Emchap's Shit from the Internet 12/1/21 🍠
Earlier this week, one of my coworkers texted me to ask if I wanted to meet up. (She’s normally elsewhere, but was in Portland on vacation, which I had suspected from her Instagram stories.) I said yes, and asked where she was staying so that we could figure out a midway point for lunch. She texted me the address and clarified that it was near the park that I am a five minute walk from. I assumed that she was staying in my general area but 15 minutes away or so.
I sent her my address and got back an exclamation and a Google Maps screenshot. It turns out that no, she was staying literally a block away from me. If it weren’t for the church near my house, you could see her place from mine.
I thought that was of course very funny, what are the odds, etc. I told my boss, thinking she’d get a kick out of it, which she did. She asked if my coworker had told me about their weird serendipity; she had not. It turns out that one of the people my friend was traveling with asked where she worked, and she told her (assuming that she wouldn’t know us, as we’re a relatively small company). The woman said she thought she knew someone who worked there, which my coworker assumed was just her misremembering some other similar-sounding company name.
But no, the woman looked up the full name of the person she thought she knew, and asked her if she knew them. And she did, because it was our boss, who lives in Denver. (Who she immediately facetimed.) It turned out that my coworker had nearly met this woman when we were in Colorado for my team offsite, and just hadn’t felt up to going out and so hadn’t had a chance to meet her in person.
The world is very funny and very small.
Shit to read
This essay on generational poverty and young motherhood made me cry. Fuck the Democratic party and their absolute failure to even pretend to do their fucking jobs to uphold federal abortion protections.
I loved this set of thoughts on ethics and machine learning.
This Charlie Warzel piece on the omicron news, to which I am entirely dead at this point, felt very true.
This piece got me to pull my rose quartz roller back out until I knocked it off the sink and cracked it in two.
Shit to eat
Peel a pound of potatoes. This is one very big potato, or two more normal sized potatoes.
Use the food processor and the big shredding disk to shred the potato. You can also use a box grater, but that shit sucks.
Take four pre-peeled shallots you have leftover from Thanksgiving, or half a big onion, or one small onion, and peel them, too. (Unless it’s the shallots, in which case, saved you a step.)
Into the shredder disk.
Toss all of that into a dish towel or a cheese cloth or a nut milk bag from that time you thought you were going to be the sort of person who makes cashew milk and squeeze it out.
In a bowl, mix a quarter cup flour, teaspoon baking powder, teaspoon salt, and some pepper.
Take the sack o’ shreds and wring it out again.
Toss it into the flour mix, and use your hands to coat them all.
Crack in an egg, and use your hands to mix it all together into a batter that one could fry.
Turn the stove onto medium and wait until water sizzles when it hits the pan.
Add more oil than you think you need to the pan. You can use olive if, like me, you’re dumb, or vegetable if, unlike me, you don’t want the oil to smoke. Wait for it to start shimmering, except you’re not totally sure what that means, so just start dropping individual potato shreds into the pan every few minutes and wait until they start to brown immediately.
Form the latke dough into little tiny latkes, carefully squeezed so as to not be too wet. Place each into the pan. It will take longer than you expect for them to get golden brown, but they will do so.
Flip, repeat.
Eat, with sour cream and apple sauce, and potentially chili crisp if your boyfriend brought some because he was curious and you had mentioned it. Enjoy.
(Adapted from Smitten Kitchen’s latke recipe, which is great.)
Shit to listen to
This incredibly horny tiktok song, which has been stuck in my head.
Shit to buy
These jeans from Lucy and Yak, which are now in the new size range (up to a UK 32/US 28) are on sale.
So is this jumpsuit.
And these mega-cute overalls, which I slightly regret not getting.
I just got this jacket from Uniqlo and it’s super cute in an art girl kind of way.