Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the maiden voyage of this blog.
I know the design of this site is template-y and that I should do better, but to be frank, I don’t have time to worry about that right now, so bear (or bare, if you so desire) with me, and I’ll get it fixed in the near future.
Part 1- The Art of Web Design
With Mother’s Day looming around the corner (for those of you who don’t know, it’s May 11 and I had to open iCal to double check), I decided to put together a little video for my mom with pictures of my family over the years. In doing so, I went hunting for a pretty Flash template to save me some time (Mom, if you’re reading this- I love you dearly).
So, I stumble into Flash Mint, www.flashmint.com, and it’s a pretty snazzy website so I decided to take a look around. Everything seems cool until I get to the FAQ section.
Part 2- Blue Haired Ladies
I don’t think I will separate my blog topics in the future, but I’m pretty ADD so this is a good way to stay on track. If you know me, and I don’t know why you’d be reading my blog if you don’t but hello! if you are, you know what my job is like. I spend about 20 hours a week at my favorite coffee shop in town working away. (I do work more than 20 hours a week). Anyway, this is a good experience because I always get to meet new people and I get a ton of work done since I’m out of my normal, distraction filled environment. Regardless, some days I miss doing one to ones with blue-haired ladies at the Apple store. There’s nothing like repeating “click on the Apple logo in the top left corner of your screen” 17 times while waiting for a prune-y smelling lady to dig around in her purse for her glasses so that she can see that the Apple logo isn’t just a funny looking dot, after all! (Note: some of the customers I had are very good friends of mine to this day and are not old or blue-haired).
Part 3- Children + Dominoes = Kernel Panic (error code 3126: invalid condom)
It’s no secret that I’m not fond of children. I never got into babysitting, I don’t find babies cute, and I really have no desire to ever have them. That said, I did host children’s birthday parties at a local pizza place for two years and was very good at it, so maybe one day my maternal instincts will kick in and I’ll want children. Don’t count on it though. Anyway, so I’ve been sitting in this shop for about two hours now, just trying to finish up some last minute things before the weekend. This nice looking blonde woman comes in with her son and they order their drinks and sit down. It is at this point that I start praying fervently that she did not buy him a caffeinated drink. He grabs some Jenga blocks from the games section and starts playing with the blocks on the doormat. Fine, whatever, don’t yell at me if I step on him on my way out the door. That’s when it gets bad. He grabs the Dominoes and starts knocking them off the table one by one. OVER AND OVER AND OVER. And, as is typical with these types of children, his mom just sat and acted like nothing was happening.
Welcome to my life.
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Oh, you haven’t lived until someone else’s spawn decides to pitch a cast-iron fit at the local grocer because he’s not getting the megabox of Fruit Loops (or whatever sugar-blend his barely educated mother feeds him). My youngster notices the conundrum and asks me with those pleading young eyes, “Daddy, what’s wrong with him?” My response is simple, “Honey, he’s trailer trash. He’ll be pumping gas when he’s 35 and will probably have fathered several children out of wedlock.” Her young eyes glaze over as I leave her briefly to take a pack of Chef Boyardee mini-noodles to cram down the little waste-of-ejaculate’s throat while simulataneously ninja-kicking his scored-scored-420-on-my-SAT mother square in the uterus, hopefully sabotaging any chance she has of bringing another of her useless spoor to life.
And then I head for produce department… I love legumes.
I, personally, myself, prefer the story about the old guy who wanted porn copied onto his computer with even a hint of shame. Its people like that, and the kid at starbucks and the grocery store, who make me believe in the future of this country.
For the record, I also dislike children. I realize they’re too young to know anything about what they’re doing, but that doesn’t change that I get angry at them for being ignorant. Even worse are the parents who do nothing to stop them, or encourage their behavior. I was at an Easter service this last Easter, and there were three clearly-adopted little girls behind me who insisted on sitting on top of the pews, kicking the backs, asking questions about the service loudly, and causing a general perturbation for myself. My dad and I looked scathingly over our shoulders almost constantly, but it did nothing but make the mother of these girls angry. Later she told me she would pray for me to have more patience with children and that I was happy that her children were missing a beautiful service, because she eventually did take them to the day care, only to bring them back with her half an hour later.
Like I said, I dislike children.
Upon further reflection, I sense I was a bit harsh on the under-educated mother in my previous post. I should probably be empathic, willing to see the good in her, not just LEAP to the conclusion that she would score in the low single digits on a Wonderlic exam. Maybe I should give her the benefit of the doubt that she has contributed to society in some meaningful, altruistic way, not just flippantly assume she was and is the by product of a poorly funded and overworked public education system and that her most significant addition to this planet was the screaming miscreant child raging toward apoplexy in the breakfast cereal aisle of the local grocer. I imagine her name is something eighties-hip, like ‘Heather’ or ‘Mindy.’ She started playing the flute in fifth grade and made it to second chair in the Wind Ensemble, never able to beat out that one girl with braces who religiously practiced. She was an above average student until about eighth grade, when the combined pressure of Mr. Steinwine’s Social Studies class, occasional blackheads, and the emergence of pubic AND axillary hair sent her into fits of selfdoubt. Her older sister listened to Journey and Foreigner, had a perfectly proportioned body and dated a guy that worked at the local water park with a GREAT tan. Mindy? She never cleared 5′5″ and grew breasts two sizes beyond noteworthy. While her older sister was hanging with ‘the crowd,’ Mindy was discovering that Nathan, a clarinet player with a face that looked like Craters of the Moon National Park and whose top teeth belied the fact he had sucked his thumb well into kindergarten, wanted to ask her to the movies. She squirmed uncomfortably through “Dirty Dancing” at the two-dollar show, painfully aware Nathan’s gaze was fixed on her chest, not Jennifer Grey’s, and endured the awkward 14 second moment of silence when Nathan said goodnight, frozen between diving for the kiss or running crying into the night.
She’d later date someone from the debate club, come in 3rd for Homecoming Queen, and be best friends with the girl voted “Most likely to succeed.” She wanted to be a vet one day, but on her first day as a vet assistant under Dr. Robillard, she had blown groceries when the good doctor took the temperature of Mrs. Shonican’s aging Persian… and not with an oral bulb. She struggled through 4 meaningless semesters at the local JuCo before bailing out and getting a job as the operator at a local car dealership. While working there, she went out with one of the sales guys. On the third date, she got a little too drunk and he got a little too careless. When she told him about missing her period, he was initially excited. The next Tuesday, he didn’t show up for work and she didn’t hear from him that week. When she went to his apartment to find him and ask him “what do we do?”, the landlord advised her he had moved out that Monday; his forwarding address was the mail stop for the local Little League fields.
Mindy decided to keep the baby, but had to move back home, an unwed statistic. Her mother was too supportive, too personal and gave too much advice, up to and including demonstrating proper breast feeding technique - with her OWN breasts!! Her dad was dismayed that his youngest daughter had given it up for a grease monkey at the dealership who then managed to skip town incognito. The birth was uneventful, but it was clear early on that Junior was hyperactive and ADD. The medication worked most of the time, but it also made the kid irritable. Her mom doesn’t understand the connection between ADD and diet and has blindly fed the kid Kellogg’s products for breakfast, giving the kid the kind of small, contained energy signature of a food processor on frappe.
It was in that state of mind Mindy went to the store that day to get some things, her nuclear dynamo of a screaming little reaching critical mass at just the time I turned down the same aisle. We caught each other’s eyes briefly and I saw a tired face that had probably been reasonably attractive at some point. She was wearing sweat pants with a frayed drawstring and a faded Rice University Marching Owl Band t-shirt with ambiguous stains on the shoulder. Her hair was pulled back in a don’t-care-ponytail and her dark bra was plainly visible under the shirt. She had a faraway, tired look in her eyes and for that split second I think I felt some sympathy for her. It wasn’t her fault her big sister was enjoying her job, having just returned from a three week project in Venice. Nor was it her fault when she FINALLY tracked down her baby’s father (two years later), his wages were already being garnished for child support from ANOTHER fun-baby. But it was her fault for having that fourth jumbo ‘Rita-on-the-rocks and trusting he would never go ‘all the way.’ When she awoke with a screaming headache - partially from the hangover, partially from his earsplitting snoring - she could tell the night had ended poorly. Only time would reveal just how poorly, indeed.
So my empathy drifted away pretty quickly, partially because the story seemed to fit her and partially because her little boy was so gosh-FREAKINGLY loud and annoying, I couldn’t muster up anything but negative feelings for her whole sorry existence. Shut his yap pronto, you service animal. And Dear Lord, girl! don’t wear a red bra under a faded white t-shirt.
I have a thought nagging at the back of my head. The thought is that nothing I say will come close to the comments already posted. So clearly I need to get here first next time….
However, on the note that is vaguely in the same key as this post and more closely related to the comment of Mr. Tuttle, I do have a bit to add about work and moronic fucks.
I work at a public library. For the first year of my job, my home branch was located on the east side of town — what the cops refer to as “the ghetto of STP” — and as a result, we get a lot of creeps (for example, the guy who STARED at me with a thoroughly gag-inducing smirk on his face for over 20 minutes while I shelved books in the Children’s section and he “watched” what I assume was his granddaughter). Our library system generally refers to anything that is not set in a size 32 font and has more pictures than words as “juvinile” and everything else as “adult.” That means all the newly-released movies are referred to as “Adult Movies” and all the regular fiction books are referred to as “Adult Fiction.” You can see where this might lead to problems.
But I, being the naivette that I am, had never even thought of this before one fine day when I was working the circulation desk by myself. A man (and I use that term VERY loosely) came in and the second he walked in the door I wanted to gag. He reeked of booze and rotting-something-I-don’t-care-to-think-about. His hair was falling out in chunks and he was wearing the saddest excuses for clothing I have ever seen. He came up to the counter and asked where we kept the adult movies. I politely explained that the feature films were all on the shelves just behind him to his left. He said, “do you have any films about blondes?”
I nearly wretched all over the desk.
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