Writing bravely in the Guardian, Icess Fernandez Rojas unearths a new realm of suffering, one hitherto ignored by the unthinking masses:

All I really wanted was a venti, white chocolate mocha without the whip cream.

No, don’t worry, it isn’t that. Ms Fernandez Rojas does get her beverage. The horror comes before that.

I gave the barista, a lovely older woman, my name and she shot me the typical confused look.

It begins.

I spelled it for her like a first-grader would recite her home phone number. “I-c-e-s-s. You know, like the goddess, but spelled like ice,” I explained. “What?” she asked again.

Yes, our latest Declarer of Ostentatious Grievance was trying to order a personalised coffee – or rather, coffee in a disposable cup that has her name scrawled on it before being thrown away – a baffling concept in itself, one made more complicated by the author’s uncommon and phonetically unobvious name. And the confused barista, despite being a lovely older woman, was, albeit unwittingly, grinding our Guardianista’s face beneath her heel.

In fairness to Starbucks, it’s not just baristas who are at fault but any restaurant or eatery requiring a name to add a personal touch to its service.

You see, Ms Fernandez Rojas has endured this poignant political struggle before – “a lifetime of having my name misspelled and mispronounced.” And those tears won’t dry themselves, you know. Which is why you, the public, must be told. What with your dull and obvious names, like Jessica and Angela:

Angela could get coffee at Starbucks with ease while Icess was still spelling her name out. Jessica was a staple at my local Chinese place even though Icess paid. And even Microsoft Word recognised Jenny as a proper pronoun, a proper person, over me; the red squiggle line was a constant reminder.

Spellcheck too? Will this oppression never end? One for our collection of classic sentences. And doubtless Ms Fernandez Rojas is intimately familiar with the spelling and pronunciation of every name of every employee at her local Chinese restaurant.

Sometimes the endless quest for name validation, even in my own Word document, was exhausting.

Poor lamb. Perhaps a coffee would help. Oh wait.

It’s all very tragic. Our Guardian columnist just wants to “celebrate [her] uniqueness” in an “inclusive society” and her spellchecking software, the subtleties of which apparently elude her, is dashing those hopes. She isn’t being “validated” by Microsoft Word. It’s how utopias die. No, you black-hearted scoundrels, stop that smirking at once. Why won’t you feel her pain? Doesn’t its immensity weigh upon your breast? Well, at least Ms Fernandez Rojas isn’t suffering alone.

Update:

Sniggering at the spelling errors of Starbucks baristas is now a thing among Guardian readers, who seem to imagine a ten-second interaction with someone whose own name they don’t know, and don’t care to know, is equivalent to a relationship with a long-standing colleague or close family member. (Next week in the Guardian: laughing at dyslexics and people for whom English is a second language.) Though I did quite like this dissenting comment: “This is a bit of a pot-and-kettle situation. A few weeks ago this newspaper ran, on its front page, the headline marquee ‘Plane carrying Bolivian president, Eva Morales, rerouted to Austria.’ There was no mention of when Bolivian president Evo Morales had announced a sex change.”

A phrase I borrow from a remarkably sane Guardian reader, responding to this article by Mike Power, a man apparently determined to atone for having such a patriarchal name. First, picture the scene:

All across Britain, the whiff of charred, low-quality sausage meat is hanging in the summer haze. And with it, floating almost indistinguishably in the grease-filled air across the garden fences, is blokey barbecue chat.

And then, this being the Guardian,

If there is anything less compelling but more oppressively penetrating than the conversation of four suburban men discussing how to light and then operate a barbecue, I have yet to hear it.

You heard him, it’s oppressively penetrating. Why so, you ask?

What really drains the joy from the summer breeze is the assumption, and the practice, that this is Man’s Work. All over the UK, probably the world, the barbecue is now one of the last places where even normal blokes become sexist.

Yes, I know. Two for our archive of classic sentences. Mr Power is upset, as all right-thinking people should be, that some heinous “biological determinism” holds sway in the warm weather custom of cooking outdoors. A cultural phenomenon that, we learn, “sees women as salad-spinners and men as the keepers of the grill, the tenders of the flame, lords and masters of the meat.” “It’s a sausage-fest out there,” says Mr Power. “And it’s getting ugly.” Because there’s nothing uglier than the sight of menfolk indulging, often knowingly, in a clichéd male behaviour – cooking for friends and family, and making sure that everyone is having a good time. None of which impedes our slayer of the patriarchy. He has credentials to display and boilerplate to churn:

The mythology of meat is well marbled with machismo.

I’ll just leave that one there, shall I?

Baby bangs. // The clap-off bra. When time is short. // The $6 foot-long black hotdog. // Ways to say “beer.” // A brief history of wiretapping. // Swing of note. // Japanese schoolgirl with an electromechanical exoskeleton. // How to make slime. // Waterspout, Florida. // How clothes should fit. // Cat wedding, 1914. // Alfred Hitchcock explains the MacGuffin. // It’s a law, like gravity. // Attention UFO enthusiasts. // New York’s summer of ’69. // A stylish radiophonograph. // Frank Zappa plays the bicycle. (h/t, Coudal) // Piglet, ice cream and parasol. // And Kate reminds us why San Francisco’s public transport is second to none. 

While we cower in the shadow of Laurie Penny’s mind, here’s another bite-size agony for our ongoing series: 

The article Laurie finds so inspiring – Racism is to White People as Wind is to the Sky – can be found here. Its profundities include,

Brace yourselves, people, I’m elevating the tone and it’s a steep incline. Prepare to weep with delight as your very soul is embiggened. Thanks, of course, to our old friend the “much praised” Bulgarian performance artist Mr Ivo Dimchev, whose theatrical stylings, “impressive physical idiom” and “gripping sensitivity” have thrilled us previously. Here, we turn to Mr Dimchev’s epic 75-minute collaboration with sculptor and fellow artistic titan Mr Franz West. The project, titled X-ON, features the bare-breasted gyrations of Yen Yi-Tzu, Veronika Zott, Christian Bakalov and of course Mr Dimchev, who also had a hand in the musical score and whose talents clearly extend beyond mere human measurement. The piece – of which the video below is, sadly, but a small taste – will be featured at the Vienna International Dance Festival on Sunday July 21st, and is summarised thusly:

Dressed only in high heels and sumptuously decorated panties, bald-headed and endowed with the voice of an opera singer, the queer diva Lili Handel moves about and manipulates sculptures by the famous Austrian artist Franz West. And three figures, who are tourists at first but then mutate into muse-like creatures, dance with her to the spherical and powerful music by Philipp Quehenberger. According to Ivo Dimchev – alias Lili Handel – the point is not “to find ways to accommodate West’s works to the dancers’ bodies and the stage but to find out in what way ideas of the theatre, of music and of the performative body must adapt and transform themselves to establish contact with these sculptures.”

Unlike in his previous offering, Mr Dimchev doesn’t masturbate with a wig. He does, however, extract some of his own blood before smearing it on a chair. So there’s that. Yes, I know. You’re champing at the bit, itching to become one with the cultural elite. And stocked up on liquor, I hope. So. On with the show…