Tuesday, August 24, 2010

If I Have to Be Thinking About It, You Have To Be Thinking About It

I could have happily lived out my day in bliss without anyone saying, "I don't trust anything that bleeds for 7 days and doesn't die." I really, really wish I HAD gone all day without hearing it.

My respect for one of my co-workers just hit rock bottom and started digging for China.

***
In other things I wish I could un-know, someone (you know who you are...I'll be kind and not name names this time...KELLY) passed on a tidbit of information that makes self-immolation seem like a reasonable way to pass the time.

Did you know there is a Twilight themed vibrator? That you are supposed to put in the freezer? So the experience is very much like actually doing a dead guy?

On the one hand, I really want to know WHO and WHY. On the other hand, please let me never have to know who OR why.

***

Someone out there has the job of determining how much your body parts are worth. They determine how much money you get if you lose a finger (depends on how much of the finger you lose), a hand, an arm, a leg, or any combination thereof.

Friday, August 20, 2010

This Week in Things That Are Annoying Me...

Its that time when things are starting to piss me off for no good reason. Just to vent a little (so I don't explode at the wrong time), here is a list of things that are annoying me this week.

1. Can we all agree that its really time to stop promoting Romeo and Juliet, Wuthering Heights, and just about anything by Nicholas Sparks as "romance"?

Romeo and Juliet: Why its Not a Romance

Romeo and Juliet are 13. 5 minutes before seeing Juliet for the first time Romeo is desperately, madly, hopelessly, unendingly in love with Rosaline. After Romeo sees Juliet this girl's name is never mentioned again. Which should give you a clue how Shakespeare intended us to view ol' Romeo. He is clearly, CLEARLY, incredibly fickle. Romeo and Juliet spend approximately 10 minutes in each other's company before deciding they would rather die than live without each other. Then they kill themselves. What about any of that strikes people as romantic? I am pretty sure that if I dug up a ouija board and attempted to contact the spirit of Shakespeare and asked him, "Is Romeo and Juliet a romance?" His response would be, "What are you, fucking nuts?"

It's a tragedy people. Please stop sighing over how romantic it is.

Wuthering Heights

Evil, controlling psychopath meets the most selfish twat ever to be committed to paper and then published. If the two of them had actually ended up together (which, they could have, if Catherine didn't love money and status more than she loved Heathcliff) it wouldn't have ended in happily ever after. It would have ended with one of them taking a butcher knife to the other. I do not see what is so awesomely romantic about this book. I hate this book.

The Entire "Ouevre" of Nicholas Sparks

Okay, I'll admit, I haven't read all of them. But the gist seems to be: 2 bland characters I never feel any connection to or understanding of meet each other, eventually fall in love, have about 5 minutes of happiness, and then one of them dies horrifically at a relatively young age (I realize the Notebook is exempt from this. But Nights in Rodanthe, I am glaring at you). Most of the Nicholas Sparks that I have read, I read as a teenager. And the moral I took away from these stories was: dear Lord, whatever you do, DO NOT fall in love. One of you will DIE way before your time.

2. Personalized license plates. We can all agree they are annoying. Generally, I'm pretty live and let live. But I think we need more rules for the personalized plates.

Rule #1: It must be decipherable so the OCD among us don't lose our freaking minds. RETAHP1 I am looking specifically at you. What the hell does that mean?

Rule #2: It should not be completely retarded. NoMoSno, now I'm looking at you. I was seriously tempted, in fact, to flag down NoMoSno and explain to them - YOU LIVE IN CENTRAL ARKANSAS. WE DON'T GET MORE THAN 4 INCHES OF SNOW TOTAL PER WINTER, IF THAT. If you want there to be even less snow than that, perhaps you need to be living in the tropics. MORON.

Rule #3: Someone should explain to them beforehand that things like "GINASBBY" and "BOYTOY" make them look narcissistic and also douche-y. Like, Marie Antoinette douche-y. The masses are going to rise up against you at some point. And frankly, a mob doesn't care if you're misunderstood or not.

3. This one is a little specific, and I need to try to be a little vague because I'm not trying to hurt feelings or open cans of worms that can't be closed or burn bridges or anything. So it needs a little prefacing: I am, easily, 25 pounds (at least) lighter than any other woman in my office. I eat pretty healthy, I run at least 5 times a week, and I basically WORK AT IT. So it pisses me off when people feel they have the right to say things to me like, "Enjoy it while you can!" like its some kind of genetic miracle and not hard work. There is actually more to this story, but it involves a specific person and I kind of don't know if I can tell it without being outright mean. So I guess I'll keep it to myself, but even that is pissing me off.

EDIT:

4. An Open Letter to the Receptionist at the State Environmental Agency:

Listen, heifer. I so did not need your attitude today. I'm sorry that I sprinted in the door 4 minutes before close and made you stamp my cover letters. Bitch, please. You work from 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. and you get an hour for lunch plus 15 minute breaks. I worked from 7:30 this morning without a break, and I tried to get to your office by 4:15. It's a 10 minute drive unless you unexpectedly have to battle the traffic from hell because your office is located on the same road as an elementary school where apparently every precious little darling in attendance must be picked up by two separate cars. And I still managed to be pleasant to you because my bad day and the horrible traffic were not your fault. I even apologized for coming in at the last minute. As if you actually having to keep your ass in that seat until 4:30 and do your fucking job is some kind of trial.

P.S. You wouldn't HAVE to stamp my cover letters if you didn't lose half the reports my company submits to you, and then claim we never brought them in.

The odds that anything I almost killed myself to turn in today mysteriously disappears are probably about like the odds of the sun rising in the east tomorrow.

Monday, August 16, 2010

Brace Yourself Bridget, Its a Long One

When I was 16 the local library offered me a job. I was in there so often that all of the check out people knew me by name and when they needed a stack slave, er, paige, they came to find me in the fiction section. I took the job, and it was, frankly, kind of awesome. It was the one job I've had dealing with the public that did not seem designed to turn me into a shriveled misanthrope without a morsel of love or kindness in my pruney little heart for others of my species. Which I think is weird because the library? That's where the crazy people hang. Also the homeless people and the generally unwashed masses. But I learned a lot of things in the 2 years I worked there that made me more accepting of people in general.

As I was helping my mom start packing her metric ton of crap this weekend, I decided to take a little break and cruise by the library. I still like to go in sometimes because they have what may be the closest thing to heaven on earth I've ever encountered. They have the Book Sale Room. You can find all kinds of wonderfulness in paperback form for less than $2.00. Being there reminded me that I wanted to blog about the three people/groups I have the most vivid memory of.

The Homeschool Kids

Being 16, I had a very negative attitude about kids who were homeschooled. They were strange and weird and definitely uncool. There was one particular homeschool family that actually changed my mind a little bit.

The first time I saw them I seriously thought that somewhere my life had gone seriously awry and I had wandered into some type of Children of the Damned situation. Imagine that a blonde man with fair skin and relatively archaic, Biblical ideas of gender roles met a similarly blonde fair skinned woman with the same views. Imagine that they are ultrareligious and they set forth to procreate and populate the world with tiny little pale blonde versions of themselves. The children are supersmart and well-behaved in that way that always makes me start surreptitiously checking for signs of demon possession or my imminent death. Their mother makes all of their clothes and all of them match. Including the mother. Tell me that doesn't terrify you to the marrow of your bones.

And yet...they were seriously impressive. They were, indeed, supersmart. I had always thought homeschool kids were poorly socialized. They weren't. It was just that the majority of their socialization was with ADULTS. And not just adults, but their PARENTS. This made me sympathize with them. I shudder to think about 99% of my time being spent with my mother even now. Also, they were so eager to be around someone other than each other and their parents that they were the least judgmental people I've ever met in my life. They were genuinely interested in other people and other people's experiences. I hope I learned to be like that.

Creepy Guy

This guy was not initially creepy like the Children of the Corn. I mean, the Homeschool Kids. This guy looked almost exactly like Johnny Galicki, except maybe a little gothier. He didn't read, he always came in to use the internet. He was in his twenties and he lived with his mother. He always wanted to use the computer in the very back corner. When his hour was up he would come back and furtively sign up again, preferrably on the same computer. Do you see where this is going yet?

Look, I figured the guy was looking at porn. He was relatively young, he lived with his mother, they didn't appear to have much money and he certainly appeared to have very little privacy. I'm not sure why the library computer seemed a better option privacy wise, but I was a teenager, and a relatively sheltered one. I didn't spend a whole lot of time thinking about it. Until I actually saw what he was looking at.

This guy was into some seriously, seriously disturbing shit. I don't even like to think about what I saw on that computer screen that day. It wasn't long before the head honchos caught on (I believe he was caught, literally, with his hand in his pants and some truly atrocious crime against sex on the screen) and there was a new rule: The girls were not, under any circumstances, to deal with this dude. Part of me felt like this was ridiculous. The guy never seemed angry or tried to hurt anyone. He could barely make eye contact with the girls. Plus, there were no serial killers where we were. Nothing bad was ever going to happen to any of us anyway. On the other hand, I abided by that rule like my life depended on it. Because it didn't take a psychology degree to realize that this guy, no matter how mild mannered, MUST have some pretty deep seated psychotic rage against women. I later learned that he did have some pretty serious anger issues. That he lived with his mother because he couldn't live alone, and that she insured he took some pretty serious medication. And that if he DID go off that medication he had a tendency toward violence. I think this taught me that its never a bad idea to be cautious. Maybe nothing bad ever would have happened if I'd had more contact with this guy. But...it didn't seem worth the risk to prove people wrong (for once).

Schizophrenic Guy

This guy mostly taught me that mental illness is not contagious, not necessarily dangerous, and the state funded mental hospital in my town had a pretty faulty system. The guy was homeless, when he wasn't at the hospital. And being homeless, he couldn't afford or didn't care to continue the medication he was provided at the hospital. He would enter the program dirty and muttering constantly to himself. Over the course of a few weeks he would be cleaner and more coherent. Then he would be discharged and he would begin slowly showing signs of life on the street and he would mumble to himself more and more. Generally, he was a nice man with a mental illness. After a long enough time out of the hospital he would do something...disruptive. Not necessarily violent or dangerous, but something that would cause someone to notice and call the hospital. He was kind of a nice balance to creepy guy, really. Except that time he smeared poop on the chair and I had to clean it up. I was not wild about that (on the other hand, I also worked in a movie theater at the same time, and completely sane people would WRITE on the STALL with their own FESCES. So...there's that.)

Monday, August 9, 2010

So I Found This...

In honor of my new love affair with 30 is the new 13, I dug up what appears to be the beginning of a story that I wrote. I have no idea what age I was at the time, but judging by the handwriting and the fact that it is in cursive, I'm going with 4th or 5th grade.

She was as lovely a woman as there ever was. Scotti, yes, Scotti was her name (If you can't tell, I'm at the pretentious, pseudo-literary stage of my writing. This is what I believed real "literature" sounded like, having not actually read any actual "literature" at the time). Her mother, Cassandra, was known as Cassandra the Tyrant.

Scotti loved her mother but her heart yearned for freedom (as one's heart does, yes). Now as she was ready to take herself and her mother to the charity ball (She's as lovely a woman as there ever was, but she can't get a friggin' date?) she wanted freedom even more (I can't imagine why. At least she isn't yearning for it at this point, I guess).

Her beautiful soft brown locks pulled into a loose knot on top of her head with only one delicate ringlet left by her ear, and her soft creamy throat slipping from the emerald green silk (this seems like something she should have the doctor check for her. One's neck probably shouldn't ever slip), she was especially beautiful (Did I mention she was beautiful? Because Scotti? Beautiful. In case I didn't make that clear).

That is all there is to the story. I have no idea where I was going to go with it, but I'm putting my money on the idea that I wanted to audition to ghostwrite for Danielle Steele. I feel confident when I say there was a good chance Fabio was going to appear at some point, and something was probably going to throb.

*I would like to point out, as the one compliment I can lend my writing here, that I had some mad spelling skills. I was not the Garland County Spelling Bee Champion for naught, ya'll. Let us not examine too closely the atrocious grammar and weird punctuation.

Saturday, August 7, 2010

This is Why I Never Take Naps

I have absolutely nothing of interest to say (Creative Writing 101: hook 'em with the first line. Done and done). But I took a nap this afternoon, which means I will probably NEVER SLEEP AGAIN. I've cleaned the entire house, been for a run, played with the dogs, and read for hours. And now, blogging. Maybe if I type for long enough I'll come up with something, anything, to say.

*cue Jeopardy theme song*

*crickets*

Yeah. Nothing.

I have a non-injury to my foot. I have no idea what happened. It just started hurting at work yesterday for no discernible reason. But its not swollen or discolored and I have run several miles since then. So, it just sort of randomly hurts.

My next four weekends are going to be spent helping my mother move, so maybe I'm just wishing for an injury that would get me out of that without having to actually, you know, tell my mother I'd rather be hung naked by my toes in the middle of town than actually help her move. Which is mostly a reflection on how much I hate moving and only a little bit of a reflection on my mother. I love her. I do. But she makes me crazier faster than any other person on earth. I can tell you exactly how this is going to go:

1. She's going to ask my opinion on how to do things and then not listen to me. Repeatedly.
2. She's going to, at some point, ask me when I'm going to give her grandbabies.
3. She's going to criticize because she loves me.

Lather, rinse, repeat for an entire weekend.

My mother just sent me a picture of herself with a drunk, shirtless man at a concert. I...don't know what to make of that.

I'm going to go try to knock myself out with Benadryl and pretend I didn't just see that.

I apologize for this post.