Archive for the 'Love/Hate' Category

Nov 01 2002

Love/hate: Life Soundtrack

Published by under Love/Hate

Love/hate for Friday, November 1, 2002
Life Soundtrack

You already know that I’m pretty much impossible to please. I love living in a city, but I don’t want it to be too noisy. The country is way too quiet. When I’m up at my brother’s and sister’s, it’s so quiet that it actually presses on your ears, and besides that, you can’t get a cab. So San Francisco is the perfect city for me. It’s really a small town that looks like a city, only much more cosmopolitan. It’s nowhere near as crazy and loud as New York or Rome. It’s just right, and it’s even been easier to get a cab here since the economy tanked (before that, it was one of my few complaints about this beautiful place).

I like my apartment to be an oasis of luxe, calme, et volupt&eacute, to quote Matisse. But when John’s home, the calme part pretty much goes out the window. He seems to need a soundtrack to his every movement, as if he were accompanying his own silent movie. When he sits down, he sighs. He’s always tripping over the cats, or bumping into things or dropping them, which calls for swearing (often creative and amusing) or other miscellaneous noises which are beyond my limited powers of description. He coughs a fair bit, in an extremely uninhibited way, and has a habit of clearing his throat which I truly believe is unconscious.

But the worst. The worst is the snoring (though to be fair, other people can be much louder than he is). If I could change one thing about my beloved husband of almost 12 years, it would be the snoring. I know it should be that he’d quit smoking, but since he does that outside and cleans up immediately afterwards, it doesn’t really affect me on a day-to-day basis, unlike the snoring, which affects me on pretty much a night-to-night basis. (Yes, I realize that this puts me out of the running for the Wife of the Year contest, but I already failed the talent portion anyway.) I am usually able to get him to turn over, which almost always ceases the snoring hostilities, but it still annoys me. I mean, he’s sleeping so much that it’s loud, which in turn is depriving Me of sleep.

And here’s the most enduring mystery about snoring: one’s ears are generally located quite near one’s nose and mouth, whence the snores issue. I mean, the snore is right there next to the snorer’s ears, yet it rarely, if ever, wakes him up. Can anyone explain that one?

One response so far

Oct 11 2002

Love/hate: Wine

Published by under Love/Hate

Love/hate for Friday, October 11, 2002
Wine

It’s especially fitting that today’s “Love/hate” is about wine, because I’m going out for a glass or dozen of wine tonight with my friend Kathleen, who is gracing San Francisco with her presence this week, to the detriment and despair of Detroit, her hometown. How’s that for alliteration?

I guess it’s not surprising that I love champagne, since I’m the fizzy side of this blog. I am also a hopeless luxury addict. I tried to like beer when I was poor, in college, and a luxe-addict wannabe, but it never took. I remain, and always will be, a champagne kind of girl.

Not that I limit myself to champagne in matters of wine. I can always be found buying Beaujolais Nouveau on the third Thursday in November, for example. And I have happy memories of visiting the major wine-producing areas of France and Italy, where you can taste and buy wine not shipped outside the country. If I’m at a restaurant, I enjoy reading the wine list, whether or not I’m actually planning to drink any. It’s something like reading recipes, in the sense that I “taste” them in my mind as I read.

The study of wine is surely one of the more pleasant forms of homework, whether you travel abroad or just through your local wine merchant’s. Drinking wine makes any occasional more special, and certainly more convivial, with its “ability to banish care”, as Thomas Jefferson observed. It complements food like no other beverage, and is now considered to be good for one’s health, though you shouldn’t let that deter you. It’s a pleasure to be savored in good company.

3 responses so far

Aug 30 2002

Love/hate: Shaving

Published by under Love/Hate,Random Thoughts

Love/hate for Friday, August 30, 2002
Shaving

Shaving – I’m all for it. When I shave my legs (and I’m sorry to say that when a girl has been married as long as I have, it’s no longer the daily ritual that it was when I was single, the idea being, I suppose, that one’s husband is more forgiving of imperfections than potential suitors may potentially be), they feel like dolphins, and I love that. I’m also a big believer in pit shaving, for both aesthetic and olfactory reasons. Crunchy granola girls and Europeans be damned. Fuzzy arm pits would ruin the look of the most exquisite strapless gown or lacy bra. And anyway, I generally prefer artifice to nature.

Perhaps familiarity also breeds contempt for men, too, as far as grooming goes, because I’ll tell you, I’m lucky if John shaves twice a week. Even though he mostly feels that the entire world should be arranged to suit my convenience. Even though he knows I love it when he has just shaved and his face is all smooth, instead of doing a convincing cactus imitation which in turn wreaks havoc with my delicate porcelain complexion.

So shaving your face must be wore than shaving your legs and pits, since all men seem to hate it. But as usual, we women have more to do and bitch about it less. The ones who have the most work are definitely transvestites. They have all the boy shaving, and all the girl shaving, plus make-up, wigs, and other et ceteras to deal with. It must take them ages to get ready, especially since they are really guys. In my experience, girls always have to wait on the guys to get ready. But that’s another story.

One response so far

Aug 23 2002

Love/hate: Clothing variety

Published by under Love/Hate,Random Thoughts

Love/hate for Friday, August 23, 2002
Clothing variety

This may be one of the classic male/female situations that lead to clich&eacutes: women feel that one can never have too many clothes, and men feel the opposite. Women can stand in front of a closet stuffed with clothes and say with all seriousness, “I have nothing to wear!”, a remark greeted by her husband/boyfriend with utter disbelief. I mean, look at all those clothes in there!, he thinks (though if he is wise, he keeps this observation to himself). But what he doesn’t understand is that once you have eliminated:

– things that are too big (but which you might have altered, so you’re keeping them)

– things that are too small (but which you might lose enough weight to fit into, so you’re keeping them)

– things that need repairs which you haven’t gotten around to doing yet, but you will, so you’re keeping them

– things that are too heavy or too light for the weather du jour

– things that are too formal or not formal enough for the occasion du jour

– things that no longer make you feel good when you wear them (i.e., have lost their fun factor)

there really is nothing left in the closet to wear.

The same thing applies to shoes. At a working lunch, one of my colleagues said that when she and her husband were in Italy on vacation, she had bought 5 or 6 pairs of shoes. Her husband gazed at the new shoes with bemusement and said, “But honey, you already have a pair of black shoes.” All the women in the group laughed at the utter absurdity of his remark. All the men looked at each other in bemusement. Men think one pair of black shoes, a pair of sneakers, and possibly a pair of brown shoes is all you need. They don’t realize that women need shoes with heels of varying heights, some suede, some leather, pumps, mules, boots…the possibilities are endless, and if you don’t have the right shoes, it ruins your whole outfit.

You can tell that guys wrote Star Trek and other shows set in the future, because the first thing they do is get rid of fashion completely and make everyone wear stretchy uniforms. If the future is like that, or the most recent remakes of The Time Machine, where everyone lives in sconces and has the most deplorable rags to wear (and no jewelry), or Planet of the Apes, then no thanks. I would have a hard time living in such aesthetically unpleasing times. On the other hand, no-one has ever predicted the future with any real accuracy, so I can take comfort in that.

2 responses so far