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These luncheons were mandatory Family Time: everyone had to show their faces if they were in town; the only acceptable escape clauses being death, disability, a job-related trip, or the loss of one’s job (in which case you might as well be dead).
make you want to chug a bottle of antifreeze right after.
ready to face all the orcs that
Gluttony, after all, is a Chinese art form and we’ve had millennia to perfect it.
it
I rolled my eyes. If only my mom knew how little action I was getting down south, where a secondary forest was on its way to becoming a primary one.
Why did mothers always think that if they recited random details about a person you’d never met in your life, you’d somehow magically know what they were talking about?
Problem is, you can’t just shake off centuries of cultural mind-fuckery that tell you that you are nothing but a sandworm without the benevolence and sacrificial love of your parents, who fed your worthless child self and molded you into the acceptable, if not exceptional, adult that you are, and that the only way you can ever hope to repay them is if you take the hopes and dreams your parents had for you and gently but surely stuff them down your brain hole, make them yours, and realize them, or betray your parents and burn in the special place in Chinese Hell for unfilial children while
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And that, my friends, pretty much sums up the concept of Filial Piety.
Today is Day Which Must Not Be Named (it’s no coincidence it shares the same first letter with “vomit” and “Voldemort”). Urgh.
using 80 percent of my waking hours to eke out a living just so I can enjoy what’s left of my week for the remaining 20 percent and not be homeless.
Ah, shit. Am now crotch-to-shlong with a poker-faced blond cyborg in cycling gear so tight I could see inside him. If the train makes an emergency stop I will fall pregnant. It is not the way I wish to go about it, so have placed an expensive handbag between us as a makeshift condom. Sorry, Prada.
Some people are so selfish, rubbing their happiness in other people’s faces.
“My point is, waiting around for the One is not sound investment advice, so why not try to be more transactional like me? Think Big Picture.
If you can’t beat them—join ’em.
I figure that you can only hate someone so much if you had once loved them in equal measure.”
where we stay at work way longer than necessary with no tasks to complete except to score Brownie points with our own overworked and unhappy boss.
sanguinely
furries and swingers.”
You inhaled Sweet Valley novels. You like all the slow songs from Backstreet Boys. You cry at every wedding, and not just because you’re not the one getting married. Face it—you’re a sucker for love, and that’s OK.
“Lies: always a good foundation for a relationship,”
Dastardly Overlord,”
“Fifty-five percent of these guys won’t text you beyond the first three messages because they’re just not that into you; five percent won’t make a move at all because they are too chicken shit or they want the woman to make the first move; ten percent will turn out to be liars, freaks, douchebags, socially inept, and psychos who will show themselves on my superior no-BS radar and who I will eliminate after five text lines; which leaves thirty percent worthy of navigating through, after which we will probably only find half of them deserving of our time, which leaves us with approximately three
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a bird in the hand is worth twenty-seven in the bush, every good Chinese knows that.
establishing dominance must be done in a classy, indirect, subtle way, like farting.
“Clichés exist for a reason;
Someone inside my head was banging a timpani in tandem with my heartbeat.
the enthusiastic smiley nod of a Jehovah’s Witness.
Revealing fondness for carbs and sweets is a sign of weakness.
Whatever happened to direct gladiatorial confrontation, mano a mano, the way we used to do in the noughties?
walked in with the confidence of a woman with a thigh gap.
Here’s the thing about dating without alcohol at my age: it’s pure agony. You lose the ability to lightheartedly banter as you age; instead you worry about sounding intelligent (but not in an intimidating fashion), being current without trying too hard, while being politically correct.
but I prefer it. It’s more … approachable, if that makes sense.”
‘There are only two things wrong with money: too much or too little.’
by Charles Bukowski.”
What a terrifying reality to contemplate: to have to dress like this every day, when my default work outfit, sensible light wool trousers with long-sleeved silk tops, allowed a woman in her thirties to comfortably scarf down a cream cheese bagel and two cupcakes for lunch, after which she could discreetly undo the fastening of said trousers so that the belly, thus satiated, could spread out in post-digestion bliss.
Hopped on one fantasy train after another.
clients are like Dementors: as soon as they sense a surge of youthful optimism when you should be low on morale and slaving over their files as you bemoan your life choices, they come a-calling and emailing, the soul suckers.
My bladder and kidneys are working a little too efficiently today. Hmm. But need coffee. Nearly fell asleep while peeing.
Only desperate or unfunny people use LOL in their texts.
My first piece of advice to pre-millennials in my position is this: don’t date anyone who does not remember VHS. Don’t even look in the vicinity of anyone who has mouthed the lyrics from anything by One Direction. Because if you do, if you are lured in by their flat bellies and full hairlines, you will live to regret it.
(yes, Saturdays belong to our dark overlords, too)
The thought stresses me out: what if we have nothing to say to each other and I have to stare at that face for an entire lunch? Or worse: what if I couldn’t enjoy my food because of it?
mean, you could never talk about work with him, and once the romance is gone, and you’ve already figured out each other’s political and religious beliefs, finances, and sexual history, what else is there to talk about?” Loud mastication of something small, with fragile bones. “Just think about it, him telling you how a colonoscopy went. Or how best to beat hemorrhoids.”
“Maybe I was wrong. Maybe he is the exception to the rule.” Her voice was bitter. “But you’re just like the rest: you judge him before knowing him.” “You’re not thinking straight,” I insisted,
That hit me with the force of a knee to the groin.
I was sure I would die from a brain aneurysm mid-scream.
harpy.
Well, just wait till the lawyers of the Gen Z cohort are unleased upon the world. Forgetting to capitalize will be the least of anyone’s concerns.
One of those weeks at work that makes me wish the zombie apocalypse would come already.
