I always compliment the waiter is the food is good, they are usually happy to hear it, especially in small places where the chef is their partner
there is always some part of me that gets mad at wholesome stuff like this. Why tf am i like this, it’s a small nice story damn it.
Maybe it’s seeing other people having a good time when you’re miserable?
Not saying that as an insult, by the way; that’s at least how I feel, because I also sometimes get that weird pang of irrational bitterness seeing stuff like this. It’s sweet and wholesome, but I think maybe a part of me is jealous from not having that sort of experience in my own life. It’s part of the reason why I ditched traditional social media, because I can’t help but compare my life to everyone else on my feed. I just want my own wholesome moments once in a while, y’know?
Maybe I’m just projecting, lol.
My brother was a big fan of the band Swans. I liked some of their stuff, I could see where it was meant to be entrancing and jarring and I quite liked it. But there was one particular song, God Damn the Sun, that he absolutely adored and I never understood. It felt like someone just whining for the sake of whining, lashing out at everyone just to be a dick.
I didn’t get it until 3 summers ago when my brother died. It was unexpected, and it hit me like a truck. For a couple weeks I just didn’t really participate or form new memories, I just kinda sat on the sidelines and watched everyone else be a part of life. For those first couple weeks I was indifferent, everyone else was just in a different world than the one I was in. But after that, for a few months, maybe even about a year, I was actually really fucking angry. Like, at everyone. The dawn is breaking, the dusk is fading, people are going to work in the morning and then coming home to be with their families like it’s a normal day. Couldn’t they see? The whole world is over but they’re acting like it’s not. Fuck them. God damn the sun, god damn anyone who says a kind word.
It comes from a place of hurt, of lack, of want. All you can do is catch it as it happens and realize that while your anger is real, and needs to be felt, the people that you’re angry at didn’t do anything wrong and don’t deserve to be shit on.
I’d never heard that song before, so I listened to it and now I’ve saved it. Whenever I hear this song from this point forwards, I will think of you, and by extension, your brother.
My best friend died last year, and thoughts like this make me feel small, but in a good way. I hope it has a similar effect for you.
God damn, that was heavy. Thank you for sharing that, though, that was really touching. I’m sorry about your brother. I’m listening to the song right now, and you’re absolutely right about the pain of loss and the almost crippling white-hot anger that comes with it. The song is actually quite beautiful with that context in mind.
I hope you and your family are doing well now.
It is a perfect song. It does what it set out to do flawlessly. Thank you for your commiseration. It still stings like hell but we’re all still here and the world still has joy in it.
Accept those thoughts as a part of you, at least when they come to the surface. Try to picture yourself as two persons, one persons is the one you want to be and the other is all the traits you don’t like about yourself. Try to picture the latter just sitting in a chair, loudly complaining like a Karen. Don’t pay any attention to them, just let them rage in silence. The point is not to fight these thoughts because then, you already acknowledge that they hold power over you. But you shouldn’t dwell on them either, just acknowledge them, then let them fade into nothingness. In time, this person’s whining and screaming will get more and more silent, until it will eventually become just a whisper. It will never truly go away, but it won’t make you question yourself anymore.
I know it sounds stupid and what you’d expect a shrink to say, but it really does work. It takes a lot of learning to let go of stuff though.
I love this idea. It’s essentially externalizing those thoughts you want to stop having in an easy to imagine way. Thank you!
Me too. For me, this feels one dimensional, like a story where everything is good and wholesome, and nothing bad ever happens. It feels incomplete.
maybe its been a while since somebody asked you about something you wanted to share and your jealous ?
“Why does it never happen to me?” — maybe? Sometimes I feel like that…
Oooooooh I have a similar story.
Went to this awesome winery for a lunch, and one of the courses had some special kind of leaves that taste like oysters.
They were delicious, and the waitress was the one who grew them in her garden! She was stoked that we said so. She didn’t have photos but it was a real cool experience.
I’m really intrigued. Do these look familiar?
Yes! Very similar to that.
In Greece I had the geezer dip out back and come back with 4 litres from the family trees, poured into old water bottles. Good shit. Peppery.
Us butter Europeans don’t know the first thing about how serious olive oil Europeans take their oily substance.
And us corn/soy oil Americans have no clue what’s going on over there. Too busy eating our garbage margarine .
You got the full pappou treatment.
That sounds absolutely amazing
Those trees might have been living with the same family for centuries.
I actually had a very similar experience nearby in Lucca, not far from Florence and Pisa. Only it was tomatoes in the pizza sauce. It was amazing, but have no recollection of the name of the restaurant.
My best experience in an italian restaurant was in a small fishermen restaurant in Conca dei Marini. Shit was kind of lost in the middle of nowhere, I don’t even think it had a name. But it was the most delicious meal on my whole trip. Chef kiss
Oh if you find it on google please post it. I am intrigued. My dream is to retire near there one day. I’ve been bookmarking all my favorite places along the coast there.
Here’s my favorite little locals seafood joint near Sorrento:
https://maps.app.goo.gl/MPC8QuXYer5ggTfK6?g_st=ic
Cheap white wine and cheap plates of clams and pasta all day. Heaven.
The photo I took georeferenced to 40.616715,14.575713
It might have been any one of the three restaurants on the map there, considering how things are done on Italy, all three might be runned by the very same family, just different brothers.
I remember being served an unordered wheel of bread with lots of tomato sauce ‘on the house’, it was amazing, no other restaurant in Florence, Rome or Venice offered something similar.
Totally recommend askibg for limoncello as a dessert, it blew our minds.
Having traveled quite a bit in Mexico, Belize, and Guatemala, those hole in the wall restaurants are just THE BEST. And you can usually tell when it’s the owners running it themselves. Compliments go a long way in those places and by god do they almost always have amazing food.
You mamma’d his mia
For some of us there is no better way to love everyone than to feed everyone with our absolute finest.
That’s adorable! It must take a lot of training your palate to be able to pick out particularly good olive oil, I’m not sure I’ve ever noticed any olive oil tasting any different than other.
Not really, all commercial olive oils taste the same because most of its composition is the same. If you ever tried “homemade” extra virgin olive oil, you’d be able to tell right away but I rarely found good oil outside of Tuscany and, even then, none as good as the ones that my friends make.
I used to work in packaging for Sardelli; we bottled, boxed, and shipped many different brands of olive oil of different qualities. There are different tanks of different qualities of olive oil and depending on the mix they are sold as olive oil, virgin olive oil, extra virgin olive oil, etc. Some are expensive, some are cheap, none of them are 100% extra virgin olive oil, just enough that they can be legally sold as such.
Got bad news for you …
If the joke here is covid, this is something I’ve never noticed, not just something that started in 2020. But I’ve never had any of the fancy ones Set is referring to, so that’s likely why.
No, the joke is that if you can’t tell, you probably haven’t had any of the good stuff. You can smell the difference from a distance, let alone taste.
Sounds like good news! Something I get to try :)
Fuck ice buckets. Compliment someone a day for a week challenge.
Looking at you, Tokkers. My online existence isn’t powerful enough and I am only here for the sarcasm and crushing of grapes and fascism when time is available.
Bonus points if it is without any context.
IE: Step on to an elevator. Standing staring at the back and just say “you all look great today”. don’t move until top floor or until car is empty.
I (m) like to compliment guys on there cars. They always like that and you can see there eyes change when they realize what I say.
And me, driving around in a white minivan.
Cool van man. I really like it.
Thanks. I actually really like it. Minivans get a bad rap but they have so much room and they ride so smooth. And captains chairs.
Minivans are badass. Only one car in America is mid-engined, RWD, supercharged with a 5sp AND has a swiveling captain chair: the Toyota Previa
I will never publicly admit it, but I had to rent a car to move some stuff a few years back and ended up with an odyssey. Smoothest, most comfortable ride I’ve ever had.
Would I spend money on buying one? Not a chance, but I won’t pass one on the road without thinking how nice of a drive they can be.
Of course, I purposely choose to drive a bumpy-ass jeep wrangler with a loose steering wheel, so to each their own I guess.
I have my ears stretched to 16mm (it’s sizeable, but not overly large) and I will 100% of the time go out of my way to compliment others about their stretched ears. Those of us with larger gauge sizes have been at this for a lot of years and it’s a ton of effort and care. Every single time I end up with a beaming smile in my direction. I know the (very very infrequent) times I get a compliment on them I react the same way.
Everybody is proud of something they’ve done and compliments are free. So why not make somebody’s day.
Image Transcription:
A Reddit comment from user bumblegadget_: My mom and I took a trip to Florence, and at one restaurant the olive oil they served with the bread was incredible and she told our waiter so - he absolutely beamed and whipped out his phone. Turns out he and his family grew the olives and made the olive oil themselves, he was showing us the pictures from his orchard like a man showing off pictures of his firstborn grandchild.
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I was so confused bc I read “inedible”
Mama mia
