wasn’t what I imagined from the start
GOOD MORNING GOOD NIGHT
I was up at 4 am as usual, after a dream where (a) Camille Grammer was being a catty bitch to me and (b) my mom had bought individually wrapped hot dog buns. In the dream I was very disapproving of this wasteful hot dog product but I did not want to say so to her face. Hooray social anxiety dreams! So now it’s mid-morning and my coffee break I suppose. I don’t know how real people with real schedules do things. I just sort of work until I want to stop and then I read or take a shower and then I work some more. I have my Spotify playlist on shuffle and my office candle burning.
I am not going to name names, but this candle company is also a registered charity that teaches at-risk women how to make candles and run the candle business (I actually forget the exact nature of the risk…prison? homelessness? I do not want to look it up). I suppose I can feel good about that but? The candle is not a great candle. The wick is way off center, the top gets all dimpled and sinkholed, the fragrance (advertised as citrus) is a bunch of nothing. I do not blame the at-risk women! Their mentors are AT RISK of losing my business though, unless they start teaching better candle-making techniques.
As long as I am complaining about things like a dusty old newspaper columnist, I will spend a moment on Thai food. I am not a Thai food expert by any means, I have not traveled there, and my main frame of reference is Chicago Thai food. Particularly mid-90s Chicago Thai food, when it seemed to be everywhere and was very cheap and good. And is this just my nostalgia talking but was pad thai, in particular, better back then? I have tried several different places recently and it just seems hard to find that particular sour/funky flavor that I remember. Pad thai “these days,” even from well-rated places, seems to be more of a pleasant and inoffensive noodle dish.
I am willing to accept any explanation that makes sense:
- I am ordering from the wrong place (tell me the right one!)
- I am elderly and my taste buds are dying
- I am misremembering/exaggerating the flavor I remember
- I am right and pad thai is being dumbed down for the masses as the lowest common denominator of Thai food
Leave your opinion in the comments oh wait I don’t have those. Emails or Twitter DMs are accepted, along with cash, cryptocurrency, or deliveries of Thai food (make it delicious please).
HE NEEDED TO DO THE MASH. FAST
This past weekend LT and I traveled to North Carolina, a state that has long been mysterious to me, to attend a wedding. It had been so long since I dressed up in any way that I had to do a dry run of my dress/shoes/jewelry etc, just to make sure all was well and the undergarments worked and so forth, and ended up having to go to Target for new tights and some cheap “gold” earrings. I normally only wear silver but the dress had a giant exposed gold zipper in the back and while the fashion world would probably tell me to BE FREE, MIX METALS; I cannot.
I was headed to the self-checkout at Target when a man sprinted past me carrying a potato masher. Carrying it somewhat aloft, in fact, like the Olympic torch. He paid for it as fast as humanly possible, did not get a bag, and was walking down the escalator trying to get the tags off before I had even scanned my first item. Was there a pot of steaming boiled potatoes waiting in the car? Was he at home, n the middle of mashing, when the handle snapped in half FUCK, GUESS I’M GOING TO TARGET? I will never know.
Anyway, North Carolina. We flew first class on a weirdly cheap upgrade and the whole plane should be like that! Look at me, I can move my arms! We had some restaurant meals and really good wedding food and went to some breweries. At one of the restaurants I became mesmerized by the pronunciation of “air fryer,” said repeatedly in conversation by the woman at the next table. I have been trying to replicate “air fryer” in this particular North Carolina way and I cannot. Maybe the same part of my tongue that has lost the ability to be pleased by modern-day Chicago pad thai is also the part that could pronounce “air fryer” in this marvelous manner.
At the North Carolina Natural Sciences Museum I learned about/saw a specimen of a new-to-me creature, the parchment tube worm. It is so disgusting!
—mimi smartypants feeds by using modified structures on her midbody segments that create mucus nets to trap food.