Slightly awkward friends and how to cope

I've taken a quick break from mocking the NRA to share some advice and ask for some back. Please help!  I have had my share of weird friends whom I am very fond of but who require special social adaptations.  I’m still not sure whether this is a universal thing, or whether I’m just enough of a weirdo myself to attract even weirder weirdos.  But I need help.  This is a want-ad for your input.  I will even give you up-front payment your advice in the form of some advice of my own to start.

First, the friends I know what to do with:

 The Space Invader Friend

Your personal space is no longer your own.  Your once-amusing friend has become like a badly-shot HDTV program—so close you can see their pores and hear their nose-hairs whistling.  But you’ve had some good times together and you don’t wish to end the friendship.

Solution: find an inanimate piece of furniture and back up around it as they talk to you, ever maintaining Face Space as they try to get closer.  Choose the furniture wisely—you must be able to back around it indefinitely, or you will be cornered!

 

On the plus side, these table-laps do count as your cardio workout for the day.

  

The Friend With Bad Breath

You genuinely like this person, but anytime they open their mouth to speak, dinosaur tear gas comes out.  Conversation, once your basis for tear-streaming laughter, has become a form of torture appropriate for Abu Ghraib.  Solution: find a head angle that is out of the blast.  Do your best to shield your nose and mouth while maintaining an expression of extreme interest .

The Friend Who Talks To Your Chest

This is the friend, or maybe the friend of a friend, who is irresistibly distracted when speaking to a woman.  You spend the evening getting increasingly irritated, but you know won't be able to avoid them.  Solution: wear helpful clothing.

And now, the most awkward friend for whom I beg, beseech, scream, for help in coping with.

 The Stinky Friend

How do you break it to someone that they are smelly?  I have no idea.  I’m soliciting advice here.  How many of us have been in the situation where your close friend/coworker/housemate /other person you must frequently interact with is extremely stinky and does not know it?  Worse, people who stink but are absolutely confident that they don’t stink yet can offend the hell out of even anti-deodorant hippies?  Or worst of all, those who have made a conscious decision that their hygiene is perfectly adequate and anyone who says otherwise is a snobby anti-environmentalist with ideas above their station?  What do you even say to them?

When I lived in Massachusetts, I had a housemate who qualified.  I should have paid attention to the alarm bells when I first met her--she was vaguely disheveled, but I thought, don’t be demanding, I can deal with disheveled.  I could qualify as disheveled 65% of the time.  Usually it indicates a person who is so BUSY! and ENTHUSIASTIC ABOUT LIFE! that they don’t always take the time to put on runway model clothing before going to the bar.  And that’s cool, and it often means we'll get along.  In this case, however, being disheveled was an indicator of zero personal hygiene whatsoever.  It quickly became clear after this girl moved in that her concept of sanitation was to glance in the mirror once a week to make sure she didn’t have peanut butter stuck to her face.  This was an actual risk, as she could not shut her mouth to chew.  Breakfast was always oatmeal, and was always carefully rearranged inside her mouth using her tongue before swallowing—at which point she would finally close her mouth.  I don't eat oatmeal anymore. 

Now again, laziness about appearance I can deal with.  I’ve explained why my hair doesn’t always look as presentable as it might.  It’s a rare occasion that I get out the mascara, let alone all the “foundation” and “toner” crap that magazines pretend I need.  (If I did use it, I'd probably look like the cast of Jersey Shore, only not as photogenic.) But this girl—let’s call her Smellody—didn’t differentiate between personal grooming and vanity.  To her, all self-care fell under the heading of egocentric narcissism, which meant that not only did she not usually bother to shower, she would look down her nose on anybody who did.  She was convinced that as long as she didn’t have visible parasites, she was doing just fine.

She knew she was way too busy to spend time on stuff like soap.

But she wasn’t doing fine.  Her odor was pervasive, sharp, and animal.  She smelled like a combination of armpit pheromones, mold, and crotch rot.  She could clear a room just by removing a jacket, and frequently did.   Her potentially lovely hair would go unbrushed for days at a time, which meant it turned into a frizzly nesting ground for nastiness and random animal parts.  Leaving aside incontinent old people (who make me feel sympathy rather than disgust anyway), she was the foulest-smelling person I’d ever met.  Worse, when she moved in, I realized it wasn’t just her body that smelled—it was her car, jackets, and entire bedroom as well.  This meant that she didn’t even have to be physically present for you to be olfactorily assaulted.  Leaving her door open would lead to a meaty, rotten aroma of dead skin cells and secretions wafting through our entire apartment, which could only be dispersed by leaving all the windows open for an hour.  It became a choice between Smellody’s body odor and being frozen to death in winter.  I tried to simply shut her door whenever I walked past, but she would obstinately leave it open and the one time I asked her to shut it, she challengingly asked, “Why?” and I didn’t have the heart to explain.

Our friends started to avoid visiting my apartment.  When she would turn up at social events (which happened whenever she heard about them, invited or not), people would find excuses to leave, making our parties very short-lived—especially since she was always the last to leave.  (She did like a party, she had that going for her.) Whispered discussions were held as to how on earth we should address this nose-assaulting problem.  Should we keep our social affairs a secret?  That would prevent new friends from joining us, and we were a welcoming bunch.  Plus we would have to have everyone on board in a mutual pact not to say a word.  Should we ask her not to come along?  Given that she'd cried in the corner of the bar for weeks the last time she'd broken up with a guy, this did not seem like a good option either.  Should we actually explain to her that she stank?  This was the mutually approved approach—but who would do it?

Naturally, eyes turned toward me as her housemate.  I shouldered the burden with an Atlas-like shrug.  After all, we were friends; how difficult could it be to subtly drop the hint if I lived with her?

Unfortunately, these efforts often ended with me thrown by her inability to pay attention to subtext.

“Smellody, I’m washing a bunch of jackets, can I throw yours in?” I would say.

“Sure, go ahead,” she would reply, continuing to stink obliviously.

Clearly I needed to be blunter.  So I upped the hint.

One day, with a big smile, I said, “Ha ha, what is that smell… oh no, Smellody, I think your shirt might have gotten into the wrong laundry pile!”

“Huh?” she replied.

Me: “You can’t smell that?  I think your shirt might be… dirty…”

Smellody: “Smell what?  It’s fine.”

And I had to slink off with my tail between my legs.

I steeled myself to try again.  Should I give her a gift basket from Body Shop?  No; she would see the use of such products as unnecessary vanity that she was far too busy to bother with.  Could I stage a “makeover night” with someone else?  Sure, but most likely Smellody would just say how all this was so hilariously beneath her and leave, or make a melodramatic fuss about how annoying it all was.  I couldn’t imagine that the lesson would stick.  So I kept on thinking, and putting off saying anything.

Then one day I realized that the armpit/crotch/meat smell had spread—it was now coming out of the bathroom as well.  I had to ask.

Me: “Smellody, can I ask you a personal question?”

Smellody: “Sure.”

Me: “When was the last time you washed your towel?”

Smellody: “I dunno, a couple of weeks ago?”

Me: speechless silence

This made me realize I was up against more than a poor shower regime.  As I understand it, body odor is produced by two factors in concert:  sweat glands in the armpits and groin producing mostly odorless but thick, nutritive gunk, and the bacteria that live on skin which enthusiastically consume said nutritive gunk. 

Yummm!  GUNK!

The resulting excreta produced by the bacteria are the source of the stink.  For most people, showering removes both gunk and bacteria.  But with Smellody, not only did she shower infrequently enough to ensure a good buildup of gunk, she was constantly re-inoculating herself with stink-bacteria every time she did shower, by drying off with a towel that might as well have been a petri dish.  Around the same time, it dawned on me that she’d lived with me for about five months and I had never once seen her wash her sheets.  So she was getting her bacterial starter culture from all over the place!

This was a major setback.  It meant that addressing her stinkiness would take way more than a simple gift of a deodorant can.  If I was going to unstinkify Smellody, I would have to convince her to change her entire hygiene regime, including teaching her about regular sheet and towel washing, explaining to her that she must shower every day, and that no, a quick application of cheap deodorant was not a sufficient substitute.  In short, I would need to be her mother.

So what did I do?  I despaired and moved out.

Suggestions welcome.

Products Endorsed by the NRA Part 2: Home Defense Hand Grenades!

Not for use by children under 5.  Otherwise, go nuts!

Is your home adequately protected?  Are you secure when you sleep at night?  Remember, anyone can fall victim to the millions of home invaders in the United States.  They’re everywhere and YOU could be next!  Get the latest in domestic protection with the NRA-Endorsed Home Defense Hand Grenades!

Remember, security cameras and alarms won't protect you from a determined invasion, and especially not from ninjas or aliens.  Security cameras don’t kill people— PEOPLE WITH FIREPOWER DO! 

These easy-to-handle, ergonomically molded grenades feature an E-Z Pull Timing Pin and monogrammed casing straight from God via the United States military.  Guaranteed stopping power for any home invader under 900 pounds! 

 Our NRA-Endorsed Home Defense Hand Grenades will not only protect your home and belongings from ninja invaders, they will blow your invaders into Self-Assembling Smithereen Artwork!  This fetching decor for your post-invasion home shows your patriotism by  depicting an American flag imprisoning your home invader!

"Yeah, that's the guy that came in here and tried to steal our shit.

Turns out he was just trick-or-treating, but hey, bonus flag art!"

Products Endorsed by the NRA Part 1: The Vapo-Matic Exploderizer Deer Cannon!

Is there a hunter in your life you know and love?  Are you unsatisfied with this pansy one-bullet-at-a-time bullshit?  Wouldn't you rather have FIREPOWER than that candy-ass "good aim" crap?  Then you need the NRA-Endorsed Vapo-Matic Exploderizer Deer Cannon!

 

 

 This is the hunting tool that ensures you will never miss, because even if you do, your prey will be flattened by the TNT-like shockwave!  No inconvenient carcass to carry home!  And remember—this weapon is protected under the United States Second Amendment of Deer Vaporization!

Next: Have you adequately protected YOUR home?

My Hair: A Saga

 

PONYTAIL!

Regularity scheduling: why?

Apologies for the repeated posts about one particular topic familiar to us all.  I am not obsessed, I swear, I just realized I was fascinated by this whole Activia movement.  No pun intended whatsoever!

Honestly, is anyone else a little perplexed by Activia, Yakult and other “pro-biotic” yogurts and their advertising?  I never knew regular bathroom habits were such a concern to the world at large.  They certainly never were even on the radar for me, until those commercials popped up.  When I have to poop, I go to the bathroom and poop.  The only variation to this is when, occasionally, I eat something that disagrees with me and I RUN to the bathroom and REALLY poop.  Never had it occurred to me that “regularity” might be something to be valued—I never used to notice my guts as existing except when I was either putting something in or getting something out.

This is how I know it's time to poop.

This is NOT how I poop.

When did regularity become such a concern for us all?  I mean, I get the fiber thing and the Immodium thing.  I understand that texture is important for bottom comfort. But what makes regularity important?  Am I irregular because I forget to schedule in a poop for 10 a.m. every day?  Should I care?  Does this make me somehow deficient?

Do you do this?

Or maybe it’s because everyone keeps talking about regular people.  You know, like regular people drive cars to work every day, or regular people don’t shave their heads on a bad hair day, or regular people don’t have sixteen pet weasels.  All this time I thought they were talking about normality.  Now I suspect they were talking about bowel timing all along.   Thanks to these  yogurt commercials, I am coming to realize that I’ve failed in my approach to being a regular person by behaving myself and trying to fit in; what I actually needed to do was pencil in my poop times to a personal planner, and the world of normalcy would fall into my lap.

Then I could join the rest of the world in poop scheduling!

 

 

Maybe this is actually the man version of PMS.

An Open Letter to Dietary Weirdos

Dear Dietary Weirdos:

Go away.

What is a Dietary Weirdo?  To me, a Dietary Weirdo is someone who claims to adhere to a chosen non-average food regime but who is actually talking bullshit because they eat whatever they want whenever they feel like it, yet still feel compelled to tell you all about their “special diet”.

This does not include people who genuinely have constraints on their diets, even voluntary ones.  Let me just say straight up that I absolutely respect that.   I’ve had my share of friends with celiac disease, Crohn’s disease, Type I peanut allergies, hellish-fart-inducing lactose intolerances, and strict but polite preferences like vegetarianism.  Disclosure:  I myself refused to eat poultry or red meat for ten years, and I stuck to that policy with minimal fuss. 

No, it’s the people who PRETEND to have restrictions that piss me off.   I’ve found that these people fit into two broad categories.

Type I:
Those who are holier-than-thou and preachy about their diets because they are so SMART and SPECIAL and they are bent on showing everyone else how SMART and SPECIAL they are.  You can recognize these people from their upwardly-tilted noses down which they look at you when they converse, and by their not-so-subtle assumption that they know more than you about any given topic and therefore do not have to listen to you at all, ever.  Their dietary restrictions will be something that we can all agree is high profile and well-meaning, like vegetarianism, veganism, or strictly organic, and will originally be based on a very admirable environmental-sustainability concern for food production.   However, these people will have hijacked the this idea for use in demonstrating that they are clearly better than you. 

This type will tell you about their diet at every opportunity, being sure to criticize yours as much as possible in the process.  Remember, the goal is self-aggrandizement, not actual progress toward sustainability.  A conversation might go something like:

You: “I’m going to go get myself a sandwich.”

Dietary Weirdo: “You do know that they use rare African ferret eyeballs to produce plastic wrap for sandwiches?

You: “Oh?  Well, I’ll look out for one that’s in a box.”

Dietary Weirdo: “They also burn critically endangered Galapagos jumping spider gonads to toast the seeds in multigrain bread.”

You: “I see… I’ll get white bread this time.”

Dietary Weirdo: “By the way, the carbon footprint of white bread is greater than for driving your Toyota for a year at 120 miles per hour.”

You: “Thanks for letting me know.  I’ll probably get tuna on whole wheat then.”

Dietary Weirdo: “There is no such thing as dolphin-safe tuna.  YOU’RE PROBABLY EATING DOLPHINS.  That's just so uncouth.  And I can’t believe you would even eat something with as many food-miles as whole wheat has.  Haven’t you heard of the micropolyviscosity metanutrient glycosylanethylamine problem?”

You: “Actually no, but I’ll Google it later… what are you having for lunch?”

Dietary Weirdo: “Home-pickled pine twigs hand-gathered in my own backyard, raw organically grown pubic hair, and wood-fire-toasted lice humanely combed from wild Canadian moose.”

This is all well and good, but what you will soon note is that 70% of the time, this person will not follow his or her own rules.  Often you will come upon this person happily and un-ironically devouring a greasy pile of factory-farmed processed sausage seasoned with child-labor tears.  This often occurs when:

• they are vaguely cranky or tired
• they are being lazy
• just for the hell of it because fuck you, I eat responsibly-sourced moose lice and pubic hair sometimes so I can eat whatever I want right now and still be better than you.

I once had a boss at work who was inordinately pleased with himself for being a vegetarian.  Whenever the topic of eating meat came up, he would launch into a lecture on its carbon footprint (I agreed), its nitrate pollution (also agreed), its unhealthiness (I’m on board for a lot of that), and its general unsustainability and unsuitability as a staple diet (yup, I’m with that too).  Then he would come in to work with a hangover and go across the street for a bacon-double-cheeseburger at Burger King.

 

Pictured: Vegetarian lunch of champions

And yet he still felt it was okay to look down his carefully-upturned nose at anyone who came in with a ham sandwich.

Finally, these people also include the ones who refuse to buy Prairie Hayseed Happy Barn Home Chicken Sausage from the corner corporate supermarket, but will buy exactly the same brand from the locally-run health-food store—because somehow being sold from the hippie shop makes the sausage cleaner.  More disclosure:  THIS HAS BEEN ME.

Type II:

The second category of Dietary Weirdo includes those who are in some way neurotic about their food.  They are controlled by every latest health food fad and jerked around by every piece of psychosomatic bull crap.  Instead of being environmentalists, these are hypochondriacs who are convinced they have vague and sinister intolerances or allergies that insidiously ruin their lives.  They might read some article in Cosmo about how someone somewhere is lactose intolerant and decide I MUST STOP DRINKING MILK FOREVER STARTING RIGHT NOW because obviously OH MY GOD I PROBABLY HAVE THAT.  Then they hear that sodium is really bad for you so they cut out salt entirely.  (Woe betide you if are a dinner guest at this home.)  Then they read a rumor on the Internet that fluoride added to tap water could cause cancer of the reticulochondromyopatellarhepatiformis or some other made-up organ and refuse to drink anything but bottled water ever again.  You can recognize this type of Weirdo by their obsessive reading of alarmist health magazines (but never a scientific journal) and their constant prodding and poking of their various parts while wearing a worried expression.

On their own, these concerns might be legitimate and your average Type II views them as well-founded.  But it’s the constant changing of these fad diets and the poorly–informed way they’re implemented that piss me off.  One week it will be no dairy.  The next week it will be no red meat.  The week after, it will be no animal-derived saturated fats.  The following week, it will be animal-derived fats, but no peanut oil.  Then maybe dairy will be okay after all.  Whole wheat is good but white is not.  Oh no wait, actually both are bad.  Eat oats. 

Another problem with these people is that they generally don’t know what the hell they’re doing when they implement these restrictions.  I had a friend swear up and down to me that her life got so much better when she stopped eating bread, because she’d been feeling really ill before and it was definitely because of gluten intolerance, and now she was so much healthier and more energetic.  At the time she visited me, I was a bit of a moron about what gluten-free meant, so I stupidly selected a pasta recipe with vegetarian, gluten-based, sausage to cook for her because I didn’t know any better.  She devoured it happily and without irony, apparently lacking the insight that—surprise!—pasta is also made from wheat.

This type knows all kinds of factoids about the ailments they are convinced they have, and will tell you about them in great detail.  If you are sucked into this discussion, be prepared to hear a lot about their pooping habits.  They will also insist on the most dire-sounding labels for their conditions, like calling things syndromes or allergies instead of intolerances or irritations.   It may get to the point where diet replaces horoscope in being blamed for everything that happens during their day.

So why do both types annoy me so much?

It's because at heart, true Dietary Weirdness in either type is a way to say, "LOOK AT ME!" without mind to hypocrisy or inconsistency.  I could hardly blame you for being confused about what to eat.  There are mountains of information, misinformation, and changing recommendations that are out there in the world.  Oh dear, you poor Weirdo.  I'm sure the truth is that you annoy me disproportionately because I'm secretly terrified of becoming you by accident.  Why?  A personal timeline of my own confused food learning curve:

 

Insidious cholesterol bombs?

1986:  Mum tells me never to eat more than two eggs per week, because otherwise I would get heart disease when I was Daddy's age.

 1990: Everyone says we should never eat butter again and we switch to some greasy and gross-tasting bright yellow creepy stuff.

Funny, I totally can.

1996: I decide to be a vegetarian because you know, animals are nice and stuff.

1997: Everyone says eat only whole wheat because processed white stuff is bad for you.

1998: I try veganism and realize that in suburban soccer towns, you can’t find anything to eat except air unless you get your whole family on board.

2001: I learn about overfishing, agricultural runoff to estuaries and creepy algal blooms.  Should I never eat fish again?

2002: I hear about trans fat for the first time.  Now what do I put on toast?                                

                                

2003: Mum gets colon cancer (she’s fine now) and decides FIBER 4-EVER!

2004: I see gluten-free cake in a café for the first time and wonder what the hell that’s about.  Also, I see the word “halal” appearing everywhere and assume it's some sort of improvement on factory spam-meat.

2005:  Everyone says, "You know what, actually, eat butter because that greasy yellow creepy stuff is actually worse.  Just do it minimally, because, you know, fat and stuff."

Go ahead, grab a spoon.

2008: I give up being a strict vegetarian for a multitude of reasons, chief among them being a carnivorous boyfriend and nonexistent blood iron.

2009: I learn that halal is actually horrifying, and that eggs are probably perfectly fine.

2010: Whole Health Source starts in about how what you SHOULD be eating is tons of butter and you know what, fiber is pointless and probably no good at all.*

And then there is all this stuff:

Everyone has heard the Cheerios story from a couple of years ago--how Cheerios claimed to lower cholesterol until finally the FDA said, you can't prove that!  Stop pretending to be medicine!

I never even realized people got so concerned about when and how often they pooped until Activia started running these ads.

Ooooh, soy!  Soy is good for you, right?  Duh: even if it is soy, it's still chocolate milk, fool!

Hel-lo, this is not health food either.  Even if it's not actually a potato chip, that doesn't mean it can't be greasy and salty.  "Multigrain" is not a synonym for "so healthy I can eat the whole bag."

Who could be consistent in dietary philosophy with all that and more getting thrown about?  I don’t even know what to eat anymore.  This barrage of recommendations is turning me into a combined Type I/Type II Dietary Weirdo, I’m sure.

So, my dear Dietary Weirdo, you may annoy the crap out of me, but I can only blame you insofar as you use this situation to be egocentric.  Type I’s, I’m very sorry that your admirable environmentalism has given you an excuse to be a prick.  Type II’s, I wish you I could help you be less neurotic.  Truthfully, we as a scientific society should GET IT THE HELL TOGETHER and give some consistent, 100% data-backed recommendations to give you some peace.  Then again, a few hundred women’s health magazines would go bankrupt and you, poor soul, would have to find something else to be neurotic about.

So, Dietary Weirdos, if you will give up your hypocritical superiority  complex and/or egocentric hypochondria, I promise to forgive you.  Maybe we should together write a letter to the food industry.  It could go something like:

Maybe it will make a difference and maybe in this lifetime you Dietary Weirdos can be cured of your weirdness, and I won’t have to put up with you anymore.  I won’t hold my breath though.

                Love,

                Anna

*This completely inaccurate representation of Stephan Guyenet’s excellent literature reviews of nutritional science has been bitchified for comic purposes and probably bears little resemblence to the original.