What are some of the best purchases of your life?

Unless someone else names them first: nope. Same with my favorite coffee and my favorite tea.

My origin story is this: 1.) parents who knowingly and recklessly got married and decided to produce offspring despite both families having a history of long legs--they knew this!--and produced a five-ten daughter with disproportionally long legs and 2.) apparently, I should have taken better care of my gall bladder (somehow?).

Due to my gall bladder feeling neglected or some shit it punished me for eating and drinking and living before abandoning me via surgical intervention: this has led to slowly growing intolerance for acidic foods and drinks. My favorite two drinks are coffee and tea and I like them caffeiney and delicious. As it turns out,it is not easy to find a balance between very low acid and not something either dark roasted or tasting of feet that I could also easily tolerate for more than one cup.

Then I found my coffee. It was amazing and perfect and I will pay well for not being in pain for my caffeine, I just prefer not to admit it to a living human being. I was innocently excited through that entire five pounds; then I went to get more and everything went very very wrong.

This coffee--delicious, low acid, no pain!--has six (6) unbearably bougie descriptor terms before the word 'coffee' and two (2) after. Worse, they rearrange the coffee there regularly from spite., all the bags look the same totally not pretentious off-brown paper with stupid plain text and I can never find it on my own and suspect they hide it. Every time--EVERY TIME--the salespeople will maliciously make me use ALL EIGHT WORDS (plus 'coffee'), out loud, in the correct order, before they're totally "Oh this [eight words plus coffee}] is right here!'

This is their idea of fun on a slow day; I bet they got perfect scores on the PCL-R, too.

I actually had better luck with tea,. then I made a terrible mistake. One day while browsing, I found a new one I hadn't seen. I didn't read past the words 'low-acid' because why would I? It's just plain black tea. I bought it, loved it, then went to get more. I couldn't find it, hunted up the empty bag from my previous purchase that I'd brought for just this reason, and for the first time read the full label and all the descriptors, and then easily found my favorite new tea. It was beneath a GiANT CHALKBOARD on which the formal name of my new tea resided: five (5) incredibly pretentious descriptors and something new and much, much worse. Once--once--someone went with me to pick it up and I only belatedly remembered that goddamn chalkboard when they said "soooooo....your tea has to be ethically handpicked by specially trained monkeys, huh?" and oh God. No one understands: I saw the words 'low acid' and thought 'cool'. No, I didn't read further, that's on me, but it didn't occur to me ethical monkeys were involved because why in the name of God would they be?

Now I am the girl who buys handpicked by ethical monkeys tea, [eight words] coffee and overpriced jeans and everyone else is "ooh that's nice, i just get my jeans from the thrift store and drink lipton".

All of these psychopaths are five feet seven inches or less and have a goddamn gallbladder; some are first and second degree blood relations ad make really good desserts for Christmas and family reunions so what can you do, but some are people I chose willingly to associate with and call friend and therefore know where I live and all my online identities so I'm stuck with them until I can figure out how to make it look like an accident, hopefully a pretentious one. I hide my spaghetti sauce now when there's any danger one might show up; at some point at the rate I'm going, I will probably have to hide my entire pantry and I'm not sure how to do that in an apartment.

Am I being dramatic about this? Yes, but I deserve it; this has been in progress for fifteen years and the less I can tolerate acid, the more words are applied to basic foods with a corresponding increase in price. I have had to deal with this and every so often, I am wearing one of those pairs of jeans while doing it and I just. Cannot.