“Shut that kid up or I’ll shut her up for you.”
For those of you who have ever tried to imagine what kind of person might slap a stranger’s crying 2 year-old daughter in a Wal-Mart … now you don’t have to.
I bet this asshole thought people would cheer for him or something.
This is HarperCollins’ cover for a new printing of Wuthering Heights. For real. I really would like to comment on this, but … it just makes me feel exhausted. We just couldn’t stop at life-size ‘Edward’ silhouette wall posters and glittery vampire dildos, could we?
Aw GOD-DAMMIT. Just… stop. Just STOP IT PEOPLE! It’s BAD writing!
I was once told by a friend of mine that, while attempting to purchase a burritto from Chipotle, he was forced to wait in line for ten minutes while the customer in front of him forced the people working the burritto assembly line to stop, get a manager, and wait while he complained that the burritomatons behind the counter weren’t being “courteous enough”.
I see this sort of thing with alarming regularity, and while I understand the frusteration that people have to deal with in terms of rude, unhelpful, frequently unsanitary customer service personell in all realms of the feild, I think when things like this begin to happen, that we’re forgetting that there is a time and place for everything. Unless someone in the burritto machine is pulling things directly out of their pants to serve on your burritto, I feel your complaints should be saved until you’ve reached the end of the line and can speak to a manager privately.
I have to go to the post office daily, to get my offices mail. Once there, I have to stand in front of a large, blue, two part door and press a little buzzer until the employees of that particular cave decide to grace me with their presence. It feels a little like the entrance to The Emerald City, except instead of a rude little man with a funny moustache, it’s one of six or seven people who have never quite fully mastered the English language and who, regardless of how many times I show up, day after day, to do exactly the same thing, have to ask me what I want. Then they vanish again.
The time I spend waiting varies, but on average I would say it’s roughly between ten and fifteen minutes, though it has been, on some occassions, as long as twenty to thirty.
One time, Werner Herzog was there to get his mail. He got angry at the amount of time we were being forced to wait, and demanded to see the manager, which made us all have to wait longer and made the employees even more unpleasent than usual. At first, I wanted to rush up to the people that were sass talking this director who I admired and scream, “Don’t you know who this is? This man spent years in the jungle making a movie! THIS MAN IS AN ARTIST YOU CHARLATANS!!!!!” and shake them about until I was forced to leave. Then I realized that I come here every day and deal with this same shit, and despite many times when I’ve been perfectly capable, in my head, of murdering another human being in a frenzy of blood, fingernails, and postage, I’ve never lost my cool with these people.
Then I imagined Werner Herzog, holding up the line at a Chipotle. And I though, “Fuck you, Werner. Wait for your mail like everybody else. There’s air conditioning in here, which automatically makes it better than the jungle.”
I felt better after that.
This, also, is a good song. By a caucasian rapping fellow.
“Alpine Farmers Furious over Marmot Plague”
It looks like those marmots are eating PB&J with the crusts cut off. This is the most adorable plague ever.
You seem to be forgetting the kitten plague of Derby Yarn Factory.
So, my dad is a good, good man. I love him to death, and he’s never been anything but great to me.
That said, he’s one step away from being a good-old-boy. He’s an ex-Marine, ex-cop, and generally the majority of his views are diametrically opposed to mine. If we had lived together since I was seven, I figure we probably would have fought a lot at some point. And this is true of a lot of my dads family. So, it was sort of a shock to me when I found out, when I was about fifteen, that they were friends with some of the old-money-richingest, fancy-pants dressingest, tea-and-crumpets families in Texas. They got invited to their annual Christmas party, which none other than former President George Bush Sr. would attend regularly. I met him once. He shook my hand and was very polite.
But I was still mostly a kid, so I didn’t want to walk around and canoodle with adults through the whole party, trying to choke down beluga and avoid knocking over ming vases that were probably worth more than I could pay off with a lifetime of indentured servitude, so I hung around in the arcade.
Oh, right, also, their house had an arcade.
Lots of these party guests had kids, and since there were so many effing parties, (You ever read The Great Gadspy? Seriously, you could wander around this house for a week and just keep finding people that had been hanging out.) people had to have a place to stick their kids. So they stuck em down there.
I had never been very good at fighting games, especially in an arcade platform, but I got busy playing Street Fighter while the other kids huddled around some sports game that I had no interest in. I was doing pretty good when this one kid who couldn’t have been more than five or six wanders over and slaps the player two button and joins in. I was mildly pissed at the interruption when I was doing so well, but figured I could whup his ass in the game rather than backhanding him in real life. Silly me. I beat the little bastard to a pulp, and as my character did his victory dance over the still-twitching, ruined corpse of the kids Blanka, I loomed over him to see what thought about interrupting other people in the middle of a streak.
“I won, right?”
Ah. Okay. He was retarded. I felt sort of bad, all of a sudden.
“Yeah, right. Yeah, you won. Good job, man.”
I gave him the old, patronizing pat on the back and turned back to the game, only to have him, once again, slap the button. I sighed, resigned to having to destroy the poor, poor fool once more, hoping he would get the point eventually.
This happened ten times in a row. Each time, the child was convinced he had won.
I was, of course, frusterated. If one is going to have to fight the same opponent over and over, you want it to be suspenseful. You want a challenge. Or, at least, you want acknowledgement of the fact that you slammed their ass like a school locker. This was providing neither. And yet, that poor, stupid, likely spoiled rotten kid looked so happy to have won, I couldn’t deprive him of it.
“Good game man. I’ll have to practice harder, for next time.”
I instantly felt gratified. I had done something nice to someone, with absolutely nothing to gain from it. It was a rare opportunity, and I think about it, obviously, to this day.
However, the more I think about it, fuck that kid.
Seriously, he didn’t earn a goddamn thing. His parents, on the way home that night, probably bought him, a video game store just so they could open it up and buy him video games, and then probably paid a maid to lose to the kid over and over again. I should have known better. The moment I won that first round, I should have pounded on the machine and crotch-thrusted that kids hopes of easy victory into a jagged pile of shattered dream-dust.
As I said, my father was a marine, and a cop. He’s a tough guy. And he loves me. But he would have kicked my ass at a video game, and called me a pussy for getting beat so easily, if he didn’t think video games were designed specifically for asthmatic, hemopheliac girls.
And god bless him for that.
So, that’s what I’m watching. And doing laundry. And not writing. Not writing is what takes up most of my time lately.
The parkour feels good, and it’s getting me to work out more regularly. Oh, right, I’m doing parkour now. Once a week. Convinced Kevin to take a class with me last week and he’s determined to come as often as possible.
New fictional role-model: Spider Jerusalem.
New favorite term (from a lady): Chunky period.
More. Soon.
Been a while. I still don’t take or view nearly enough pictures or interesting internet things to be on here, mainly sticking to the same few sites and minimal poking around, and yet I keep coming back, time after time, hoping it might eventually stick and that I can straddle one more bandwagon.
It’s Wednesday. I’m going to go buy some comic books.
