things I hate that everyone loves

Paris.  It smells bad, and everything costs too much.  The most overrated city in the world.

This one Indian restaurant in my neighborhood everyone adores.   It's the only Indian restaurant I've ever run across which has next to no vegetarian options.  And weirdly it serves virtually everything in wraps. Now I have been to southern India and know what a dosa is, so I know that a "wrap" is a version of an authentic Indian dish, and if it were a dosa, I'd be fine.  But meat in a wrap?  And that's Indian food?  Get off my lawn!  Which brings us to..

Wraps.  To begin with, the word is so unappetizing.  "Wraps."  It looks and sounds like the antithesis of good food.  And it seems to stress that what is inside the food doesn't matter.  All that matters is that it's wrapped up, because you are too much of a slob to get your lunch in your facehole without it being hermetically sealed.  Also, I like to be able to see what I am eating.

Amazon.  It killed off so many independent bookstores.  It tried to go after beloved publisher Hachette by not selling Hachette's most prominent authors.  It didn't give a fuck that it was preventing authors from making sales by barring those authors from its site, when they were just innocent third parties.  And it treats its employees like slaves.  Warehouse employees faint during the summer.  They are kept under fear of firing.  Their bathroom breaks are severely limited.  I could go on and on.  In summary:  it's an evil, evil company.

The Sober Husband has been recruited by Amazon many, many times, including for really interesting and fun jobs (most notably working on their delivery-by-drones program).  We've had some conflict over this.  "I'd rather you work for online porn.  Or spam," I have said.

The mountains.  I don't want to go skiing; that's much too cold.  I'd rather be by the sea or off in a nice, toasty warm desert.  It puts a strain on my poor car to heave us up some giant peak, only to have to turn around and come back down to a more sensible level.

Tomatoes.  Why are they in everything?  Why is it assumed that vegetarians live off tomatoes?  I tried some online eating program where they give you recipes and shopping lists so you can eat healthy but fabulous diet foods, and every single last meal was crammed with tomatoes.  Tomato salad, tomato flatbreads, stuffed tomatoes, chopped tomatoes, grilled tomatoes, pureed tomatoes.  One of my favorite cookbooks, a seasonal menus book by my beloved Melissa Clark, is unusable all summer because every single fucking thing revolves around tomatoes.  Last year at Burning Man someone decided that, as a kindness, they'd make dinner for those of us working on building our theme camp, and the vegetarian option was spaghetti in tomato sauce with chopped up tomatoes all over it.  And then the only topic of conversation amongst everyone during the whole meal was how weird it is that the Drunken Housewife doesn't eat tomatoes, did you ever hear of anyone who didn't like tomatoes, why doesn't she like tomatoes?, surely she would like the tomatoes if she only ate them, everyone loves tomatoes, tomatoes are the best thing in the world, it must suck to be her, god, what a picky eater. And then the next day everyone wondered what the hell was up when I snapped and said, "I don't want to hear ANOTHER WORD about how I don't like tomatoes.  Seriously." In summary, tomatoes are loathsome, oozing their nasty little seeds everywhere.

more than anything in the world

I love camping in the desert, and the children frankly think that is one of the more inexplicable and idiotic things about their mother.  Today in the car Lola asked me again to explain why I like being in the desert.  I struggled to describe the desolate majesty, the weird beauty, and among other things, I said that because there aren't trees, you can see farther.

That right there to Lola was the matter in a nutshell.  "As you know, I love trees."  She grew pensive.  "I love trees more than anything in the world, except a bunch of things."

street closures and the jaded residents

For a couple of weeks there have been some ominous signs posted, stating that parking will be forbidden on much of our block for a five day period.  The five specified dates of forbidden parking passed by without incident.

Then today suddenly, three or four days after the permits for blocking off parking had expired, I drove home to find to my displeasure that our street was closed.  "Dammit, Lola," I said, "what is going on?"  I parked a block away, complaining about having to shlep my groceries and Lola's backback.  "It's a good thing I was lazy at the grocery store and didn't feel like doing much shopping," I observed to Lola.

"What if we'd had a mattress delivered?" said Lola.  "Two years ago we had a mattress delivered.  What if we had waited until today?"

We shlepped our things home, discussing this outrage all the while.  No parking signs do not mean a street is going to be closed off, just that you can't park there, and it seemed wrong to us that our street was barred to us.  As we were approaching our house, my next door neighbor's sleek Porsche roared through.  "Hey!  Brad drove through the cones," I said.  My neighbor emerged from his car.  

"How'd you get through," I said admiringly.  "I couldn't fit my Mini through those cones."

"I just drove over them," said my normally mild-mannered neighbor.  "I've just had it with these street closures.  It's always something.  I say fuck it!"  There was a pause.  Lola and I had never heard this neighbor swear before.  

"I'm too well-behaved," I mourned.  Brad's defiance seemed admirable next to my mealy-mouthed obedience to authority.

"What the hell are they doing, anyway?" Brad continued.  "Is that the water department?"

We all regarded the giant excavation in the center of our street, just a few feet from my house.  

"Didn't they just replace all of that a few years ago?"  We three agreed that only a couple of years ago, the city had torn up our entire street and replaced all the water pipes.

"How can they just close our street?" I complained.  "I feel like they should send us a letter, give us some notice.  I could have had a piano delivered today.  I have had a piano delivered before.  Or I could have had a cocktail party today."

"Listen to you!" said Brad.

"I have had cocktail parties before," I said defensively.

"You sound like you're from Atherton!  Cocktail party! "  He paused.  "Come to think of it, if we were in Atherton, I bet they would have told us they were closing the street."

things said in our home

Me, to Lola:  "If after you move out and you come by to visit and you find my corpse partially eaten by cats, don't be mad at them.  Tell them you're sorry and get them some nice canned food."

Lola nodded in agreement.  "It's not like you're using your body, after you're dead."