Not-So Brave Days

If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you probably have the impression that I am a hard-assed, super aggressive, hyper judgmental, argumentative person who is pretty much a pitbull to deal with anytime someone does something to irritate or disagree with me, and that really isn’t true. In fact, there aren’t all that many circumstances where I get ballistic. Most of the arguments I have with other people are had in my head after the true confrontation occurs, because there are so few situations where arguing actually benefits me. This blog (and others) has long been an outlet for me to let loose about all the things I hold inside when I stand there and take it from someone I wish I didn’t have to take it from. Being that I’m a nobody at work, and a nobody in my family, and a nobody in society, I take a lot from a lot of people who I’d really rather go off on, and that is why I have written blogs for so long. It keeps me from getting fired, kicked out of other people’s homes, arrested, or beat up by people stronger or too smelly for me to fight back.

You don’t believe me, I’m guessing. You’re thinking that my sarcastic and scathing words here cannot stay in my head without being unleashed occasionally, and it’s true, occasionally I do go off in a way that is more brutal than some of the meanest people I know can handle. That’s just because I save it up for so long and have fights with people in my head so many times before I actually speak up for myself.

It’s not just about confrontations. I’m pretty spineless in most situations. Ann likens this to having brave days and not-so brave days. That sounds much better than the spinelessness I attribute to myself on so many occasions.

For instance, I can relate some recent examples as proof.

Ann and I planned this big shopping trip to the Milwaukee Public Market a couple months ago. It was a big trip and we planned it weeks in advance, researching, saving money, etc. I pictured a true farmers market event in an indoor building, which thrilled me to no end because I’m a lover of farmers markets, but pushing through crowds in the blinding sun of a summer afternoon is something I despise. This indoor market sounded awesome.

We drove all the way up to Milwaukee, only to find that the free parking lot was full, so we had to drive around, getting a little bit turned-around and lost on the one-way streets, until we found street parking with parking meters. Ann and I fed the meter all our quarters, giving us 2 hours inside the market, and we actually thought we’d run out of time and have to return to feed the meter more. Unfortunately, this was not to be true. Instead, we found the market to be an upscale, yuppified collection of frou-frou food vendors, with only one solitary produce stand that had the exact same food that I can get at the local grocery store, complete with the same brand names on the packages. However, it was all very nearly twice the grocery store cost. Still, I bought a bundle of asparagus, some green beans, a bunch of bananas and a quart of strawberries for over $20. Then I bought a small, 8-inch coffee cake for another $9. On the way out, we bought lunch. I had a very small vegan sandwich with mozzarella cheese, tomatoes and a pesto sauce, and a root beer for another $10. Ann got a baked potato and a bottled water for $8. We left and felt a bit ripped off, particularly when we realized we’d only used up 20 minutes inside.

Here we were, in Milwaukee, a half-tank of gas gone, $40 out of my pocket for a ridiculously small amount of food, and an hour and forty minutes left on the meter for us to play. We went back to the car to drop off our bag (bag, singular: $40 for one bag of stuff I could’ve gotten at Jewel for under $25), and while we were sitting in the car, we looked up and down the streets to see if there were stores nearby in which we could at least window shop. While we were gazing in all directions, looking for somewhere else to go, I noticed someone in a truck had pulled up next to and behind my car, clearly waiting for our spot, assuming we were leaving.

I said disappointedly to Ann, “Uh-oh, someone’s waiting for our spot.”

She responded, reading my mind, “I guess we have to go.”

I concurred, “I guess so,” and without a second thought, I pulled the car out and left, allowing some stranger to take my spot, though I wasn’t done with it, and use up the hour and forty minutes of free parking we left behind. For some reason, it didn’t occur to us that we were entitled to stay.

Later we laughed about it, particularly because we had no idea what to do in Milwaukee after that and simply drove home. How pathetic is that?! All the way to Milwaukee to blow way too much money, vacate our parking spot before we were ready to leave, all in 20 minutes, and go straight home. We might as well have gone to the riverboat and gambled most of our money away, only to hand our winnings off to the next person waiting to gamble because we thought we had to.

A couple weeks later, Ann and I were dining at a Culver’s, and, as usual, we sat in the restaurant for three hours after eating, talking and shooting the bull. Eventually we got hungry again and discussed placing another order, getting some ice cream before they closed, but Ann suggested we go to Coldstone Creamery, which she preferred. We hopped in the car and drove a few blocks to Coldstone. By then it was 9:30 at night and the folks inside Coldstone looked like they were cleaning up and ready to go home. The sign on the door said they were open until 10, but Ann and I were hesitant to go inside.

She said, “Look at them. They’re all cleaned up and it looks like they are just waiting to go home. We can come back another time. I don’t want to bother them.”

I very nearly agreed with her because I was thinking the exact same thing, and then I remembered the Milwaukee experience.

I sternly said, “Wait a minute! We gave up our parking spot before we were ready to leave just because someone else wanted to use it!”

She started to giggle. She knew where I was going.

I continued, “Coldstone is open until 10:00, and we still have a half-hour to get ice cream, whether they want to go home or not! We’re getting ice cream!”

And we did. And it was good. And the boys inside were not angry with us for wanting ice cream.

This is something we were relating to Christi and Marina tonight, because often we do not have brave days. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve eaten food at a restaurant that I never ordered, forcing it down and paying for it, despite the fact that I ordered something completely different and someone got it totally wrong. I do not complain. I do not send food back. I eat what I’m given.

Then Christi told a story, and Ann and I decided we need a little Christi on our shoulders, whispering in our ears, to empower us when we’re having not-so brave days.

Christi and her boyfriend recently went to Wendy’s, and Christi, who is a recovering vegetarian, ordered a single-stack hamburger, but instead received a double-stack. This was way too much meat for a recently-vegan girl to take and she reacted. Strongly.

Barely able to form words, she began the high-pitched squealing, slamming her fists, yelling about wanting a single-stack, getting a double-stack, and the idiots who gave her way too much meat. Hair was flying, fury was growing, and our sweet Miss Christi pulled the extra hamburger patty off of her sandwich and violently wadded it up in a ball with her bare hands, all the while yelling about getting the wrong hamburger. She looked at her boyfriend and warned him not to laugh or she would lose it, and I contested that she already had lost it. But what she did next was the best part. She took the wadded up patty of greasy meat and flung it out the window of the car on her boyfriend’s side. Only, his window wasn’t open as she thought, and the burger slapped against the window and dripped down the glass in a large smear of grease.

Christi’s boyfriend said, “Wow. All that for a hamburger?” and then the humor of her extreme reaction became realized.

I think I need to start flinging hamburgers at windows, too. Maybe I wouldn’t need to blog, then.

I Did It!

Finally! I've been working all weekend on this and it's finally done!

If you're interested in reading about our adventures on the trip, you can click the picture below to read my travel blog.



Or, if you're not really into reading all the silly stories about our goofy antics, feel free to visit the following Tabblo pages of just photos.

And, now I can finally get a good night of sleep again. Whew!

...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.