Rate Anything Volume 4

peanut butter revelations, tweezer scams, and television menace

Hello! Apparently it’s going to be 87 degrees outside with high humidity for the rest of our lives here in Minnesota, which means we’re all visibly sweating while examining the list of “spooky season” drinks at the coffee shop and this is not acceptable for any reason!!

Here is some unsolicited feedback for random things, using a rating scale of 0-5 stars, with “0” being “horrible” and “5” being “excellent.”

All opinions are author’s own, and all opinions are facts.

1. Grind-Your-Own Peanut Butter

* * * * * (5 Stars)

There is only one health food co-op in Northfield, Minnesota, and it is called Just Food Co-Op, and I am obsessed with it for two reasons:

• Abbreviated, Just Food Co-Op is “JFC.” At the beginning of the pandemic, when I was new to living in Northfield and I didn’t yet know the proper name of the co-op, Just Food hung huge neon banners outside their store that said “SHOP LOCAL JFC” and “STAY SAFE JFC”, which I read as “SHOP LOCAL JESUS FUCKING CHRIST” and “STAY SAFE JESUS FUCKING CHRIST.” I have been a loyal customer ever since.

• Just Food Co-Op has a grind-your-own peanut butter machine. And… have you had this stuff??? Have you seen the nuts in the clear case above the machine descend into the grinding chute in a chunky little whirlpool? Have you held your chosen clear plastic container and felt it getting pleasantly warm as a swirl of fresh, perfectly smooth peanut butter drapes into it? Have you taken this warm container of new-made peanut butter home, added a tiny bit of sugar and some flaky sea salt, mixed it up, and tasted it?? What the fuck were we eating our entire childhoods, hydrogenated ashes??? This is what peanut butter tastes like???? How alive!! How real!! How delicious!! FIVE STARS, JESUS FUCKING CHRIST!!!

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2. Personalized Hotel TV Greetings

* (1 Star)

OK. I know I just gave the front desk person my credit card and my license. I know they know who I am and what room I’m in and how long I’ll be staying.

But why does the hotel TV have to know me? Why do I require robot servants to passively greet me? Why are marketers so sure that I am a little tantrumy toddler baby who needs every last little thing exclusively catered to me, personally? Why is technology so interested in making me believe I live in a world made just for me???

The world is not custom-made for each of us and using machines to pretend otherwise is the weirdest shit!! It is creepy to walk into a hotel room and have the words “Welcome, Krista” on the screen of the TV! It freaks me out, in the Big-Brotherly way that Google Maps welcoming me home makes my skin crawl – in the same way that someone saying, “Alexa, play the Garden State soundtrack” in a suddenly-slightly-louder voice inside their own home fills me with a nameless horror! You’re telling me something was here with us the whole time, listening?

Smart home this, smart home that, why would I want a TV or a dishwasher or a refrigerator that is actively aware of me??? Sorry to be your dad on this one, but what in the fuck, can I just check in to a hotel in a city where I’m a stranger and feel pleasantly on my own for a single second??

One star because I’m still excited to be in a hotel room, but man, my kingdom to be an unknown traveler wearing a hood low over my eyes at a rowdy inn!

3. Sharpening Tweezers

* * * * * x 2 (10 Stars)

skip to :43 to avoid an overcaffeinated intro

THE JIG IS UP, BIG TWEEZER. I watched a video last week that changed my entire life!!!

Did you know that you can sharpen your tweezers?? Like if you bought nice tweezers, and then you dropped them and dented them and now they won’t grip, that you can make them grip again? It’s true and you can!! and I am so simultaneously thrilled and mad about it that I need to march into my bathroom right now and pluck my eyebrows under bright overhead lighting while muttering everything I want to say to the CEO of Tweezerman!!! How much money have I spent in my adult life buying new nice pairs of tweezers?? And for WHAT?

It’s all been a scam. It takes two seconds to fix your unusable tweezers, and if you don’t feel like watching the video above, here’s how you do it:

• You get your non-gripping tweezers. (I know you still have them; Tweezermans are like $25!)

• You get a double-sided nail file. Metal, glass, emery, it doesn’t matter.

• You take the tweezers, open them so they straddle the file, and run them back and forth along the file. Do that a couple times, and ta-daaa: Good-as-new tweezers!!! Like, good as the day you bought them! And you can do this indefinitely, until your tweezers are just little baby sharpened nubs, until the day you die!

If you didn’t know this, are you furious? If you did know this, were you deliberately keeping this from me?

10 stars for this new knowledge, may we all never attempt minor surgery (digging out an ingrown chin hair) with dull-ass tweezers again!!

4. Wedge Salads

* * 2 Stars

I’m not here to work.

Wedge salads are delicious, but they are very hard to eat, and if you present me with one at a restaurant, I am going to make the kind of mess one might typically associate with snuff films. And the ratio is going to be all off; every mouthful is going to be all dressing, or all lettuce, and all the wee cute trimmings are going to fall to one side, and then what will we have?

I’ll tell you what we’ll have. We’ll have the ingredients of a salad, without anyone actually enjoying a salad.

I can’t do this alone. I did not go to culinary school or get in the weeds as an apprentice at an old-school steakhouse at 7 PM on a Saturday. I need a professional’s practiced eye to make a salad good; a pro who knows just how big each piece of lettuce should be to fit on a fork. And I know I just said above that I am not a little toddler baby who needs every last thing exclusively catered to me, but in the case of wedge salads, yes I am!! Pwease, pwease cut up my widdle wedge of wettuce for me!! I need you to make each bite worth getting out of my pajamas for!

This wedge salad feeling actually extends to all restaurants that are themed around wanting me to do the cooking. Hot pot, fondue, Korean BBQ – I just… me? you think I’m a good judge of when meat is cooked through well enough to eat it? You don’t even know me; this is an enormous amount of responsibility and trust to place in someone who’s had to go to the ER for food poisoning more than five times.

Two stars because I love how wedge salads taste and I have seen other people successfully consume them, but making me work to make my own dinner is the opposite of why we are at a restaurant!

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5. EZ Skin Tag Removal

* * * * 4 Stars

Several years ago, I was standing in front of the mirror, poking at a brand-new skin tag I’d just found on the side of my neck. My friend Tawnya was in the other room, and I started bitching to her.

“What am I, a 14-year-old labrador??? I called, fingering the strange new skin thing. “I just get weird skin tags overnight now? Skin tags just appear? I can’t have this on my neck, this flippy little nub, what the fuck!”

Tawnya came into the bathroom. She looked at the skin tag. “Oh yeah, you gotta remove this.”

“Like, get it removed?”

She stared at me. “No. Just get rid of it.”

Horrified, thinking she meant “rip it off,” I raised my hand to shield the skin tag from her.

She laughed. “You use tea tree oil. Don’t you know this?”

I shook my head.

“You get some tea tree oil, and you dip a Q-tip in it, and twice a day, you dab the oil onto the skin tag. In a couple weeks, it’ll fall right off.”

She padded out of the bathroom. The second she was gone, I opened the medicine cabinet, found her tea tree oil, dipped a Q-tip in it, and began my course of treatment. I had zero doubts that it would work – Tawnya is a high femme homosexuelle with a near-encyclopedic knowledge of the limits of crunchy-ass homeopathic remedies – and she had never yet let me down.

After a week of twice-daily tea tree treatment, the skin tag turned black. Two days later, it fell off entirely. There was no scar; there was no sign it had ever been there at all. I have since done this on multiple other skin tags that have cropped up (what is aging!! the horror!!!) and they’ve all been banished with a course of tea tree oil.

Don’t give a dermatologist money for no reason; join me in the granola aisles of Just Food Co-op and remove your skin tags all by yourself, JFC!!

Four stars instead of five because I hate writing the phrase “skin tag” and I hate smelling like tea tree oil, but goddamn does this work!