Buckets comin' out of my ears

I swear I'm not making this up. They have ham-flavored potato chips here. I saw them in a vending machine today: Jamón Ruffles. Really.

Anyway, this unannounced rain is getting old real fast. It was not supposed to rain today. I check the weather obsessively. I know it wasn't supposed to rain. That's why I didn't have an umbrella when, 20 minutes from home and without my metro card, the sky opened up and poured on me.

Barcelona has an Arc de Triomf. As far as I can tell no one knows who exactly was triomf-ant over whom, but it's there. I stood underneath it for a while hoping the rain would let up. It didn't, and when the wind picked up, making it rain sideways, the Arc stopped being much of a shelter at all. There were quite a few people trying to wait out the rain under the Arc but, aside from a little girl who asked me if her backpack was wet (as if the answer could have been no?) and asked someone else the time (where were her parents?), no one was making friends. I guess even Spaniards get grumpy in the rain. I get really grumpy in the rain. But I kept it together, even though I had clothes hanging outside to dry and even when a passing car hit a puddle and soaked me, cartoon style. In the end what did me in was the grocery store. You always have to bag your own groceries here, which is fine except that the plastic bags at my grocery store are nearly superglued shut. They are so hard to get open. And I was cold and wet and the store was about to close and they were turning off the lights and I COULDN'T. GET. THE FUCKING. BAG. OPEN. And that's when I kinda had a little mini-meltdown....

The good news is that there are few meltdowns that can't be fixed with scotch and Bob Dylan, and I'm better now. At least it isn't snowing, I guess.

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So I've been reading the European version of the Wall Street Journal. Not by choice, exactly, but it's the only English newspaper my department subscribes to and there are always free copies lying around. I can't find the New York Times here, and I don't have internet at home. Before I had ever read it, I always assumed that WSJ was a very reputable, if right-leaning, publication. Maybe it's just the European version, but I've been surprised by how not-very-well written it is. And also by how right-wing it is. There was an editorial last week spouting the declining cancer rates in the US as evidence of the virtues of the free market. Anyway, the reason I'm bringing it up is that I have to share the following, which was at the bottom of a section called Washington Briefs or something last week. (Please no one sue me for copyright infringement....)

"Minor Memos: In honor of Women's History Month, which is March, the Census Bureau reports that women earned 77 cents for every $1 earned by male counterparts in 2004--and that 83% of aerobic-shoe buyers are women."

Now I'm no radical feminist. I love men, and I don't offend easily. But that's what they have to say about Women's History Month? That women earn less and do aerobics? It would have been better not to mention it at all....