My guilty um… guilty schadenfreude? I guess?… is watching pretentious Italian chefs who buy into that whole “our Italian cuisine is an ancient and unchanged tradition of amazing food following perfect stringent recipes” thing, serve meals to ‘uncultured’ people who are super enthusiastic about them but not in the refined cultural way that the chef expects, and then the chef has to listen to them sincerely compliment the food in ways that they (the chef) takes as a grave personal insult. This sounds incredibly niche and specific but it happens constantly and I love it every time.
It’s something about like. The pretension of their high-and-mighty fake food history, and the importance of that performance, being seen as so much more important to them than the actual purpose of their craft (making delicious food) that the fact that they are excellent at making the delicious food means nothing to them and the people enjoying said delicious food are taken as insulting them for not worshipping their bullshit cultural mythos instead. Like they did it! The food is being enjoyed! But it’s being enjoyed in the wrong way by people who they cannot get to care about their weird pretentiousness. So they’re offended and upset at what most master craftsmen would see as an unmitigated success because nobody’s letting them be all fancy and exclusive about it.
ok last thing. but what people fundamentally need to get through their heads is the significance of gaza fundraisers not being the same as like mutual aid when you’re helping someone get groceries, because it is a genocide. there is insane deliberate scarcity and prices are unmanageable, because there is nowhere nearly enough for everyone, so only people who can pay can eat. and what positioning individual fundraisers as the only course of action does is quite simply give a tiny percentage of random people whose fundraisers take off the ability to pay those prices while thousands of others can’t. and every one of those thousands of people without a fundraiser is suffering through the same inconceivably horrific reality. it is giving a few completely desperate people out of hundreds of thousands a slightly more favorable position in a horrific war economy of imposed scarcity. and what grassroots community kitchens do is try to mitigate in some small way that inconceivable hierarchy of who can pay and who can’t, by stretching ingredients as far as they can last to cook meals at large scale and give them out at no cost. and obviously people are still going to send money to their friends and families because this is hell what else are we supposed to do but please just think about that before promoting endless individual fundraisers as somehow the most ethical way to help
Operation Olive Branch has a spreadsheet dedicated to mutual aid, local distro, community kitchens, etc. in Gaza.
This is a good place to start if seeking to donate to a community resilience action. Just contact the group(s) directly to make sure they are still active. Life in Gaza and Palestine is full of uncertainty.
“No lives will be lost. Not when they’ve just begun to breathe. You have a choice to make, He of Pestilence— abandon this people for the sake of your own cowardice, or continue your life without learning alongside me what the wrath of Death looks like when called down upon the head of one man.”
maids are soooo uppity nowadays 🙄 i ask her for 100 grapes and she starts with this backtalk about “but your highness last time you ate so many grapes at once you got a tummy ache” as if she knows better than me??? when im literally a princess
um maid. could you come urgently. i need my tummy rubbed. a tummy ache again, yes. from the grapes, yes.
“faulty accelerator pedal” here means that the cheap plastic dressed to look like a fancy futuristic metal to cover up the cheap plastic pedal thats like an inch wide was cheaply glued on, so it would slip and jam itself into a cheap plastic nook below the dashboard, pinning the cheap pedal to the cheap metal so that the cheap engine would be at full power btw
she was going to call me a bitch (playful) and i saw her gears turning like no but he’s trans i need to call him the male equivalent. and then say fag and look so so surprised at the word that came out of her own mouth. it was like watching someone fail a disco elysium skill check irl
AUTHORITY- One of your sons is being annoying to the other. Make it clear that you think this is unfair.
YOU - “Stop being a b–”
REACTION SPEED [Challenging: Success] - Wait a minute.
DRAMA - Sire, the word you’re about to use is historically feminine! Applying it to your transgender child is tantamount to misgendering him.
1. [Suggestion - Legendary 14] Think of a masculine equivalent to “bitch.”
talking about impenetrable accents/dialect just reminded me. when I was in Milan a couple of years back I was staying in this little rathole hotel and I had the biggest fucking migraine, so I was like non c'è problema I’ll just go buy painkillers. of course every pharmacy on the map in a three block radius was closed, so my stupid ass just starts wandering around trying to figure out on the fly if you can get OTC from supermarkets in italy.
I walk into this little everything store (to my foreign eyes the kind of place that back home could sell you a bunch of carrots, a 6-pack of beer, pantyhose, bleach and a screwdriver set) and I see some household basics in the back but not what I need. with the confidence of a person who is only in the city for 3 days because he got bored and packed a bag and booked the cheapest flight available the week before (<= MENTAL ILLNESS), I was like no worries I know some italian, I can just ask.
I grab a bottle of water, walk up to the counter, and I’m like Ciao, hai il paracetamolo? And the guy is like che, and I’m like paracetamolo. Per la mia testa. And he’s like che?
This is where I would have said ‘aspirina’ except I can’t take aspirin for medical reasons, or 'antidolorifico’ except I don’t know that word and I’ve got no phone data for google translate and also I’m stupid. So in my fucked up leith-glasgow-italian accent I’m like paaa-ra-cetta-mollll-ooo. He’s like ohhh bene, bene, and he calls another guy out of the back and asks him to go get something. Other guy then walks out of the store into the street, and before I can be like hey, che la fuck, he comes back and hands me a huge bundle of herbs.
At this point I’m like okay this entire interaction has been a bust, but these guys have been very nice and patient and they’re both smiling happily at me because they’ve been of service, so I’m like ahh perfetto, grazie, pay them a couple of euros and leave.
EVENTUALLY I find a pharmacy that’s open, and my head is fucking killing me, and my phone still isn’t connecting, and now I have this small shrubbery poking out of my coat pocket, so I don’t even bother looking around the shelves. I just walk straight to the counter and I’m like uhh ciao, scusi. And hearing my nightmare of an accent the guy answers in english and I’m like thank christ, do you please have paracetamol. Not aspirin, I can’t take aspirin. And he’s like yeah yeah hold on, goes into the back, comes out with what I need.
Only when he comes out he gives me this look, and then he starts laughing. And then he pretends he’s not laughing and rings me up and I pay, and as I’m leaving I can see him losing it. But I don’t care, my head is going to explode, I’m going back to the rathole to close the blinds and fall comatose for four hours.
When I get back to my hotel room I take off my coat and remember the huge bouquet of herbs in my pocket. They smell amazing, and I’m like I’m pretty sure this is parsley in which case I can just get some tomatoes and mozzarella later and make it work. but since I have no idea what that interaction was, I want to make sure. I bring out my phone to get a visual reference of what parsley leaves look like, and because I was using it for google translate earlier I put 'parsley’ in the wrong box like a dope and translate it to italian.
prezzemolo
I wish I could have been the pharmacist in the moment he looked at my tired pissed off anglophone ass, heard me say 'paracetamol’ in my fucked up accent, and turned around saw what was in my pocket. I’d have lost my shit too.
Respect to the first guys who, after you left, said “what a nice bloke. He looked so tired. We can relate. Whom amongst us has NOT had a parsley-related emergency”
In a Modern AU, Firn Lambert is the social media manager for a business that Narinder runs. She also is an extremely popular influencer with large followings on countless platforms. She also has a Tumblr blog where she drops her beloved persona and posts her #raw and #unfiltered thoughts under the same username as her other accounts, but everyone thinks it’s just a parody impersonation account not owned by her.
ALT
