• Previous posts

  • Aging is for the weak, and everyone else
  • More short cuts
  • Smol Ketchups
  • What’s the opposite of green juice and deep breathing
  • Living through it all online
  • The Change
  • 18
  • Ok but ALSO:
  • Midlife POV
  • Influence and Dooce
  • Horse therapy
  • You can’t go home again
  • Obsolescence
  • Before and after
  • A cringe confession on friendship

Archives from 2002-2006

I just noticed my container of fake coffee creamer has this annoying Good to Remember! tip printed on the side: A good rule of thumb is to know how much COFFEE-MATE® you use. A single serving is one tablespoon. Use in moderation for your perfect cup.

Dude, no one who uses creamer puts in one tablespoon. If I did that I wouldn’t have my perfect cup, I’d have a slightly-less-black cup that’s full of sadness and deprivation. In fact, you can just stop creamer-shaming my lack of moderation, milk derivative packaging, because I choose NOT to know how many calories worth of partially hydrogenated cottonseed oil I’m downing each morning. In my world a creamer serving is a beefy glug-glug pour, not some pansy-ass trickle that I fussily measure into a spoon. So take your rule of thumb and jam it up your ass. SIDEWAYS.

Hooboy. Okay, it’s possible I’m feeling a little testy about my coffee requirements lately because the daylight hours are rapidly dwindling and it’s always a shiteous adjustment. Every evening I find myself thinking how grateful I am that it’s almost bedtime because wow, the kids are really kind of driving me up a wall with all their shouty indoor obnoxiousness, and then I look at the clock and what the fuck, it’s 6:34 PM. And let me tell you, that stretch between 6:34 and 8:00 does not adhere to the fundamental concepts of Newtonian time.

It’s also pitch black when I get up, which makes me feel all bleak and unsettled, like I’m getting ready to head to the airport. What used to be a perfectly reasonable time of day — even a bird-chirpingly cheery time of day — now comes with a walloping existential crisis. O, what is my purpose in this world, I think woefully, as I trudge out to the kitchen. Soon enough the sky lightens and the house comes to life and I lose that sensation of floating, disconnected, in a meaningless void of ontological insecurity, but until then? You’d better believe I’m adding as much Frankencream as I goddamned want.

I had never heard of pantry moths until a few months ago, when I started spotting them in our kitchen. Plodia interpunctella, the Indian mealmoth, is a tiny brownish-grey insect that apparently spends the entirety of its life cycle 1) fluttering around erratically in front of your face whenever you open a cabinet, and 2) reproducing at an alarming rate. These motherfuckers have resisted my every attempt to ferret out their feeding/egg-laying source, even after I threw out half our food and stored every newly purchased dry good in sealed containers, and although they succumb by repulsive handfuls to the glue traps I’ve scattered hither and yon, the invasion NEVER ENDS.

They’re annoying, the way they come bumbling out of god-knows-where in the cabinets and launch into their herky-jerky flight patterns while I swat ineffectually at the air and whine like David Spade in Tommy Boy: “Can we get any MORE moths in here??” They’re gross, because their dying revenge is to leave a giant swath of bodily squish and dark wing-dust on whatever surface you’ve swatted them against. They’re MADDENING, since I know there’s a mess of larvae somewhere, probably in something I’m currently eating.

This would be a prime opportunity for Oregon’s unpleasantly large autumn spiders to endear themselves to me by serving as backup in the Pantry Moth Wars, but all the eight-legged members of our household seem focused on honing their startle tactics. I found one on the shower wall. Another came scuttling out from underneath the utensil drawer. I was getting into bed the other night and when I pulled back the sheet and blanket, there it was: huge. Horrible. Lurking there on my side of the bed, under the covers, in flagrant violation of all that is decent and acceptable in this world.

I told you about the snakes, right? JB went a little crazy and ripped out some boards in the sunroom walls, convinced we were housing some sort of reptilian lair. (Or hive. Whatever.) Nothing emerged, but the cats continue to produce a new snake at least every other day. It’s become just another regular chore around here: take out the trash. Clean the bathroom. EVICT THE GODDAMNED SNAKE.

In conclusion … well, I don’t have a conclusion. I have moths, spiders, and snakes. The end.

← Previous Page

• My product review site:

  [Older recommendations]