Days Off

There are so many little things irritating me right now that I simply must get a couple of them out.

This morning I made a trip to a local bead store to pick up copper crimp beads, and while the clerk was ringing me up, her phone rang. Obviously, I could only hear her side of the conversation, but I was getting quite ticked-off on her behalf. What I heard went something like this.

We do allow children at the classes. Anyone eight and over.

Eight. Eight is the age minimum.

No, they’re very stern about that. It’s a hard and fast rule – no exceptions.

Well, maybe, but most kids that age just don’t have –

Uh-huh, but –

No. I’m sorry. She’d have to be eight years old.

Yes, that’s the bottom line. It’s a very strict rule.

Okaaaaaaaay…

No, they won’t tell you any different. We all teach and we all have agreed on the age of eight. It’s non-negotiable.

Well, that’s your right.

Goodb—

She then looked at me with wide eyes, holding the phone away, and clearly the caller hung up on her. I fully expected her to tell me that the mother (because only a mother would do that shit) was trying to get the rules bent for a 7-year-old, or maybe a really, really dexterous and obedient 6-year-old (is that an oxymoron?), but it turns out, the demanding mother wanted to enroll her 4-year-old in beading classes.

My reaction was far more goaded than the clerk’s was, and I hit her with some automatic spray of rhetorical questions and comments like this.

Four-year-olds can’t even color inside the lines!

They can’t sit still at a table for more than a few minutes!

What are you supposed to do with this kid?

They can’t even play with the little Legos yet! They still have the big blocks! How are they supposed to handle tiny, little beads? And needles! And wire!

Don’t they eat everything they play with at that age still?

I mean, how miserable would that class be for everyone else?!

Then I calmed down. You know, I’m starting to get a chip on my shoulder when it comes to moms. What is it about them that makes them think they can inflict their spawn on everyone else now that the country doesn’t believe in using discipline anymore? I really miss the days of being able to whack your kid, because I don’t remember this shit happening when I was little. Some parents really make the world a worse place.



Last night I had to make an emergency trip to a local department store to pick up an emergency replacement of my favorite casserole dish, which was killed by someone in my household, and I had nothing to cook my emergency spinach and artichoke dip in. When I was leaving the store, there was a man at a podium-like stand, harassing passersby about registering to vote. While I’m all for registering people, the last thing I want is someone using car-salesman tactics on the public for this. It’s off-putting and obnoxious, and I seem to be uber sensitive to obnoxiousness right now. However, I thought I’d be nice to him and ask how things were going, which he just kind of shrugged off.

Though there were no people coming in or going out of the doors, he didn’t seem to want to talk to me at all, and he didn’t look me in the eye when I spoke to him or when he gave me his aloof answers. When he succeeded in giving me the hint that he wasn’t up for chatting, I started to walk away, and then he started talking to my back. I turned around to face him from 15 feet away, and he kept talking, like suddenly he was in the mood. What the fuck?

So we chatted. Or, I should say, he did.

This explains things. He’s one of those people who doesn’t like to listen, but really likes to be heard. Blah.

It went something like this:

Him: We’ve had about 22 people today, so I guess that’s okay. You practically have to hit people over the head to get them to register.

Me: I’m all in favor of hitting people over the head at any opportunity.

Him: Pshaw! They should be begging me to register them! They shouldn’t have to be forced to do this.

I was wondering why he forces people, but I think this is just his super aggressive personality exaggerating. And maybe it’s easier to behave this way with strangers when you won’t look them in the eye. He was still constantly scanning the parking lot for people coming in rather than dealing with the person in front of him. I think this was indicative of his main personality flaw – unable to deal with what’s in front of him and constantly gauging the future.

Me: We are lucky if we do two a day at the library.

Him: What library do you work at?

I told him and he said “Pshaw” again, as if he wouldn’t deign to grace us with his presence. He uses a neighboring library. That’s probably better for us.

Him: So, how is your library, really?

Me: It’s nice. I’m pretty proud of it.

Him: No, honestly. Tell me. What’s it really like?

Has he heard about my blog? What’s up with this?

Me: Honestly, I think it’s a great little library.

And that’s the truth, folks. Because there are some people working there who make it truly priceless. Unappreciated universally, but priceless nonetheless. And I’m particularly fond of my little library right now because someone had the brilliant idea to use actual toilet paper in the bathrooms, instead of the pathetic membranous tissue that replaced the butcher paper. My hoo-hoo is happy again, particularly now that the steroids have me dehydrated, so I drink nonstop and pee about once every 90 minutes. As long as there’s real toilet paper, my love of my library will be true. (See what a cheap date I am?) (And I do realize that now that I’ve pointed this out, someone will take the expensive toilet paper away from us and I’ll be back to paper-cutting my labia with butcher paper five times a day, but until then… happy!)

Him: Well, I’ve never been there because I just figure you won’t have much. Like, do you have movies?

Me: Um, yeah, thousands.

Him: Really? But I mean DVDs. Newer ones.

Me: Yeah! We have a ton. We have for as long as they’ve been available for people to buy. We also have a new collection of video games coming out, which most libraries don’t have, and we –

Him (condescendingly): I don’t care about that. What’s your history and biography section like?

Me: Um, what are you looking for?

Him (annoyed): Just… whatever, history.

Me: Well, it’s two full aisles long, and the aisles are two-sided and the length of half the building. Give or take.

Him: Hmmm…

Me: I can’t really explain it to you. You’d have to come and –

Him: I go to another library.

Me: Okay. I’m sure that’s just fine for your needs. Keep going there.

Was that too overt? GOD, I wanna say this to people at the library all the damn time. I figured it was okay to say this to him outside of work because I’d already talked up my cool little library, and the truth was I didn’t want this self-centered asshole fouling up my workplace. There are enough self-centered people in the world. I don’t have room for any more right now. I’m at critical-fucking-mass!

Him: Maybe I’ll stop by.

Oh, you fucking fuckface! That’s what sells you? Telling you NOT to do something? Piece of shit! How about I tell you not to look at me when you talk to me? Oh, wait! I’ll just retrace my steps.

Me: Good, you should stop by!

Him: Yeah, since I’ll be mayor in April.

Me: Oh you will?

Him: Yeah, I’m going to be the next mayor.

Me: Where?

So I can start the campaign against you, you miserable, eye-avoiding, pompous burro.

Him: Here.

Me: Right here? My town?

Him: Yep. I’ll be taking over in April.

Me: Ah. Good luck with that.

Him: Don’t need luck.

Me: Uh-huh. Okay, well, see ya.

Him: Nice talking with you.

Me: Uh-huh.

SONOFABITCH! Doesn’t it figure? He’s a small-time, wannabe, local politician, who isn’t even elected to anything right now. No wonder he was so full of himself and incapable of listening to or looking at people. What can you possibly see and hear if you don’t look and listen? And how do you expect to lead the people if you can’t even look at them? Fucking asswipe.

And I should point out that registrars are supposed to be completely impartial and should not be campaigning while registering. Some might argue that he wasn’t trying to win my vote, just stating that he had the election in the bag, but it takes a real dickhead to handle himself in this way, while doing this particular job. In fact, I think he succeeded in campaigning against himself just by being himself. Nice work, butthead. I don’t care what ticket you run on or what ideals you purport. I’m voting for whomever your opponent is.

And yeah, I’ve gotten to that point after living in Blagojevich’s Illinois for a few years. I’ve come to realize that just because I’m a Democrat and he’s a Democrat, doesn’t mean I will ever vote a straight ticket again. OH HELLS NO! I’ve had enough of the assholes who happen to be on the same side of the fence as me. Not that Illinois has a history of honorable politicians, red or blue, but if he cuts one more social program and raises tolls one more time, I’m going to lose my goddamn mind. And then I won’t be able to get professional help because he cut it all, which is just as well because I can’t afford to travel to see anyone on the malignantly dilapidated and fucked-up roadways that never, ever improve, but just continue to cost us more to use. Sigh.


This is what happens when I have days off work. I run into people. I don’t like people. I need to spend more time without people.

Vacation starts October 3. My vacationitis is acting up. Maybe I’ll have to install a countdown timer again, just to give myself peace of mind.

Apostrophes

Marina and I were exchanging instant messages today while she was at the reference desk, and I was trying to help her help a patron who was requesting some unusual information. During the conversation, she was explaining something in the text and included a portion in parentheses, but she never ended it with the last parenthesis. She immediately apologized, which I thought was funny. There are some people who are far too conscientious about their typos, but I thought I’d give her a hard time anyway, telling her that parenthetical conversations that go on forever wear me out. So she gave me my “)” so I could relax.

This led to a series of complaints that far too often, people will use abbreviations, contractions or acronyms with things that deserve to be spelled out, but they will stick apostrophes in words where they are not needed. There seems to be a new version of the word your, which is either spelled UR, or you’re, for random reasons. HATE THIS! But the worst offender is the apostrophe-S. Plurals have apostrophes now. No, they’re not supposed to, but I’m finding no one even tries to be correct, and whenever there is an S on the end of a word, they just put an apostrophe before it.

There is a subdivision near my house, and they commissioned a huge stone with the name of the subdivision carved into it, which might have looked classy if it wasn’t proofread by a fucking moron. The finished boulder had read “Northern Pine’s of Illinois”. Duh. Carved, I should say again. It stayed that way for many months, and then someone recently came in and patched the apostrophe over with some similarly shaded putty. However, the big boulder now reads, “Northern Pine s of Illinois.” Lovely. It seems to me that this kind of crap didn’t happen so often before the proclivity of instant messages and texting, which makes me think that the world is forgetting how to use the language properly, even though they’re using written words more.

Being a gigantic bitch, I’ve decided to make fun of the idiots who know not where to put apostrophes, even though that’s elementary school subject matter. I’ve decided that every time there is an S in a word, it will automatically get an apostrophe first.

That’s a lot of ‘S’s, people.

What end’s up happening here i’s that word’s look foreign. It’s almo’st pretty. ‘So, I’m going to go with thi’s. At lea’st for the time being. Becau’se making fun of apo’strophe’s i’s almo’st a’s much fun a’s making fun of the people who have no idea what to do with them. It’s ‘shocking to me becau’se it’s not that difficult. And if we u’sed them correctly, we’d hardly u’se them at all. Particularly when you compare with u’sing them before each ‘S, which i’s getting a bit ridiculou’s. It make’s more ‘sen’se to ju’st not u’se them at all.

Thi’s make’s me wonder if apo’strophe-abu’ser’s would even notice.

And how ironic if they were to ‘speak up and point out the mi’su’se of the apo’strophe’s.

Then again, I think I might ju’st be ‘shooting my’self in the foot, wearing out my apo’strophe key on a point that can’t be under’stood by tho’se who need to under’stand it mo’st.

...We'd All Have Old Bicycles

Boyfriend Extraordinaire had a bicycle that he was selling, and given that it’s a popular line of bikes and of the mountain bike genus, it’s fairly difficult to gauge how old it is. He guessed, based on wear and style, that the bike was about 4 years old. So, given what he knew and what he guessed at, he placed an ad for the bike, complete with photo and as many details as he could.

Right away, someone emailed him about the bike, only this was not an interested buyer, but a self-appointed fact-checker of the Internet. The guy, in a very hostile manner, demanded Boyfriend Extraordinaire change his ad, because this guy said he had a bike that looked identical to this one, which was at least 8 years ago, and he estimated the bike to be more like 20 years old.

At first, B.E. was a little concerned. Could it really be 20 years old? He started doing a little research about it and inconclusively decided that he wasn’t going to be able to find out the exact age of this bicycle, so he left the ad alone.

Not long after, he received another email from the hostile guy, who reiterated the age of the bike was wrong and told B.E. he had to change the ad.

By now, B.E. was getting irritated. How can anyone, who is also guessing at the age, demand that his guess is better and send such emails to a stranger? People have a lot of nerve what they ask of others in this world, under the false pretense that they are righter than anyone else. It’s another reason why Web 2.0 infuriates me so.

Don’t get me wrong. I love receiving the comments and feedback from my readers after I write a post, but have you ever read a news article online that has opened itself up to reader comments? Dear Spaghetti Monster, people are not only vicious, but they’re fucking stoopit!

There was a murder recently in my town, and it was in an area with low income renters of every possible nationality. One of the commenters said that the article needed to identify the race of the victim so that reader could know if he should care about the dead guy. This sparked a veritable war of comments where some claimed that you should be colorblind, and others insisted that race was a factor in whether or not the murder was worthy of their attention. Sadly, this was a claim made by people of multiple races. What a horrific end to this horrific story!

The same thing happens on the police blotter. If there is a police response of any kind that involves someone with a Hispanic-sounding last name, commenters go hog-wild insisting that this person be deported under the pretense than anyone with an Hispanic-sounding name is an illegal or unworthy of living in this country. Even if it was a speeding ticket listed in the blotter, people responded this way, or worse, when the Latino name was one of the victims. Absolutely no compassion.

It’s not just racism. I have seen with my own eyes that when someone posts a picture of him/herself online, it’s like half the globe thinks this is an invitation to pretend like you’ve lost 100 IQ points and are now part of some radio shock jock challenge to come up with the most creative insult. Even on seemingly peaceful photo sites, I’ve read comments by people who will rip others to shreds for posting a character picture of a homeless guy, or even a kid with crooked teeth. On YouTube, it’s as if every 12-year-old with security issues and bad spelling skilz has made it their mission to find every video uploaded and leave a shitty comment about it. I uploaded a video of some birds squawking, and I misidentified them as plovers when they were actually killdeers. JEEBUS, you’d have thought I deemed them “Yo mamma!” People left me the nastiest corrections in my comments. And one was not enough. Even when three or four people had pointed out that the bird was wrong, others would still add to it in their own shitty way. What the hell? I had to go through and delete the comments, and then more showed up! Finally, I turned off the comments altogether. The more I deal with people, the more certain I am that not only is there no god, but if I was a god, I’d be ashamed to call the human race my creation.

I am really starting to hate the Internet.

B.E. gets comments like this about ads he places all the time. Everyone feels like their opinion should count for something, but frankly, it doesn’t. He’s wise beyond his years and doesn’t respond to it unless it’s racist garbage, and then he does something else, like put up an ad that makes fun of racists. He doesn’t respond directly to people. He doesn’t email them his opinion and state it as fact. He gets it. He really gets that by and large, people suck, and sometimes you have to be above it.

This was tested when he received his third email from this jamoke, who was now so livid that the ad hadn’t changed to reflect his own guess at the age of the bike, that he was accusing B.E. of intentionally defrauding the potential buyers (and he was not a potential buyer, but a nosy ad reader). Well, B.E. could take no more. We talked about what a retard this guy was, but we also sat down and invested some real time in researching this line of bikes. Guess what. It only began 12 years ago, so there was no way the bike chould be 20 years old. Also, the design hadn’t changed one iota in those 12 years, so this bike might be as old as 12, but given the condition and lack of wear and tear, it was just as good as a bike that was 4 years old.

I asked B.E. what he was going to do. I sincerely expected him to bombard the asshat with corrected information about this particular bike, proving the guy wrong and calling him a bunch of names in between the facts. That’s what I would’ve done, which is likely why of late I've been suffering with anxiety, insomnia and high blood pressure.

B.E. is much more civilized. He said he was not going to respond directly to this guy, wasn’t going to address him in any way, but he was going to place the ad again and change the age of the bike in the ad to say that it was 400 years old. No sincere buyer would ever believe it was 400 years old, and B.E. could laugh it off and say it was a typo, which should’ve read that it was about 4 years old instead of 400.

I was still angry and I didn’t think it was enough. I thought the moron should be made to suffer the words of an eloquent and scathing response, which surely would’ve created an email war of epic proportions. At some point, I’d report the guy as spam and be done with him. This concept of trying to poke fun at the guy by making the bike so old that it was not to be believed seemed too, I don’t know, subtle, or too suave. This was not something that needed a delicate hand. This was something that needed a brutal, cerebral blow!

Once again, I was wrong.

The ad for the 400-year-old bike was a success on all fronts. Not only did B.E. swiftly sell the bike for the asking price without so much as a comment from the buyer about the typo in the ad, but the dickhead who sent him three emails demanding the age be altered actually sent him another email, and this time he said that the ad was funny and he apologized for his previous emails.

WHAT THE FUCK?

People don’t back down. People don’t apologize. People don’t realize they were shitheads. What’s this? What’s this anomaly? What is this event that has caused a black hole in my image of society and driven doubt and optimism into a chasm that was happily chock-full of pessimism and misanthropy? What the fuck?

And so, this week I’ve learned that some of the meanest, most imposing personalities can actually respond well to a slight nudge rather than being beat about the head with more insults, the likes of which probably made them into what they are. And I’d like to add that I am likely one of the mean, imposing personalities of which I speak, but I don’t step into other people’s lives to deliver my worthless opinions about whatever it is that sparks me up. Nope, I blog about it and use my words to purge myself of my fury. But that doesn’t solve problems and it just makes others defensive. Now I get it. A 400-year-old bike makes a good argument for taking a step back, coasting for a while, and not taking things too personally. No one’s perfect, not even close, and I’m doing myself more harm than good by being ready to pounce on people when they piss me off, which they do constantly. I need a 400-year-old bike. For my own well-being.

And so, that’s what I’m going to do. Coast for a little while on my ageless bike.