Doing slightly better today. I remembered that menthol cough drops are surprisingly effective for soothing a toothache. Orajel and other home remedies like clove oil never did much for me, whatever relief they offered was very temporary and not worth the disgusting taste and mouth feel. Cough drops I can hold between my teeth and let it slowly melt over the problematic tooth, so it actually lasts longer than a few seconds. Combined with painkillers I can actually get a few moments of normalcy throughout the day. Relative normalcy. The drops are sugar free so they taste like shit, but it's worth it for real relief.
The main downside is that it's easy to not drink enough water. The taste lingers in my mouth in a way that makes drinking water particularly unpleasant. And they promote salivation, so I don't necessarily realize how dry my mouth is/how thirsty I am. So I have to be a little more mindful of how much water I've had.
One way I encourage myself to drink more water is with this gif:
This is Peach, from the online cartoon/sticker set Peach and Goma by Bu Jue Xiao Xiao. These unassuming cartoon cats have surprisingly become a major fixture in my relationship. There are a bunch of these relatable couple cartoons that you can find in sticker sets of messaging apps and gif repositories. There are several that my spouse and I use, but Peach and Goma have become the MVCs.¹ They're cute, expressive, have been drawn engaging in hundreds of activities, and simple enough to draw for each other. They're rarely explicitly gendered; Peach is occasionally portrayed as femme and Goma as masc, but in general they're both fairly neutral, and we can share relatable gifs without worrying about gendering. Not that this is ever really a problem, but most couples-oriented media is heavily gendered and it's nice to have a break from it.
Anyway, seeing Peach drink water makes me want to drink water. Look how much she's enjoying it! I don't have a fancy square bottle, but if I look at the gif while I drink, I can imagine myself drinking upmarket luxury water. So chic!
Here's a gif for gently encouraging each other to drink water:
Now that I look closely, I think it's meant to be some sort of hygiene product? It looks like it has a spray nozzle. Well whatevs, close enough.
There's a gif for every occasion. My spouse and I don't see each other for most of the day, so I can let her know when I'm hard at work
Having an easy day at work
Having a rough time at work
...or finally done with work
and we feel a little closer. It brings a little lightness and joy to the rather bleak reality of life under capitalism. I don't know anything about Bu Jue Xiao Xiao, but they made something beautiful and I'm grateful to them.
The Great Canadian Hate-Read
I re-stumbled across a community devoted to comprehensively shitting on the comic "For Better or for Worse" and the woman who makes it. I remember seeing this sometime around 2008, when the author was going into semi-retirement and the comic reached its plot conclusion. At the time I had no opinion about it, I never paid attention to the comic because it was too realistic to be interesting, but the people who hated it seemed to have good reasons for it. It was interesting to me that people were so passionate about it, but that's about the only opinion I could muster. Now that the comic's been in reruns for 16 years, seeing the same people posting the same bile on a daily basis makes me profoundly sad. I can understand the pain of seeing beloved media go downhill, but the level of obsession in this community is frankly unsettling.
And as far as I can tell, there are some very valid criticisms one could make about the direction of the story and the quality of the writing in later years, but to this community, every aspect of every strip, no matter how light-hearted or innocuous, is evidence of some severe psychological defect on the part of the author. If there's nothing to criticize in the day's strip, the posters have encyclopedic knowledge of other strips this one is sort of similar to that they can criticize. They have their own language, they have a whole canon of shared Lynn Johnston lore, a black legend they pass back and forth for years, thousands of posts, hundreds of thousands of words.
I was going to share some of the more unhinged quotes I found, but I don't really have a point other than "it makes me sad" and I don't really want to spread the misery around. It's currently in the top 10 livejournal communities if you're really curious.² The positive takeaway I have from all this is: I'm glad I never embarked down the path of the hater. I'm glad I haven't wasted over a decade of my life sharing vitriol over a comic strip. Or a TV show, or series of books, or anything I once enjoyed that went downhill. It could've been so easy for me to fall into a forum of Simpsons fans who think the series stopped being good around season 8 or 9, but continue to hate-watch, tear every new episode to shreds, speculate about the personal lives of the writers and voice actors, and generally be miserable shits. There but for the grace of god go I.
I think it's easier to bond over shared disgust than shared joy. It requires less vulnerability, less personal investment, and more dogmatic thinking. If you're in a group of people who don't like a thing, and you say "I disagree, here's what I like about it": that's a display of weakness. You're going to be lumped in with the mockery. You won't make any friends. But if you're in a group of fans and you say it's shit: that's cool! You're being an edgy contrarian, stating your mind and you don't care what other people think! Others will look up to you for your bravery. That's the perception, anyway. So if you haven't necessarily thought critically about why you think the things you do, it's very easy to fall back on haterism. And it's very easy once you're in a group of like-minded haters to let inertia carry you until you wake up one day and realize hating this thing has become a defining characteristic of your identity.
This isn't to say we shouldn't criticize. We need to critique power, systems, harmful societal trends like AI and cryptocurrency, yes; but even media criticism can be valuable, even when it's something frivolous without broader harmful implications. Dan Olson's review of Doug Walker's The Wall parody is one of the most brutal and interesting takedowns of a failed creative work I've ever seen. It has something to say about why we create, the different lenses through which we view art, the value of curiosity. It's mean, but only as mean as Doug Walker deserves. Dan doesn't call him names or speculate about his personal life.
And that's it. Olson probably won't make any more videos about Doug Walker, and I don't need any. There are probably others out there hate-watching every new Nostalgia Critic video, making videos tearing them apart, reposting and mocking everything he says on social media. And I don't doubt that Doug Walker continues to make an ass of himself, but I have nothing to gain by devoting any more thought to him. Whatever camaraderie can be found in communal schadenfreude feels bad to me. Ersatz friendship. Let us go back to never thinking about For Better Or For Worse again.
1. Most valuable critters. Boy, it was a long walk to get to this footnote, huh?
2. I don't really recommend going to livejournal at all; I only remembered it existed because they implemented some sort of an achievement system, and I got an email informing me of my new achievement: Writing my first post ever (in 2002)