I hate the summer. I hate it for so many reasons. The main reason in the heat, but I also hate allergies, bugs, and humidity. Last night at ten or so, it was 89 degrees, ‘feels like’ 103. At the peak of the heat, it was 107 ‘feels like’ 118. Right now, it’s 95 ‘feels like’ 105. We get up to the hundreds once or twice a summer, but this is unreal. I get that the heat index wasn’t faithfully tracked even a decade ago, but this is still hotter than we normally get for a prolonged period of time.
The thing is, though, at a certain point, it just doesn’t matter. Such as when it’s really cold, -20 verrsus -40 doesn’t really matter. The body only feels up to a certain point and then…look. It’s like the bell curve. You have the norm and then most of the deviation is near the norm. Then, as you get farther out, the deviations are much less.
I am on the fringes of those deviations. When my brother asks my opinion on some marketing thing, he always prefaces it with, “I know this won’t work with you, but would it work on normal people?” I don’t take offense because I am most emphatically not normal and normal marketing does not work on me. I don’t care about being in or keeping up with the Joneses. I don’t have FOMO for the most part, and i am not loyal to any brand.
There are brands I like, of course, such as Logitech for tech accessories, but if the quality went down, I would change to something else. Media-wise, I will always buy a FromSoft game on release (maybe even pre-order!), but that’s because they are quality games that I love. Armored Core VI Fires of Rubicon is coming out on Friday and while big mechs are not my thing, I am buying it because it’s FromSoft.
I am very much a function over form kind of person. I want something to work. I’m sure there are things that get by me because everyone has their weak point, but in general, I am impervious to marketing. Here’s the reason why. I need things to be scent/perfume/allergen-free. So I’m going to get the detergeant/soap that is clean no matter what. I don’t care about the brand–I jsut need it to be clean.
Same with food. I can’t ea’t gluten or dairy, so those foods are completely off my radar. Then there’s onion and garlic. I can have a bit, but not much. This is tragic as an Asian person. At this point in my life, though, I don’t even notice it any longer. I automatically scan for anything I can’t eat and place it in the ‘not for me’ category. Then I don’ tthink about it any longer.
When my parents were last here, they could not grasp what I could and couldn’t eat. Are eggs dairy? No, Mom, they are not dairy. Why aren’t you eating the moon cake? Don’t you like it? I can’t eat it, Dad. It’s got gluten in it. Repeat ad nauseam. My father in particular seemed to think it was related to my medical crisis. He kept asking me when the doctor said I could ‘get back to normal’.
The funny thing is that I was on this same diet the last time they came here before the pandemic. It was when we went to Malta, and I had to not eat pasta or cheese. That was difficult. But, surprisingly, they did have dairy-free milk and gluten-free bread for breakfast.
My mother wanted to try the dairy-free cheese I had, and the face she made when she did. I reminded her that they weren’t sppposed to be one-to-one substitutes, but she was still so disappointed. I will fully admit that in the case of chees, there really is no good substitute for the real thing. There are some that are closes–as long as you melt them and don’t eat them on their own.
There are some delicious gluten-free desserts, but again, you have to think of them as their own thing. They are not going to taste exactly the same, and it’s folly to expect them to.
I am such a weirdo that when anything comes out in pop culture, I assume that I’m not going to like it. The only thing that I’m not so out there on is music. I’m a basic bitch when it comes to music, but with weird twists here and there. I like pop in general, and then there’s indie folk music that I dig as well. Even things that were consider niche thirty years ago like the Indigo Girls are now mainstream enough.
I can tell you off the top of my head that I have a hard time convincing myself to see/read anything that is popular because I’m most likely not going to like it. I have mentioned this quite a few times, but Knives Out (the first one) really underscored this point for me. I wanted to like the movie. I really did because I love ensemble murder mysteries a la Poirot.
I saw the trailer and was highly skeptical because it was so hyper-cut, it made me slightly nauseous. I knew it was supposed to be slick, but it just felt so fakey to me. I loved the cast. It was a tour-de-force cast. Jamie Lee Curtis was fukcing amazing as was Don Johnson, Toni Colette, Chris Evans, and more. I did not like Daniel Craig’s character, but I have to say he did a good job with it because he’s one hell of an actor.
I hated the movie. I’m not going to mince words. I called it “rich people doing rich people shit” on Twitter (remember when that was a working social media site?), and I was resenting every minute I watched it. After an hour, I was convinced I had been watching it for two hours and that it was close to being over. I hadn’t and it wasn’t, and it was at best half done.
By the time the movie was over, I gave up on the whole medium. Movies, I mean.Yes, I hated it that much and was that disappointed by it. It was such a letdown because i was expecting it to be fantastic. That was part of my problem–I let the hype get to me. Rian Johnson was so precious about it, pleading with the critics not to reveal the ending–as if it was anything sepecial or shocking. I knew from the second I saw the perp that they were the perp, and I spent ninety minutes just hoping it wasn’t so. It was.
I have not seen a new movie since. I will watch Michelle Yeoh’s Oscar-winning movie soon, but I’m trying to temper my expectations. I don’t want to get Knives Outed again.