Emchap’s Shit from the Internet 12/5/18 🍠
In a fit of pre-therapy self-improvement yesterday, I decided I was going to go to the grocery store and rent a Rug Doctor (those big red carpet cleaning vacuums). I have several area rugs in my home, which I like very much, but foot traffic and inadequate robo-vacuuming had turned the white parts of the rugs a sad sort of dingy color.
Getting one was more effort than I'd expected—the customer service worker at the local Jons had no idea what I was talking about, and the interaction to get the machine ultimately had me speaking to five separate people, none of whom had all of the things they needed to complete the interaction and none of whom were quite sure how much any of it would cost.
When I finally did get the machine and the definitely-overpriced cleaner, I could see why: the machine and the cleaning bottle were covered in a thick layer of dust that should have perhaps indicated to me that my idea was a bad one.
Undeterred, though, I called a Lyft to haul the thing home (forging on despite the dust and the fact that it weighed many times more than I'd thought). I managed to haul the stupid thing up several flights of stairs with minimal issue, even, thanks to half-remembered suitcase carries at my old gym. I re-googled how the thing worked, filled it with water from the single bucket in my house (a metal "fail pail" given to me by a long-ago high school friend/crush covered in inside jokes and a custom paint job and in retrospect a HUGELY inappropriate gift given that he had a girlfriend? memories!), and got to work. The various Youtube tutorials I'd found suggested it was pretty easy—I just needed to turn it on and walk backwards.
Only after plugging the thing in and scaring the absolute shit out of my poor cat did I learn that the reason that the Rug Doctor video tutorials always have soothing background music and narration is because Rug Doctors are LOUD AS SHIT. The reason they are LOUD AS SHIT is because they are basically a shop vac with a water sprayer attached to them.
If you are, for example, trying to get stains out of a flat-woven area rug, this presents an issue. Because all the shop vac mop demon will do is try to eat the goddamn rugs. I tried pressing them down with other furniture, or standing on them, or looking in vain for a lower setting. None worked. The rugs were immediately sucked into the machine, which refused to release them enough to push backwards. I hit the horrible point of sweaty unhappiness that happens in the middle of big physical projects that are manifestly terrible ideas, where you realize that you sort of have to keep going and you've sunk money into the whole doomed endeavor.
I mostly finished prying the rugs from the jaws of death, and had my therapy appointment, and cried a bunch. At that point, I just wanted the machine out of the house, but was confronted with the fact that I live alone and don't have a car, and so the whole thing involved carrying the very heavy stupid thing back down the stairs and into the street and putting it into a Lyft to get back to the grocery store. It was fine, and no one was harmed, and my rugs are marginally cleaner, but the entire thing left me feeling sweaty and self-pitying and frustrated.
Since I was in a grocery store (my favorite places on Earth, true story) I converted the sulking into a weird set of ill-advised grocery purchases, and nabbed a tub of what were labeled as "Mexican cookies", a flat sesame baguette from Armenia, some egg nog, and a box of the truffles my aunt used to bring to Christmas. I took a car home and ate my feelings and it was fine. I consoled myself by shaving all the pills off one of my couch's throw pillows with a sweater shaver this morning, and got my deposit back on the machine.
Shit to read
I had never read the restaurant review of the American Girl Cafe that Gawker did once upon a time and it killed me.
The past is a foreign land.
I do like when the Cut raises beauty news from other parts of the world, and this dive into a Korean beauty protest is super fascinating.
Watching Facebook go up in flames is going to be fascinating. (The watered-down version of leadership that filtered down to the undergraduate level from these institutions is absolutely vacuous poison and they deserve to be sued.)
This poem fucked me all the way up.
As did the article from the woman being heavy metal poisoned by the shells she made her beautiful art with.
I don't think you should put cheese on ramen but I loved this piece very much.
This woman did good, difficult work teaching women how to abort and pushing the police into finally prosecuting under unjust laws so they'd be overturned.
This piece on ghosting and internet reframing of actions as abusive rather than just shitty and inconsiderate is so good. Things can be uncaring and awful without being abuse, and framing it that way both diminishes actual abuse and gives assholes shield for their unkindness when it falls short of abusive.
I am lasering my chin hairs off so hopefully no one has to shave them in the future but this piece about aging and death and physical tenderness made me cry.
Joy of Cooking defeated a lying food scientist with math and it's great.
Shit to eat
Buy a milk frother/heater kettle. It will feel like a ridiculous purchase. It is. That's okay.
Carry it with you across the country.
The morning after you buy eggnog in a fit of sadness, pull out the frother.
Put in a quarter cup of egg nog, and 3/4 cup of some milk you're trying to use up from Thanksgiving.
Press the button so that it whirrs into action to heat the milk.
Make a shot of coffee in your Aeropress, or maybe on the stove if you have one of the fancy stove things, I don't know your life.
Pour the coffee into a large mug.
Add the frothed milknog.
Top with some nutmeg.
Drink fancy coffee for breakfast and feel retroactively smug about your goofy purchase.
Shit to watch
There's a new Monster Factory and it made me laugh so hard I thought I was going to puke.
Shit to buy
Seriously, the grocery list from above is pretty good.
This moto jacket just arrived from my Black Friday purchasing, it's at the same discount that it was, and petting the faux leather made me faintly hum with happiness.