Emchap's Shit from the Internet 02/10/21 🍠
I have had a very grumbly, frustrated day for reasons that are boring and which was only mildly redeemed by a coworker having a question about the one small part of our app that I feel confident about right as I left work. The cat is loudly grooming himself next to me and hitting me with his whiskers and refusing to sit down without touching me and if I move him he screams and bites me.
And I had forgotten I hadn’t written the newsletter yet and then I tried to turn on my personal machine to do so and it took a restart and clearing the DNS cache and a bunch of fiddling with wifi to fail to figure out why it was connected to my functional wifi network without being able to load any pages until, inexplicably, I used Safari which seemed to convince Firefox to do its job.
The cat has stopped grooming himself but is instead half-hovering next to me instead of sitting down and it’s almost worse and I love my cat but I do very much wish he’d stop touching me, and I know we’re not supposed to think about anything but the next few minutes during pandemic shit but god I miss getting a break from being groomed by the tiny predator who lives in my house and won’t let me cut his nails.
I have nothing clever to say. I’m in a grumpy mood and waiting for the beans I am making to cook through and my hands are all dry from dishwashing because that is all I am ever doing after work and of course that’s fine it’s just part of being a person but man I would love to just take a break from my current life for just a little bit.
(I just went to check the beans and they are cooked through but I undersalted them badly and I burned the absolute shit out of my hand on the rice cooker steam vent by not paying attention.)
Shit to read
Unexpectedly relevant to today’s grump letter is this letter in praise of the old-school nervous breakdown. I talk constantly about how I want to sit in a bathtub full of those children’s aquabeads and just sort of be subsumed by them in a little cocoon for a while, which is coming from roughly the same place, I think.
Andy Ngo gets dunked on.
I loved this exploration of how food narratives for white people fuck up the way children of immigrants speak about their experiences with their families’ foods growing up.
Last night I read this piece about greyhound racing and the author’s late dog and just fucking sobbed.
I want a sloppy joe.
Amanda Mull doing the lord’s work talking about whether those fucking internet recipe hack videos are jokes or not.
Update on the bucatini sitch!!!
I liked this post about how to have a nice life in quarantine.
Shit to eat
Make that viral tiktok recipe with the tomatoes and the feta. I made the Smitten Kitchen version.
Fail to budget enough time (because of dishes, always the goddamn dishes) to make bread or noodles.
In a moment of inspiration, decide to eat it on tortilla chips like trash person nachos.
It’ll be pretty good.
Shit to listen to
I’ve been listening to the audio version of this D&D podcast set in NYC because that’s where we’re at in quarantine but it’s very funny and if you are going to be doing dishes for goddamn ever it’s good background noise.
Shit to buy
This resin set.
These canned cocktails. (You can get them off Drizzly on the east coast, apparently.)