“Amélie loves beans!” My oldest daughter, Jovie, tells me.

“That’s right! She does!” I respond. “She is an old-school beaner!”

I had this conversation at our house in front of a friend we had invited to have Mexican food with us.

My wife hates it when I say this, which is often because my daughter does love beans!!!

Beaners is not that bad of a word. Is it?

It’s okay. It’s okay. Ave Maria purisima sin pecado concebido tranquilos que yo soy tan latino como la chancleta con la que mi mama me pegaba cuando la decepcionaba y me daba para los panderos asi pa pa pa pa.

Or in English, “It’s okay. I’m Latino.”

I was recently thinking of slurs you can use against Latinos like me, and I couldn’t think of a word that was as bad as what the N-word is for the African American community.

They exist, but they don’t seem that bad to me.

Nobody knows what spic means. The generation of bigots who knew what this word meant have retired and did not focus on a proper transfer of hateful knowledge.

Wetback could mean you like going on swims or that if you take showers, you wet your back, and if you are not wetting your back, then you are doing something wrong.

Mexican when you are not Mexican (which is just so you know, almost all Latinos are not Mexican) is just a nationality, or it could mean that you can grow a bad-ass mustache.

I guess the worst of all of them is beaners.

But why is that slur?

Beans are delicious!

The only reason that word upsets me is because it reminds me I can’t digest beans as if I’m not as Latino enough.

I love beans, but beans don’t love me back. If I make an advance on beans, they will cancel my Saturday night because it is unrequited love. I’m just saying that if legumes organize and take their grievances to social media, I would be canceled by the #beanstoo movement.

Maybe words don’t upset me as much as they upset other people.

Do you want to know what upsets me?

The bigger things in life, like customer service.

I don’t believe the customer is always right, but it seems as though the pendulum has swung the complete opposite way to the customer is always wrong.

I remember one time I ordered pizza. I love meat, so I ordered a half-Hawaiian/half-meat-lovers. I had friends over who are vegan. So I ordered for them a pizza without cheese and without meat. Or as I like to call a “Chicago Deepression Pie”.

When I picked up the pizzas, I checked them and saw they had a full Hawaiian and a half-meat-lovers/half-P-sad.

I asked the clerk what happened, and she attacked me, saying that was how I ordered it.

“Here is how I know this is not true,” I responded, “The people coming over to eat wouldn’t want their veggies commingling with my animal carcasses. But let’s, for a second, assume I’m wrong, which I’m not; it didn’t seem weird to you to be writing an order for a pizza half-community garden/half-burial site.

It’s okay to make mistakes, but it’s not okay to attack others for the ones we likely made.

Another way you can trigger me (that’s right: TRIGGER me!) is by including green beans in my meals.

Green beans are truly the worst. They taste horrible, and restaurants want to put them in everything because they are a cheap filler; adding five cents worth of green beans can create a lot of volume in dishes.

Some people like to call them haricot vert. Maybe they think that if they make them French, we would believe somehow they don’t taste like soap and stubborn food residue.

You can put a beret on them, you can give them a pencil-thin mustache, you can give them skinny jeans and a smoking habit, and I will still know what you are up to, and I will not eat them because they are inedible and should be illegal.

One day, I called a restaurant to place a pick-up order. The one thing I asked for was “hold the green beans.”

It was a particularly tough day at work, so I just picked up my order and left. I got home and opened my container, and you would’ve thought I asked for extra green beans. It was chock-full of green beans, which is a good adjective because I’d rather be choked than eat green beans.

I looked at the container and screamed dramatically and loudly, “I cannot deal with this right now!”

My then-girlfriend was there and patiently picked all the green beans out of my meal.

That girlfriend became my wife, and I don’t really understand why she agreed to marry me.

From all the dating advice I’ve read, women make subconscious decisions about who to marry based on how protected they feel. It goes back to prehistoric times when cavewomen needed to pick a caveman that would protect their progeny in case of a bear attack.

I look at a container full of legumes, and I want to fucking lose my mind.

I feel bad because I think, somehow, I tricked her subconscious.

I don’t know what will happen if we do run into a bear. Maybe I’ll tell the old runner’s joke, “I don’t need to run faster than the bear; I just need to run faster than you, hehe,” as I speed away!

What I do know is that because she gave me that pass, I will forever be committed to her as we raise little beaners of our own.