grrlcookery replied to your post

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grrlcookery replied to your post “sugarspiceandcursewords replied to your post “validate me” …”

Uggggghhhhhhh same. Very happy with everything except that Everything Homely Is My Business. And, like, that’s a full-time job for a housekeeper and *they* get time off so wtf? (I hope all housekeepers everywhere get paid enough to pay others to do *their* cleaning as well but ho ho flocken ho.) And it’s like, not objectivelt that much for two people to share, but it *is* a Lot for one person to deal with, and all the time, energy and emotional management that goes with

This is why I’ve gone to some fairly extreme lengths to decouple myself from it. I did the Classic Rookie Mistake with a new “heterosexual” relationship, which is when the underemployed woman, bored, decides to play at being a housewife while she’s job-hunting, and the man, if he notices, is delighted and assumes that’s one of her main hobbies and it passes into the realm of Not His Problem and somehow magically never comes back, for the rest of their relationship, across the decades, no matter what happens to their circumstances. I have seen this happen to basically every X-ennial couple I know; all of us have gone through phases of one or the other or both partners being underemployed, and when it’s their turn the women always innocently think “well I’ve got all this time! I’ll tidy up around here! won’t that be fun, to live like grown-ups for once!” NOOOOOOO GIRL DON’T DO IT. I did that a little bit in our first year, and then a bunch in our third, and like a moron a bunch more in our like fifth or whatever, and it was a terrible fucking idea I’m still living with reverberations of.

 Because here’s the other end of it: When Dude and I had been together like four or five years, somewhere in there, he went through a stint of unemployment while I was waitressing, and I’d come home from two different waitressing jobs and absent-mindedly bus the table where he had his entire day’s worth of dirty dishes, and finally I yelled at him for it and he was sorry but that has never meant he’d do his share. He never stepped up; he spent his unemployed days sitting on the couch and never did anything around the house at all. 

Finally, I had a full-on nervous breakdown at one point, and said I don’t know what we’re eating next and I’ve used up every bit of myself to keep going this long and so henceforth if it’s up to me we’re just not eating, and that was that. And it sucked, but eventually he started taking a tiny bit of initiative– but I have to resist with every bit of my attention just taking over again, because if I don’t consciously keep paying attention and making him do half, before you know it, it’s 100% my decision again. He’ll cook, he’s always been willing to cook, as long as it’s something he can look up in Joy of Cooking and follow the recipe with only basic substitutions, but he won’t plan or decide unless forced to. Even this past weekend, he said “Well, I’ll just go buy us breakfast, do you want bagels or doughnuts?” and I was like “whatever you want” because I had been 100% in charge of food for almost two weeks at that point because I’d forgotten to make him do any of it, and he was back to not being able to choose anything because it’s so much easier to always let me do it. (I knew he’d prefer bagels, but I wasn’t going to choose bagels because I knew he wanted them. It felt mean but I forced him to choose. We had bagels. It was great but I had trouble choosing what kind I wanted, which was a good sign that I really had been making too many of the decisions lately.)

For the rest of our lives, that will be how it works. I have to contribute somewhat, of course, at least to the planning because I have good ideas (and, also, in an ideal world, I do like to plan meals and cook– I do! a little! not for a living! not as my sole hobby!), and once I’ve put in a few good ideas (like, say, listing off the stuff we already have and what it was bought for, because if he has not just purchased it it no longer exists to him, this is a fine and valid way of thinking and I think this way too but somehow I am the only one who can dredge up the self-awareness to think “I know we already own things and should go see what they are because I know I’ve forgotten”) he can then riff off of that and be inspired and happy and come up with stuff of his own, and in a good week, he’ll do the cooking two or three times and I’ll do it twice and then we’ll have leftovers or eat out once or twice, and so on. But it’s very, very easy, in a slightly bad week, for him to just check out and then it’s one hundred percent my problem until I make him pay attention again.

It’s extra-pernicious because I have the problem that many women have, where my full-time work is paid much less than his. He literally makes five times what I do in an hour, and he’s salaried, and I’m not, so if I come home early with a headache or take a long lunch break to run an errand, I’m making less that day, whereas he can stay home all day if he wanted. It has never struck him that while he’s working from home he could change over the laundry or whatever, and I don’t want to ask him to, but you know if I had work from home flexibility I’d be taking little breaks for tiny household chores all the goddamn time, and we wouldn’t live like this.

Oh well. 

oopsabird: tough-girl9: I recently saw a meme on Facebook that said something along the lines...

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oopsabird:

tough-girl9:

I recently saw a meme on Facebook that said something along the lines of “how to make a millennial panic: lock them in a room with only a phone book and a rotary phone and write the instructions in cursive!” It had this smug “aha, gotcha” vibe oozing out of it, and it…just sort of made me laugh. Like, really? Really? But it also made me think…

Beyond the fact that I know how to use both a phone book and a rotary phone and can read cursive (as long as it’s not too horrifically messy), I think it was the attitude of “Oh no, we’ve got you because you couldn’t possibly figure out how to use something that’s new to you” that really made me snort. But I think that’s the key to this and similar memes that I’ve seen.

They don’t think we could figure out how to use something new to us, because they can’t do it. 

Like, if you presented a millennial with a rotary phone or a phone book and they had never, ever used one or seen one used before, I can guarantee pretty much any millennial could figure out how to use it. Because that’s what we do: we adapt. We’ve been through so many variations of technology and seen so many new forms of technology emerge that we’ve had to learn to adapt swiftly and fluidly. It’s second nature to us.

Put a boomer in a room with a smartphone, laptop, and tablet however, and well…different story.

I’m not sure if they literally don’t understand that presenting a millennial with something they haven’t encountered before would not be an obstacle and certainly not a panic-inducing one, or if they just say things like that to make themselves feel better that they couldn’t do the equivalent, or if it’s a combination of the above.

I just realized that the original meme is also, quite accidentally, basically describing the principle behind….. escape rooms.

You know, the recent popular trend in participatory entertainment in which thousands of millennials literally go out and pay money to voluntarily be locked in a room where they have to solve puzzles under a time pressure, often using antiquated or analog technology, secret codes, and mechanisms they don’t yet understand, all without using their phones/the internet. For fun.

For many of us, that’s not panic-inducing, that’s just our idea of an enjoyable Saturday night out with some friends!

Now I’m just laughing even harder.

oh my gosh this just made me think of an old joke. it’s probably a racist joke about Irishmen, actually, now that I think on it, and I’m not sure why I’ve been exposed to so many of those in my life that I have an entire like mental index file of them, but whatever. 

So the gist of it is, there’s this wealthy landowner whose best field is being all destroyed and dug up by a mole, and he pays an Irishman to catch the mole for him. (I don’t think the Irishman has to at all be Irish for this joke; you’re just supposed to assume he’s not very bright, is the punchline, I’m spoiling it here, sorry, it’s pretty stupid anyway.) 

Anyway. The Irishman finally triumphantly catches the mole, and the landowner says “well what did you do with it after?” and the Irishman says some racist nonsense syllables a la begorra and suchlike to make him seem earthy and simple, and in the end says “I gave him the worst death I could think of”, and the guy’s like well what did you do and the punchline is that the Irishman, to punish it, buried the mole alive. 

HA, she writes, in the current Internet shorthand for an eyeroll.

so that’s the above joke. Like, Millennials love escape rooms, right, so to punish one, you just– and I’m just going to stop here and let you draw any dotted lines you need to, or not, this post is not my finest work but it amused me enough to try to write it, so i’m leaving this here.

family groupchat chronicles

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So here’s a thing. When we were kids, me and my sisters, in the 80s, the conventional wisdom was that kids need to drink a lot of juice for the vitamins. Now, it’s generally accepted that it’s too much sugar and your kids should just drink water, or sometimes milk, for the calcium, but juice is just as bad as soft drinks and you really should try to keep them all to occasional treats. But no, when we were kids in the 80s, a significant portion of my mom’s very tight grocery budget went towards trying to make sure there was always juice in the house, because the nutritionists said that was important. So we often had juice from frozen concentrates, and it was often grape juice. 

This is all kind of… childhood background, at this point, but I do still remember what it tasted like, and yeah, it was just sugar, there was no nutrition in it to speak of. Still. There was one particular thing about grape juice that is important, and you youngsters who didn’t grow up drinking the stuff constantly might not be aware of it: it stains.

My older sister just texted us all a photo of her youngest daughter, after a celebratory breakfast this morning, with a special-occasion grape-juice mustache. The stuff stains so quickly that it will actually form the outline of most of a cup on a child’s face. 

“This made me think of [Middle-little],” Older Sister texted. “I don’t know why.”

I do; because by the time she and I, the older kids, can remember clearly, both of us were old enough to drink a little bit better from a cup and not stain our faces quite so much. We still did, but not as much. But M-l was an exuberant drinker.

“[Middle-little] sometimes got the whole circle onto her face,” Mom texted back. “A dot between her eyebrows too.” 

Farmsister, the youngest of us, wrote back “And remember, I drank from a bottle until I was almost in kindergarten, so I never had mustaches, but I remember the bottle being stained purple.” (She also is the only one of us ever to have cavities as a small child. She gave up her bottle in a big important ceremony Mom made up, when she was four, and she had a certificate commemorating it hung on her wall for a good chunk of our childhood, that as an adult I can now view in a rather different light. Listen sometimes kids need things.)

So yes, the most fashion-conscious and glamorous of my sisters, deep down, is most clearly remembered by us for her fabulous grape juice mustaches. She has not yet commented on this groupchat.