complaints

The Constant Churn of Pop Culture

I’ve been away from being able to watch new shows for the past 2.5 months, give or take. First my family was in Slovakia, and I didn’t want to watch a new show without them. Then I was with them, and we had other things to do than watch shows. Then Tomas headed to Fiddle Camp for a week, so we couldn’t watch without him, and then I was away for 3.5 weeks, so we couldn’t watch shows either. And now Denisa and Daniela have both been away on trips, so . . . yeah. In that amount of time,

No, Random Website, I Don’t Want to Subscribe to You

It’s a quiet day in front of your computer. You’re casually browsing the internet, minding your own business, when out of nowhere, you twitch your mouse to move up to close the tab you’re looking at. “DON’T MISS OUT ON NEW INFORMATION LIKE THIS!!!” The popup window certainly can’t be missed. You sigh, and then you go through the new routine of trying to figure out how to close that window, since each of them seems to be different. As if the websites assume if the window is harder to close, you’ll be likelier to reconsider closing it. “You know,

The End of Fun

I’m always pretty down the day after Martin Luther King Day. Why? Because it’s official: the fun season is over. Sure, there are some things still to look forward to. Groundhog Day is coming. The Oscars are at the end of next month. But those are small islands of fun in a vast empty sea of Routine. Each year, I’m ecstatic when September rolls around. It means we’re approaching my favorite stretch of the year: September to Mid-January. And each mid-January (today), I’m just . . . bummed. Because that favorite stretch is now over, and it won’t be back

The Double-Edged Sword of Social Platforms

I’m fairly present online. I write this blog every day, I keep track of what my friends are up to on Facebook and Twitter, I scan the news reports as they come out. I consider myself to be pretty “plugged in.” (Sometimes I wish I wasn’t so plugged in at all.) But one thing that I’ve noticed more and more is just how often we’re upset about things online. (And yes, I note the irony of me writing an upset post about other people being upset all the time. I’m not really upset this time. Just observing something and wanting

In Which I Pay $1,600 for Shakeology

You all know I’m on sort of a health kick (for me), right? I exercise. I don’t eat (too much) sugar. Then would it surprise you to hear that I’d recently spent $1,600 on Shakeology products? That, in fact, I’d signed up for $800 worth of Shakeology to be delivered every month? Because it certainly surprised me. I was sitting in my kitchen last night, going through the backlog of mail that had accumulated while we were away on vacation. Our LL Bean credit card statement was in there, so I dutifully opened it up and scanned it to make sure