-centered speed-freaks wouldn’t have let me know even if the path were 1/10 the size of today. They don’t care. They don’t care about people walking or have any concept of the extra care that should be given to people with hearing impairments, mobility issues, dizziness … whatever. Give people a wide berth and give them some fucking NOTICE before you’re whizzing by our elbows. I swear to god I fantasize about having a spike strip for bicycles specifically for teaching these cunts a lesson.

It grated on me even worse today when I had to endure these privileged shitholes headache-and-nausea-triggering flashing red tail lights as I walked behind them. It’s the middle of the fucking day and you need those on? You can afford every fucking bell and whistle for your cycling *except* the actual BELLS? It’s such a blatant show of them only caring about their OWN safety, and not the pedestrians they could knock down and cause gross bodily harm to.

And don't even get me started about skateboarders. Or even worse: BICYCLE COPS.