First, a primer on how to ruin relationships, in case your 2024 is off to a mellow start:
1. Judge your friends openly. This is best done online, in a public and enduring way. You might think that telling your friend to their face that their obsession with arriving two hours early for a flight to Omaha would be the hardest knock, but trust me on this. Say it on a popular post, ideally on LinkedIn, but in a pinch the Gram will work.
2. Overreact to their reasonable requests. Colleague asks you not to text after 9pm unless it is life-or-death critical? MUTE and BLOCK! Friend reschedules coffee (again) for illness? Blame them for being soft and weak, and loudly inquire if they’ve been licking door knobs just to sabotage your carefully-laid plans. IM soccer team wants to know if you’re planning to join the team again this season? Reply with a terrific list of everything on your plate, just to remind them of how inconsequential their adorable team is. For bonus points, also interrupt them!
3. Keep score like a Newtonian. If someone makes you banana bread, picks your kiddo up from daycare, or throws you an email cadence template for your next campaign, write it down on an ever-expanding list of favors you must repay. Destroy your sanity to pay it back, equal and opposite.
Also, a reprise of my How to Be Selfish, if you’d like further instruction….
Fave food stacks: Side Dish with Schniper and Dinner: A love story
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My biggest fascination with Instagram is what people choose to share about their lives with one another.
My second biggest is the food photos.
I have shared my victories of self-care kitchari and Airstream avocado toast (tricky, given the lack of toaster or electricity), and I’ve shared my terrifically unfortunate (looking) but delectable pies. Once I wrote a recipe blog (which would shock my person), and included really amateur pictures.
(Aloo gobi still gets all the hits, and that’s not seo or telling my life story - that’s a good recipe).
But the oysters. Or mussels. Or crustaceans. The shelled delicacies baffle me the most as I know confidently I would not have survived childhood in a locale reliant on the sea for nourishment (and I was raised on Lithuanian fare and midwestern Depression-era necessity, and not the cheese-based sort).
Who are the people who willingly invest time and energy into meals made of found fish-things?!
Some of my bests, turns out.
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