I absolutely hate the word “blog”

No, not the cheesy Shakira album. I mean actual, paid laundry service.

See, we have assigned time slots in our building to do laundry in the shared, coin-op laundry room. And lately, some inconsiderate neighbors have been stealing our time slot, despite the fact that we repeatedly leave increasingly frustrated-yet-still-begrudgingly-polite notes about it. (At first, we figured it couldn’t possibly be the same people over and over again, and that it must just be new-ish tenants who didn’t realize there was a schedule. But then, our caretaker informed us that it’s the same assholes over and over again, so now we’re in full combat mode.)

Needless to say, the fact that they’d thwarted our FOUR most recent attempts to do laundry had left us with quite the backup. So I caved, and we looked into getting professional laundry service. And can I just tell you, MY GOD IS IT WORTH IT.

For a mere $0.95/pound, Russell will come by your place, pick up all your dirty things, wash them according to your specifications with your choice of products, and return them within a day clean and dry and nicely folded and bagged. You don’t even have to drop it off or pick it up. He says his rates may go up soon, but considering that we did at least four loads worth for $35, I’m not too freaked out about it.

Don’t get me wrong — this is a major splurge for us, so it will probably never become our principal form of laundry-doing (at least not unless we’re making six figures each). And now that we know we have the building’s proactive caretaker in our court, we’ll probably continue to do battle with our neighbors until we win. (Next week: Me sitting in the laundry room reading, waiting until they show up so I can confront them in person. Fun, fun.) But still — this was a very welcome help-in-a-pinch option, and I plan on having Russell come take care of our excess sheets and towels again the next time we have houseguests!

OH MY GOD. I am SO FRUSTRATED with security questions lately! Guess that’s my fault for doing my banking online, but holy crap. This last round, I literally DID NOT KNOW THE ANSWER to any of the available remaining questions for my FIFTH required security thingamabob. So what did I have to do? MAKE UP an answer, and store it in a Notepad file called “Security Questions”, because I will FORGET otherwise and my account will be locked down due to suspected theft. Again. Awesome. Nice and subtle and theft-proof, there.

I mean, I know this topic has been done before, but I’m just not done harping. My favorite is when they put completely subjective questions in there — “What’s your favorite hobby?” Well, jackass, it was stone sculpture back when I opened the account SEVEN MILLION YEARS AGO. Now I prefer World of Warcraft, and no fucking way is that the correct security answer.

Or how about, “What’s your favorite movie?” Um, it was probably The Rocky Horror Picture Show, back before I had taste, and now, it depends if you mean the public answer (Being John Malkovich) or the private one (Finding Nemo). Or whatever film du jour I’ve just seen and fallen in love with, because I AM NOT SO CLOSED-MINDED AS YOU, CHASE FINANCIAL SERVICES. YOU CAN HAVE MULTIPLE FAVORITES, IT’S OKAY. STEP OUTSIDE THE BOX. Or at least customize the box to account for things like middle school and self-censorship around snobby film students.

Or the really memory-taxing ones, that catch you on a technicality — “Where was your first job?” Um, fuck if I know? Does babysitting count, or are we talking real wages, or my first full-time job, or my first lemonade stand, or my first job where I received an actual check instead of cash but does it matter that I was getting paid under the table because I was only fifteen and couldn’t legally work for another year but they needed a Spanish teacher willing to take eight bucks an hour and I was more fluent than the older gals so all the checks had “misc. office supplies” written in the memo field? THAT DOESN’T FIT IN YOUR FORMS EITHER, ASSHAT.

Wow, I’ve been off the blogosphere for a WHILE now!  But I swear, I have a good excuse — I went to my college reunion.  (OK, that was weeks ago, but since then I’ve both gotten sick and started a new job, both of which suck up valuable blogging time.  But it all started with that college reunion.)

Bryn Mawr is a bit odd in that we don’t have an official school mascot.  But our unofficial one is the wise old owl.  (Gives ya some insight as to how we spoiled pretentious nerd-girls view ourselves, I guess.)  I’ve always kinda dug the owl mascot, though — few people who went to BMC did so for the great sports teams or Greek system.  It’s all about the academics, and our friendly little pseudo-mascot backs that up nicely.

And in recent years, the owl motif has become SUPER trendy. They’ve been all over clothing, jewelry and accessories for a while, and they’re popping up on more and more household items now. (I myself have at least two owl shirts, an owl purse, at least one pair of owl shoes, quite a bit of owl jewelry, and a pair of owl bookends.) This aviary surplus has been nice for us Bryn Mawr grads — we all wind up snatching nearly every owl-spangled item we lay eyes on, as a subtle way to pay tribute to our alma mater. (And yes, we all compared owl gear at the reunion.)

But seriously, people. This has got to stop somewhere. My last trip to Ross Dress for Less, in which I sought only sheets, led me to one of the eeriest shelf displays of all time. I mean, there is such a thing as TOO MANY OWLS. And these three aren’t even cute, they’re just vaguely avian and bug-eyed. Please take note, Housewares Department. They were better when they were just on shirts.

So I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that this is not a good thing to spot in a WOOD FURNITURE STORE.

I mean seriously, this guy wasn’t even lurking under a coffee table or anything. (S)he was strolling casually along on the wooden walkway that wound between all the different delicious, nutritious wood furniture displays.

Needless to say, we bought our bed elsewhere.

Junk mail has reached a new level. I’m kind of blown away that things like those unsolicited Val Pak coupon mailers are still out there, when pretty much everyone has a) email and b) recycling bins. But what’s really ticked me off lately is the number of junk mailers masquerading as real correspondence.

Check out the image of our address on a recent Discover Card something-or-other. The fake-handwriting font was so good it actually fooled me until I opened the envelope. And I almost NEVER read my mail anymore, except for handwritten things (and our friggin’ cable bill, because Broadstripe doesn’t even have the capacity for any sort of online billing. Sometimes you can’t even use their phone system to pay. But that’s beside the point.)

This is only one example of recent fake-writing mailers we’ve seen. And inevitably, when I tear open the envelope and figure out that it’s NOT REAL MAIL, my first emotion is infuriation. The last thing I want to do is support a company that tricked me into thinking I had some nice old-fashioned correspondence from a friend or relative (or at least a really motivated political candidate).

Rrr! It’s bad enough that you’re still sending me paper trash that I can’t even recycle easily, since it contains sensitive information that needs to be shredded. Do you really have to get my hopes up and then crush them, too? Fuck you, Discover! (And Chase, and American Express, and all you other assholes who try to trick me and occasionally succeed.) If this is some ploy to try and get me to use your cards, it’s not really working for ya. In fact, I have no idea how I’m even on your mailing list.

Lately, I’ve been getting more and more shitty fliers stuck on my windshield. And they fliers themselves are getting worse. They used to be business-card sized, and then they were postcard-sized. Now we’ve graduated to 8.5×11. It’s bad enough that I get all the junk mail I do — now I have to recycle shit from my car, too?

I know I live on an urban block, and that some things are just unavoidable when you’re in the city. But does ANY company actually benefit from this practice? Personally, I get so frustrated with soggy, wet trash being stuck on my vehicle that I wind up making a mental note to never ever contact that pest control company, or attend that reggae music festival, or whatever other form of boycotting is appropriate.

I’ve thought about putting a small sticker on my dash that says “Please don’t leave your trash/fliers here”, but I’m not sure it’d do any good. (I figure if someone’s sticking paper under every windshield on the block, they’re either paid to do so and gonna ignore me, or asshole enough to not care about my request.)

Seriously, I wish this were illegal, so I could report these companies for environmentally unfriendly marketing practices. Hm, now that I think of it, maybe there IS something out there that would deter this. Perhaps this can be a practice test for some law student pal of mine!

Whole Foods officially discontinued their awesomely durable, heavy-duty plastic bags as of Earth Day this year.

So what are they offering instead? Paper. Yep, tree-harvested, not-so-sustainable paper. Sure, I know paper bags biodegrade, but they also disintegrate in the rain and require us to chop down and process trees.*

I kept hoping they’d replace their plastic bags with alternatives like bamboo or corn, which are sustainable and biodegradable, but feel like plastic. These bags are also super-durable and don’t fall apart when wet — a major concern of mine here in Seattle, since I sometimes try to walk to the grocery store instead of driving, and I can’t always plan ahead in order to carry my canvas bags.

But the word from Whole Foods is that those alternatives are too high of a price point for Whole Foods. I could understand this in theory for a smaller organization, but Whole Foods has plenty of money with which to be more responsible. They should a) suck it up and do it anyway, since it’s not like they’re losing money in their business; and/or b) start charging customers for the bags. So friggin’ simple.

And the real kicker? The Whole Foods delis switched from paper containers to plastic shortly after the bag changeover. Yeah, take a minute to let that sink in. Now I not only can’t walk home in the rain with my groceries, but I also can’t microwave my deli dinner in its container. How’s that for green logic?

Read the rest…

Some of you Imaginary Readers may remember back to the time when my Off Culler advice column ran in the now-dead Seattle Pulse metroblog. Those were fun times, n’est-ce pas? The majority of my submissions were goofy gags sent by my well-meaning friends, though I did deal with a few more serious queries. I answered each query like I would have in a “real” advice column (where I probably wouldn’t have known the author of each submission personally), and the less silly submissions definitely shaped my opinions about how to give serious advice when it’s solicited.

Being something of a budding advice columnist, I’ve always kept an eye on big names in advice, like Dan Savage of Savage Love; the ever-changing face of Dear Prudie, currently Emily Yoffe; and Miss Manners’ Judith Martin. But the last of these three advice queens (pun intended) seems to have gone off her rocker this week.

Miss Manners ran the following submission and response in her recent column (emphasis mine):

Dear Miss Manners,
I recently was a bridesmaid in the wedding of my dear friend. It was a great time and I was so happy to be a part of their special day.

The problem is that after the wedding at the hotel bar, I drank too much and participated in some inappropriate behavior with one of the bride’s cousins in front members of her family. I do not remember anything that transpired, and I am mortified. When I realized she was upset and “disappointed” I accepted responsibility and apologized.

My question is can I ever regain her respect and how do I interact with her and her family now that I have made a fool of myself?

***
Gentle Reader,
It’s a good thing you accepted responsibility, since everyone saw you. Makes it hard to blame it on poor staff work.

But evidently, your apology was insufficient. Perhaps it was of the level that would befit a one-time lapse at an ordinary party. For a wedding, you need something more.

Miss Manners suggests confiding in your friend that you are not just humiliated, but terrified that you might have a serious drinking problem and have foresworn liquor (at least in her and her family’s presence). She will be forced to switch from indignation to sympathy, which is at least a step back to friendship.

Wow. Seriously? The solution to having behaved like a drunken ass is to LIE to your friend, and FAKE a drinking problem, in order to MANIPULATE her into feeling sorry for you instead of justifiably annoyed?

Manners sure have come a long way since I was a kid. If this is the direction our etiquette is taking, I plan on raising raising my gaggle manner-free when my turn comes.