Dead Letter Department #47

a list of petty grievances

There was a woman lingering in the bulk tea section at the co-op, & I was absolutely awash with certainty that she was feeling smug about no longer having to wear a mask during what used to be masked-only hours for the immune compromised, & she also somehow looked like just the kind of person who talks all the time about how tiny & dainty she is & makes a huge point of commenting on other women’s weight in the most passive aggressive way possible. Could I possibly have made this personality diagnosis in ten seconds? No, but I’m sure I’m right, & I would make it again.

It’s impossible to mail anything these days without standing in line for forty minutes with a bunch of people panicking about gift arrival times. I’m not even mailing gifts. I just want to be able to use the self-serve kiosk again to avoid all this nonsense, but the lobbies are closed after business hours now, so I went this morning but it turns out they don’t even let you use them to mail packages any more—all they can do is dispense stamps. I can also get stamps at the grocery story, so this is pointless, & I have given up mailing anything bigger than an envelope until after Jan 1.

Every store is overwhelming, constantly shouting at me about the cultural supremacy of Christmas. I don’t want the item in red and green. I don’t want to listen to the Little Drummer Boy. I don’t want it to taste like peppermint. I don’t want any holiday where there’s a whole movie about how if you don’t like the holiday, you are a monster who lives in a cave & tries to steal things, & then that’s what your co-workers call you as a nickname.

During my neighbor’s huge remodel, the side fence that divides our yards blew down. They’re planning on fixing it next year, but until then I have to put on real pants to go outside & I feel strangely on display, like a slightly panicked goldfish fish circling a bowl, whenever I’m in the backyard.

I’ve stained the bottom of several dishes with ginger turmeric tea bags.
The boxes of washed spinach don’t seem to last very long anymore, & anyways Michael Hobbes & Aubrey Gordon absolutely ruined me for pre-washed greens, so now I just get bunches of spinach which means I save five dollars but I’m spending my life standing over my sink & picking off sad wet fronds of already rotting mess off of the nice green leaves I want to eat, which is a lot of work for a salad I’m going to be mad about halfway through when I feel like I’ve been chewing for six hours.

Dental access for low income people sucks, it sucks everywhere & it sucks here specifically. There is only one clinic here that takes my insurance, who (rightfully) prioritizes people with emergency situations. You have to call & ask for openings for regular maintenance cleanings, although they cannot tell you when they might have openings, or how often you would need to call to get any information on when the openings that they may or may not ever have would be, should they exist, which it’s not clear they do. I have called any number of times & somehow feel I have even less information than when I started, which means I am still seeing my old dentist & writing a check in order to preserve my luxury bones, & it is some of the least fun money I spend.

In a related grievance, I am apparently super good at forming plaque. It’s a real skillset of mine, which is not at all the physical attribute I would have chosen for myself, & does make me feel like I have taken the inherently gross, frequently humiliating issue of having to maintain a body & somehow made it even grosser. Am I really worse at having a mouth than most people? Yes, according to the amount of time I’ve spent with my jaw jacked open & a very personable hygienist chipping away in there like an archaeologist in a tomb.

My knee is still pretty messed up, & pebble beaches are really not a good idea for my continued well-being at the moment, which means I have been deprived of proper walks by the water & am growing increasingly bereft.

There’s another appointment I’m waiting for that will require an entire decision tree of logistics & organization, not a particle of which I can do before the appointment is made, & I keep mentally ramping up to start that process & then having to pull over again, because I can’t actually do anything until I have it scheduled. If I do all the legwork beforehand & then am presented with another delay, it will be more frustration than I can currently metabolize.

Quite a few of my favorite fanfiction writers have fallen head first into some new fandoms that I find utterly unappealing, which means I may never read new work by them again unless I somehow develop intense fascinations with some media properties that couldn’t be further from my interests.

A regular week’s worth of groceries now costs what a delightful, luxurious week’s worth of groceries used to be, but without any of the delight or luxury.

When trying to move the antique & extremely dilapidated wardrobe that used to function as my closet, the entire thing came apart & the mirrored door fell out of it. If a bag of childhood stuffed animals & my ancient Sorel boots hadn’t been in the exact right spot, I would have broken my foot, but they caught the heavy piece of wood just high enough off the ground that I got away with bruising instead, which is a pretty neat little parable about the past preserving me from the injuries of the present. However, practically speaking the wardrobe itself was not salvageable, which means I now don’t have a closet & my apartment continues to be a zone of bags & boxes. Nothing makes you question your sartorial choices like having nowhere to put them.

One of my nemeses is up to their old tricks, but in fresh & infuriating ways.

It takes only a day or two to completely fuck up my productivity & thought patterns, but almost a week to reset, & that just seems wildly unfair.

My fridge, always having been pretty far towards ‘trash compactor’ on the appliance noise scale, has started to occasionally make a noise that is both so loud & so musical that for a moment I thought my neighbors were standing in their backyard all playing horns. It was uncanny to the point where I recorded it to make sure I wasn’t just experiencing some sort of sensory oddity that was exaggerating the stimulus. Playing it back, it was indeed loud as hell.

Someone stole a whole bunch of mail from somewhere, sifted it for what they could use & then dumped it in a puddle at the end of my street. I cleared up what was in my yard & adjacent roadway, but it was so damp & tattered it wasn’t really returnable to the address, & now I feel vaguely as though I am myself a mail thief because I didn’t somehow get it back to the intended donor.

Everyone’s end of year lists are coming out, which always make me feel like I have done nothing but stare, slack-jawed, just a screen saver pinging around my empty skull, for the entire twelve months previous, or surely I’d have a nice long list of accomplishments. In order to impress myself sufficiently, I’d probably have to finish three novels & a memoir by the time it chimes midnight on Dec 31, so I really ought to get back to it.

one good thing

I wasn’t sure I’d even bother with it this morning when I went in, because there’s always a pretty strong chance I’ll end up having to do education & it just seemed too early for Trans 101: Customer Service Edition. However, there wasn’t anyone else in the lobby when I got to the dentist, so I told the receptionist I have a new name, not yet legal, and was there any way to change the system to reflect that? By the time I left, she’d seamlessly gotten both the hygienist & the dentist (who I have known for 10+ years) to address me with my new name, & even the text I got about five minutes after I left, confirming my next appointment in June, was to Max. The receptionist was extremely matter-of-fact about the whole thing, which made it almost deliciously easy. How I love to not answer any follow up questions about my body when it is not relevant to the situation at hand! I hope she gets an enormous raise.

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