Emchap's Shit from the Internet 9/13/17 🍠
Y'all, tonight I had a sandwich that was life affirmingly good. There is a Vanessa's Dumpling House near my gym, and I have decided that when I go to the gym after work I can just go there for dinner, for the boring reasons that it's incredibly cheap and I benefit from routine.
Today I ordered a red bean bun and a tuna salad sandwich on a sesame pancake, and the bun was great but the sandwich, oh my god. It was tuna and that set of pickles that I associate with banh mi but is probably present in many Asian cuisines possibly? I'm not sure. But it was cilantro and carrot and jalapeño and tuna on this big wedge of sesame pancake and it was in wax paper and it was $3 and I was riding high on being told that I "move like a dream" by my class instructor and it's about to be fall and I was just over the moon about the whole situation.
And then I got home and had a video chat with my dad while I ate the bean bun and apparently for a moment he thought it was a new iPhone? So that was confusing, but it was tasty and filling and my neighbors are playing dominos outside and I can hear them and I am feeling very positively inclined towards the world right now.
Shit to read
This is an article on disordered eating and female friendship and navigating the hard intersections of those things on the Hairpin (it's still kicking along) and it is good and kind and sad.
To paraphrase Jolie Kerr, men are disgusting, get rid of them. (Men: wash yourselves. Particularly cyclists, goddamn.)
Mavis Staples talks about a whole range of things in this interview and it is just fucking phenomenal.
Because of this article on mobile homes I spent a snack break at work looking at what it would cost to buy a trailer in San Diego and am now low-key obsessed with the idea, in the way that I get about things.
Read this great/horrifying piece on fascist men's opinions on women. (WWI/II fascists, not like, the current ones. Don't read r/redpill, you don't need that.)
Glorified startup minibars can't make me egg sandwiches so what is even the point of them. (I don't have like a Close Personal Relationship with my bodega guys the way some folks do, but I do see the same set of people and I like that the same way I like seeing the same folks at the wash and fold or the fruit market; the sense of continuity is nice.)
I care less about whether someone is using Android and green bubbling than I do about whether they're using Signal (stop texting me on Signal to make date plans, assorted sundry developers and DB admins) but like I definitely do notice it and tbqh mostly communicate on Slack or FB Messenger for the Android users in my life.
Shit to eat
In a fit of self-improvement, buy an immersion blender. (For soups! It is soup season soon!)
Realize that unlike your parent's literally 20 year old immersion blender, this one comes with a little blending cup for smoothies!
Spend the previous 26 years constructing a sense of self that causes you to be in a place where you do not have smoothie ingredients at home, but you do have a solid bar.
Pour 2 oz white tequila, 1 oz cointreau, the juice of half of what should be a lime but you're going to use a lemon, a solid handful of frozen mango chunks, a few ice cubes, and some sugar (teaspoon to tablespoon, more than you think you'll need, the temperature makes it weird) into the blending cup.
Attempt to blend that shit.
When the blender doesn't start, go fetch the manual from where you placed it in the recycling because you were trying to be the sort of person who doesn't hold on to blender documentation for once.
Figure out there's a whole multi-button thing.
Blend that shit.
Pour into a glass whose rim you did not sugar or salt because you are lazy, and enjoy.
Shit to listen to
I have been listening to the Bring it On: The Musical soundtrack a lot recently, for reasons that in no way deserve going into, and I recommend this medley of songs from the soundtrack and this weird dance performance to the really good song. (My school didn't really have cheerleaders of note, and our football team lost every homecoming game for like 15 years. Actual cheerleaders scare the shit out of me because they are tiny and very strong and also I was a horse girl who did theatre tech so like I am exactly who you would assume based on that description.)
Shit to buy
This is the immersion blender I got; so far it's great.
These are giant heart-shaped hoops that say "good girl" in acrylic on one side and "bad bitch" on the other and I am in love.
I bought a Boston shaker and you should too.