I got pink eye in both eyes as a non-child. I high-fived the wrong person, and I’ve paid the price. My boyfriend was planning on visiting for a week, and the first night he arrived is when my eyes sealed shut. I don’t know if you knew this but pink eye is so contagious (how contagious is it?!) you can get it from a high-five. I’ve been doing record amounts of laundry and sanitizing, but if you ever plan on having a loved one visit you, may I recommend not getting pink eye. It tends to put a damper on things.
Passions this week include: Survivor, popsicles, and eating on my way home from the store.
What do you do when someone visits you and you have pink eye? You watch an entire season of Survivor. Nothing like seeing people eat crunchy peanut butter with a shell. Every episode someone doesn’t die, I feel immense relief. Also how do they not have pink eye? Genuinely though, no one ever tells you how valuable it is to like stuff other people like. If you like Survivor, you can basically talk to anyone, because everyone watches Survivor. They should teach this in shy people school.
Some popsicles are good, some are bad, we all know this. Red is good. Purple good. Green bad. Blue sometimes good. Brown good. Yellow good. Bomb pops awful. I got some good ones, and when the infection spread to my throat, these were good, I was grateful.
There’s just something about reaching into a grocery bag and having a little bite of something on the way home from the store. Maybe it’s a piece of dried mango, a couple of Wavy Lays, you could even pull out a string cheese if you carry your bags right. If the grocery store is a food museum, this is the postcard you buy at the gift shop. When I was a kid, I used to go to the grocery store with my mom, and we both liked getting a little snack for the drive home. Sometimes we’d split a Twix bar. Other times, it’d be chicken fingers from the hot foods section. Mmm. Memories of chicken fingers. Mmm.
And now some from the readers…
Tara: “My passion this week is soda from a fountain. Why is fountain soda so much better than cans or bottles? I recently went on an 8-hour drive, and I don’t think I could have physically gotten through the last two hours without a fountain cola from a rest stop. That medium Coke with ice felt life-changing in the moment. I should have gotten a large.”
Dan: “I've fallen back in love with Post Shredded Wheat Big Biscuit. Y'know, those shredded wheats that are the size of a wallet? They're so satisfying to break up into shaggy, dribbly, milk-sodden chunks with your spoon, and even though they're not sweet they still evoke childhood in a way by making you feel like you've become very small in the presence of these enormous cereal pieces.”
Zygy: “My passion is Oscar worthy dead people. My favorite part of The Oscars is seeing who passed away in the past year. Every dead person’s picture elicits a response: “I didn’t know they died.” “I didn’t know they were still alive.” “Who cares about that person?” “Why didn’t that actor also get 2 photos?” “How could they leave out so and so?” “Who did they have to sleep with for us to know they’re dead?” I like the split screen, they can fit extra dead people in. Every year feels like more people died than the year before. The worst part of the memoriam is when they show the singer of the dirge. I don’t care about the singer, they’re alive. When the camera slowly goes from the singer to the dead person and there’s not enough time to read who they were, I’m livid. None of this should be blamed on Jo Koy.”
If you have a passion you want to share, reply to this email with 1-2 sentences about it!
-Jo