Things I Love and Things I Hate

I've been thinking about stuff lately that I absolutely love, and then also things that drive me batty and I seriously hate. So, because it's in my head, that means it gets to be shared with you. Here we go!

Things I hate:

The terms "Wifey" and "Hubby". Not only does referring to your spouse as your "hubby" or "wifey" conjure up images like the one to the left here, it also sounds completely demeaning. Why do we feel the need to cutesify (it's a word if I say it's a word!) everything? How lazy have we become that the words "husband" and "wife" are too cumbersome to put into regular speech? I also feel like constantly referring to your spouse as your "wifey" or "hubby" to friends who know that person, and who know that the person has an actual name is sort of taking away the person's actual identity and replacing it with one of possession. I know that's not how it's intended, but it's kind of how it sounds. Like, if I'm talking to friends and I am referring to Jason I just call him Jason. I don't say "my husband" as in "I'd love to have more time to spend with my husband". Nope, I just say "I'd love to have more time to spend with Jason" because he is my spouse, yes, but that is not the entirety of who he is and he does have an identity outside of me so why should I define him by the fact that we're married? Sure, if I'm talking to someone who doesn't know Jason, I refer to him as my husband, because if I just dropped the name into the conversation, that person might get confused, but in general, he's Jason. And, in general when he talks about me I'm Becky, not "his wife". Sometimes I think people who drop words like "wifey" and "hubby" into conversations are just trying to emphasize the fact that they have a spouse, which I think is silly.

I also hate Wall Street. Not the actual street, of course, because I'm sure the concrete never did anything to me, but the actual stock market pisses me off. There is no rhyme or reason to what happens with it, and people hear "The economy is bad" so they sell their stock and make the economy worse. Fabulous! Thank you so much investment banker man! I just think that if we weren't so worked up over how bad things are, they would stop being bad. People hear that money is tight, so they don't spend because they're afraid they'll lose their jobs, but because we're a nation of service industries and manufacture very little on our own soil, the minute people stop spending, they lose their jobs. So, by not spending because you're afraid you'll lose your job, you then cause companies to lose money and uhh....you lose your job. Maybe what everyone should do is chill the hell out and go about their lives as normal for a few weeks and see where that gets us. I also say we should ignore Wall Street because those jackasses are the people who got us into this mess in the first place, so why on Earth are we listening to them about anything? They just want to make a buck so they can go on their elaborate vacations and own six houses.

Now, for some things that I love!
Whole Foods. Yes folks, I LOVE Whole Foods. For someone who doesn't generally enjoy cooking or eating, it's weird for me to seriously love a grocery store, but I do. In my area there are tons of shopping choices, the most popular of which is probably Meijer, whose runner up would be Kroger. I don't shop at Meijer anymore, because half of the time we'd end up getting produce that was on the verge of going bad, and for the longest time they didn't carry any humanely raised chicken, and also whenever we went there it was like Ghetto Fabulous day and Jason and I decided we had seen far too many g-strings peeking out of the tops of too many pairs of too-tight jeans on overweight girls. Plus, they put a Kroger in around the corner from our house. So, we spent a lot of time shopping there. But here's the thing, I would go shopping at Kroger and buy food and I was never excited to go home and actually cook any of it. When Jason gave up red meat a year ago, he started worrying about buying caged chicken due to the abuse, so we went to Whole Foods where they carry both barn roaming chicken, which is antibiotic free, and free range chicken. Score! Then we started going there for just about everything, because we did the math and we weren't really spending that much more per week to buy our produce and stuff from them, and in some cases they had things priced better than Kroger (Rice, for example). So, now we go to Whole Foods every Sunday with our eco-friendly tote, our yuppie grocery list and we buy tons of things that are fresh and always really delicious (produce was still iffy at Kroger, we've never had a bad experience with produce from Whole Foods) and I line it all up on the conveyer belt and get seriously excited to go home and cook. That feeling is soooo worth the extra $6 every week.

I also love when people get my obscure literary (or not so literary) references. Last week I was walking through a row of cubicles at work stirring my tea on my way back to my desk and one of my co-workers stopped at the end of the row and watched me for a second, which made me stand still and say "What?" and he said "I don't know, you just looked kind of ghostly, like all you needed was some crazy hair and a white dress" and I said "That's funny. How very Miss Havisham of me" and he didn't get it, but another co-worker did and started laughing. I love when that happens! It makes me feel like I'm in some weird epsiode of Gilmore Girls or something (Have I mentioned I LOVE Gilmore Girls?) and I think it's awesome. I made another comment a couple of weeks ago at work when someone said that I talk a lot and I said "That's how people communicate" and she said "Well there is non-verbal communication" and I said "Who do I look like? Marcel Marceau?" and she got that reference. See, you can be smart and still relatively entertaining. YAY!

So there we go, an update that has something interesting or entertaining, or at least a little bit ranty for you. Enjoy folks!