Things that do and don’t suck…

I chew my nails. More than that, I chew my cuticles. I chew up and down the sides of my thumbs. If I could reach them, I’d probably chew my elbows. Perhaps it’s a very minor obsession, but it has a logic to it. When I’m not doing anything else, I find that I run my thumb along the edges of my fingers and, in turn, my fingers along the edge of my thumbs, looking for rough patches. When I find one, my hand goes to my mouth, out of a desire to even out the roughness. Doing this, of course, just creates new and rougher patches. So it’s a never-ending cycle.

By its very nature, consumer society produces a lot of things that most of us have no use for. It creates needs for things we don’t need in any objective sense. These things suck. But it also creates things that don’t suck: things that are a help and a pleasure. Therefore, I give you the first installment of things that do and don’t suck. Today, I’ll cover three in each category. Since I’m trying to be positive, I’ll start with those that don’t:

• Burt’s Bees Lemon Butter Cuticle Creme

  I don’t know how it works. But besides coming in a cool metal tin and smelling nice, this is the only stuff that keeps me from biting my fingers and fingernails. I try to put it on every night before I go to bed. It’s soothing. Highly recommended.

• Apple iPod
  I wasn’t sold on mp3 players. I had to own one (a nice Christmas gift) before I saw how cool they are. I have a lot of CDs (maybe 300 of them). But they were mostly sitting in my closet until i ripped all of them and started taking them with me to work everyday on my iPod. On the road, I use an iTrip to broadcast them to my car stereo. Using the Belkin car charger keeps the battery up enough that I can enjoy it all day at work. Now I seriously don’t even mind my commute. Time on the road just gives me more time to spend listening to my music (or working on my French, or listening to Shakespeare).
• The Boulevard Diner (or here)
  Right here in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina. Downhome cooking with some modern twists. Try the fried chicken. Try the grouper sandwich. The friend green tomatoes and fried pickles are amazing. It’s not something for everyday. But when you’re in the mood to spurge and not worry about your waistline, nothing beats it.

And now, kind readers, three things that do suck:

• Desani with “Lemon”
  So I’m thirsty and I think, “Hey, some of that nice cold bottled tap water would be nice.” and I reach for a Desani. And then I see the new Desani–with “lemon”–and I think “Hey, something new.” And I spent a dollar for the worst pseudo-lemonade, chemical monstrosity I’ve ever tasted. I couldn’t finish it. Honestly. It was that bad.
• Microsoft Outlook
  I’m not big fan of M$, even though I do pay the bills by teaching other people how to use their stuff. I do like Excel and Access. But Outlook is a clunky behemoth. It has crappy spam filtering and searching. It’s to do list manager is rudimentary. The calendaring and contacts modules are pretty good. But, on the whole, is crap. There are plenty of fine open source mail and groupware apps that beat it. I’m probably just angry about Outlook because I had to spend yet another evening fixing a problem with it on a friend’s machine (I don’t use it on mine).
• 80 degree weather in November
  Okay, I cheated. It’s not really a product, but it really does suck.