A List Of People I Am Mad At, 7/15/22

This newsletter is a weekly (sometimes) list of people I am mad at. This is the list for July 15, 2022.

1. I am at my absolute brink with wireless earbuds. Not since the entirety of the diet industry has a product so utterly useless, so designed for failure been so wholly embraced by a user base that still hates the fucking product they’re buying at an unbearably steady clip. How many times can a single earbud tumble out of my head and precipitously close to a sewer grate, so close that I have to be thankful, as if it’s by design that this thing INTENDED TO STAY IN MY EAR seems to fall out DAILY. Or maybe I’m just cranky because the AirPods in particular seem to have been crafted by someone who does not have a normal ear canal; instead, their holes are shaped exactly like the top of a hard plastic sippy cup, its contours not so much hugging the curve of your ear so much as stabbing into it and giving you dry swimmer’s ear. Or, I don’t know, maybe the issue is that now I have to commit to remembering to charge ONE MORE FUCKING THING just so that I can trudge my way from my apartment to the “good” bodega a few blocks away without having to spend a single minute on god’s worthless earth thinking my own thoughts, uninterrupted by Big Sean muttering “lil’ bitch” into my ears. (That is, after all, if the charger itself is working, which it seems to sometimes not work at all, for whatever reason, perhaps because I angered the supermoon or whatever, followed up only by one of the buds itself not working, a perfect, seamless product design where half of the product can be defective.) Wireless earbuds all have ridiculous names and I’m supposed to say them out lout to the man at the earbud store and not choke on the words? You want me to call this stupid, shitty little device that will end up in a landfill in, I don’t know, three years “Elite 3??” WHAT ABOUT THIS IS ELITE? I’m listening to the audio of fights I secretly recorded and you want me to do it with a device called “Master & Dynamic???????” All I am ever trying to do is avoid spending any time with myself at all — no thoughts, just cacophonous sounds — and inexplicably, we’ve all decided to allow Apple to slowly but painfully put their dicks in our ears and tell us it’s what we preferred. Do you know how bad it has to be that I would opt for the indignity of getting tangled up in a headphone cord, tripping and yanking them out of my phone and having everyone hear that I’m just listening to “Hook” by Blues Traveler over and over again?? Do you have any idea how bad the alternative product has to be in order for me to prefer having people know that I even know what “Hook” is?????? Why can’t capitalism fix this one thing instead of what it usually does, which is make EVERYTHING SO MUCH WORSE.

2. Ben Affleck.

There are more episodes of Scamfluencers for you to listen to, but your headphone choice is your own fucking problem.