Serves them right.
Dumbasses.
Thursday, June 17, 2010
Morons
Stupid fucks built a giant dual lightning rod and covered it with flammable petroleum-based crap.
Serves them right.
Dumbasses.
Serves them right.
Dumbasses.
Random Thoughts from the Hog Wallow
Are you sick of me? I'm sick of me. I'm sick of me so hard.
1) You can only listen to "Something Stupid," by Frank and Nancy Sinatra four- or five-hundred times in a row before you stop thinking boohooingly about The Guy, and start thinking things like, "Wow, Nancy Sinatra has a singing range of three notes!" and "It's really kind of creepy that a father and daughter sang this song together." It's a little icky, when you think about it. And I mean in a "Papa John Phillips" icky kind of way.
2) A smart Opinionator piece from the NY Times about Tea Partiers.
3) A co-worker called me "The Incredible Shrinking Woman" today, then cornered me and wanted to know how I did it. (I gave her the abridged version of How I Did It: "Eat Less." I left out the part about subsisting on coffee, cigarettes, the occasional half tomato that I didn't need to salt because I just cried on it.) So Ha Ha Ha.
4) When I met Mr. MWBMH (tm) on Sunday, I had a giant red pimple on the side of my nose. We're talking a Mt. Saint Helens-sized pimple, folks. It burgeoned all day Saturday and finally blew late that night with one of those satisfying shplats that leave you searching for the Windex. It felt like an exorcism. Maybe it was. But that meant I had to try to spackle it with cover-up on the most humid day of the year, mostly unsuccessfully, when I would have preferred a burlap sack over my head like the Elephant Man. In the meantime, all of this feeling stuff has left me with the complexion of a 13-year-old girl having her first period. I look in the mirror and say, "REALLY? At my age?"
5) I do wonder if Mr. MWBMH (tm) thinks, at all, ever, "Holy shit, I broke JANE." I wonder what that feels like? Is it like the guy who shot King Kong off of the Empire State Building, or more like the Enola Gay pilot looking back and going, "Uh-ohhhhh. sheeeeyit!" Anyway, oh, well.
6) If nothing else, it has set Aileen free, which feels kinda cool. Part of me wants to rest here in the mud of the hogwaller where it's cool and quiet for a little while longer, but the part that's been freed almost wants to gambol. Maybe after I get my legs under me, to try to throw a half-assed herkie. Is that strange?
7) When Miss Midwesterly came over on Friday night, the look on her face told me everything I needed to know about how bad things had gotten on the home front. She was, literally, agog. And I saw my place through her eyes. My apartment looked like a crack den, like Bushwick, August 1977, like Robert Chambers' apartment. So I swept my floors, then vacuumed, then mopped with the good-smelling Murphy's stuff and changed the utterly disgusting litterboxes. Coming home on Sunday night, I was quite pleased. Then, I got home last night after work, and the Little Cat had apparently developed opposable thumbs during the day and gone to work, like a good little Tinkerbell. There was kitty litter strewn all over the fucking place, from the front of the apartment to the back. How does she do it? Perhaps I've underestimated her. Litterbell.
8) Two days to MERMAID. There will be photos.
9) Name the movie reference in the subhead of this post and win a prize!
10) I just went off a little on a vendor. Now, it takes MUCH to make me go off, but when I do, it's not with yelling or anything. I just become hyperarticulate and very quiet. The thing that most people don't realize is that when I am yelling, they don't need to worry. It's when I get reallllly quiet, that people should be afraid. Because then I've passed blowing off steam. Then I'm enraged. See, I had asked for something last Thursday that I needed by the end of the day Tuesday. Nothing hard, just some rough dates for delivering files to them in order to make a delivery date in September. This is something any experienced production person who owns a calendar can ballpark in 10 minutes. So Tuesday comes, no dates. Wednesday comes, no dates. Promised I'll have them this morning. At 5:00 I called California and said, "Where are my schedules?" and get the same old song and dance about the production manager over there is a temperamental sort and you don't want to piss off Beckie, blah, blah, blah, and the coordinator has been having a couple of bad days, so she was allowed to leave early, come in late, blah, blah, blah. I closed my eyes, and took a really deep breath and said, "Please let me stop you right there. I am tired of having MY reliability jeopardized and MY requests held hostage to Beckie's bad temper and Shawna's bad days! I have had a MONTH of bad days, and you know what? I show up and do my job! Would it help you if I called Jeff (company President)? Would that make Beckie do her job? Because I will do it. And there, now you can go down to your production department and say that they have pissed off Aileen S___ enough to make her yell at you." I don't understand people who seem to be mad all the time and who yell at people a lot. Let me tell you, folks, that didn't feel good. That didn't feel good at ALL.
11) I've been listening to an old friend's CD for the past couple of days. Sort of alt-country-ish in a Ryan Adams way. He was never going to be the next Dylan or anything, but he did write respectable, catchy pop songs. Singable.
He wrote on the cover "To Aileen, my best friend and biggest fan, XO Will." I am named in the acknowledgements on both of his records. We had a terrible, stupid fight a few years ago, said horrible things to each other, and we haven't seen each other or spoken since. After a fifteen year friendship, and I mean, we were like Mutt and Jeff, I told him I was sick of his shit, gave him the backs of my hands, and stayed gone. For some reason, I felt the need to pull down his CD and listen to it, and now it's making me miss him and wonder if I should reach out to him on Facebook or Linked In or something.
Maybe the Buddhists are right about that whole "broken heart = open heart" thing. When your heart cracks open you never know what is going to fall in -- or out.
1) You can only listen to "Something Stupid," by Frank and Nancy Sinatra four- or five-hundred times in a row before you stop thinking boohooingly about The Guy, and start thinking things like, "Wow, Nancy Sinatra has a singing range of three notes!" and "It's really kind of creepy that a father and daughter sang this song together." It's a little icky, when you think about it. And I mean in a "Papa John Phillips" icky kind of way.
2) A smart Opinionator piece from the NY Times about Tea Partiers.
3) A co-worker called me "The Incredible Shrinking Woman" today, then cornered me and wanted to know how I did it. (I gave her the abridged version of How I Did It: "Eat Less." I left out the part about subsisting on coffee, cigarettes, the occasional half tomato that I didn't need to salt because I just cried on it.) So Ha Ha Ha.
4) When I met Mr. MWBMH (tm) on Sunday, I had a giant red pimple on the side of my nose. We're talking a Mt. Saint Helens-sized pimple, folks. It burgeoned all day Saturday and finally blew late that night with one of those satisfying shplats that leave you searching for the Windex. It felt like an exorcism. Maybe it was. But that meant I had to try to spackle it with cover-up on the most humid day of the year, mostly unsuccessfully, when I would have preferred a burlap sack over my head like the Elephant Man. In the meantime, all of this feeling stuff has left me with the complexion of a 13-year-old girl having her first period. I look in the mirror and say, "REALLY? At my age?"
5) I do wonder if Mr. MWBMH (tm) thinks, at all, ever, "Holy shit, I broke JANE." I wonder what that feels like? Is it like the guy who shot King Kong off of the Empire State Building, or more like the Enola Gay pilot looking back and going, "Uh-ohhhhh. sheeeeyit!" Anyway, oh, well.
6) If nothing else, it has set Aileen free, which feels kinda cool. Part of me wants to rest here in the mud of the hogwaller where it's cool and quiet for a little while longer, but the part that's been freed almost wants to gambol. Maybe after I get my legs under me, to try to throw a half-assed herkie. Is that strange?
7) When Miss Midwesterly came over on Friday night, the look on her face told me everything I needed to know about how bad things had gotten on the home front. She was, literally, agog. And I saw my place through her eyes. My apartment looked like a crack den, like Bushwick, August 1977, like Robert Chambers' apartment. So I swept my floors, then vacuumed, then mopped with the good-smelling Murphy's stuff and changed the utterly disgusting litterboxes. Coming home on Sunday night, I was quite pleased. Then, I got home last night after work, and the Little Cat had apparently developed opposable thumbs during the day and gone to work, like a good little Tinkerbell. There was kitty litter strewn all over the fucking place, from the front of the apartment to the back. How does she do it? Perhaps I've underestimated her. Litterbell.
8) Two days to MERMAID. There will be photos.
9) Name the movie reference in the subhead of this post and win a prize!
10) I just went off a little on a vendor. Now, it takes MUCH to make me go off, but when I do, it's not with yelling or anything. I just become hyperarticulate and very quiet. The thing that most people don't realize is that when I am yelling, they don't need to worry. It's when I get reallllly quiet, that people should be afraid. Because then I've passed blowing off steam. Then I'm enraged. See, I had asked for something last Thursday that I needed by the end of the day Tuesday. Nothing hard, just some rough dates for delivering files to them in order to make a delivery date in September. This is something any experienced production person who owns a calendar can ballpark in 10 minutes. So Tuesday comes, no dates. Wednesday comes, no dates. Promised I'll have them this morning. At 5:00 I called California and said, "Where are my schedules?" and get the same old song and dance about the production manager over there is a temperamental sort and you don't want to piss off Beckie, blah, blah, blah, and the coordinator has been having a couple of bad days, so she was allowed to leave early, come in late, blah, blah, blah. I closed my eyes, and took a really deep breath and said, "Please let me stop you right there. I am tired of having MY reliability jeopardized and MY requests held hostage to Beckie's bad temper and Shawna's bad days! I have had a MONTH of bad days, and you know what? I show up and do my job! Would it help you if I called Jeff (company President)? Would that make Beckie do her job? Because I will do it. And there, now you can go down to your production department and say that they have pissed off Aileen S___ enough to make her yell at you." I don't understand people who seem to be mad all the time and who yell at people a lot. Let me tell you, folks, that didn't feel good. That didn't feel good at ALL.
11) I've been listening to an old friend's CD for the past couple of days. Sort of alt-country-ish in a Ryan Adams way. He was never going to be the next Dylan or anything, but he did write respectable, catchy pop songs. Singable.
He wrote on the cover "To Aileen, my best friend and biggest fan, XO Will." I am named in the acknowledgements on both of his records. We had a terrible, stupid fight a few years ago, said horrible things to each other, and we haven't seen each other or spoken since. After a fifteen year friendship, and I mean, we were like Mutt and Jeff, I told him I was sick of his shit, gave him the backs of my hands, and stayed gone. For some reason, I felt the need to pull down his CD and listen to it, and now it's making me miss him and wonder if I should reach out to him on Facebook or Linked In or something.
Maybe the Buddhists are right about that whole "broken heart = open heart" thing. When your heart cracks open you never know what is going to fall in -- or out.
Awful Crap on Facebook Today
Facebook is a really good place to nurture a superiority complex.
It also reinforces my belief that I may be, quite possibly, the meanest human being on the planet for making fun of the people (some of them my OWN BLOOD RELATIVES) who are posting godawful greeting card shite like this:
Fathers Day Approaches:
Roses grow in Heaven, Lord, pick a bunch for me.
Place them in my Dad's arms & tell him they're from me.
Tell him that I love & miss him & when he turns to smile,
place a kiss upon his cheek & hold him for a while.
Because remembering... him is..easy.. I do it everyday.
There's an ache within my heart that will never go away.
Copy & paste if your Dad is in Heaven. Love and miss you Dad!
If there turns out to be an afterlife and I find out people are using my name in the same ROOM as shit like this, I swear I will come back and haunt them. And not in a good way.
It also reinforces my belief that I may be, quite possibly, the meanest human being on the planet for making fun of the people (some of them my OWN BLOOD RELATIVES) who are posting godawful greeting card shite like this:
Fathers Day Approaches:
Roses grow in Heaven, Lord, pick a bunch for me.
Place them in my Dad's arms & tell him they're from me.
Tell him that I love & miss him & when he turns to smile,
place a kiss upon his cheek & hold him for a while.
Because remembering... him is..easy.. I do it everyday.
There's an ache within my heart that will never go away.
Copy & paste if your Dad is in Heaven. Love and miss you Dad!
If there turns out to be an afterlife and I find out people are using my name in the same ROOM as shit like this, I swear I will come back and haunt them. And not in a good way.
Wednesday, June 16, 2010
Maybe I Should Go Outside And Play Or Something, Instead of Being a Pixelated Vampire With My Ass Parked In Front of My Computer
Brendan Leonard, in Mountain Gazette, has a few words to say about our stunted-by-the-internet lives. He observes that we are so busy trying to document our experiences while we are having them, that we stop actually experiencing them. (Twitter, anyone?)
Even though most of my blog posts are composed in the wee hours of the morning between 5:00 a.m. and 8:00 a.m., I suddenly feel very ashamed for blogging so much.
So I am going outside to take a walk.
In New York Freakin' City.
I will sing as I walk, because I am feeling better, and because I am wearing a pretty dress and nice sandals and because it is a very nice day, and because this is the first day in absolutely weeks that I've walked around the office singing.
(Walking around singing is just something that I do. Someone commented today as I strolled down a long hallway singing "My Cherie Amour," paying special attention to that bent note in the line, "In a ca-aaa-fe, or sometimes on a crowded street..." -- "Aileen! I haven't heard you sing in WEEKS!")
And I'm not gonna tell anyone about it afterwards.
I remember when the Internet was half porn. Now it’s one-third porn, one-third Facebook. Our love for talking about ourselves has nearly outgrown our love for looking at naked people. And that just makes me sick. Do you have a blog? Of course you do. Tell me some more interesting things about yourself. Oh, you eat food? And you breathe air?I agree with him, though I do wonder what he thinks makes up the other third of the Internet.
Even though most of my blog posts are composed in the wee hours of the morning between 5:00 a.m. and 8:00 a.m., I suddenly feel very ashamed for blogging so much.
So I am going outside to take a walk.
In New York Freakin' City.
I will sing as I walk, because I am feeling better, and because I am wearing a pretty dress and nice sandals and because it is a very nice day, and because this is the first day in absolutely weeks that I've walked around the office singing.
(Walking around singing is just something that I do. Someone commented today as I strolled down a long hallway singing "My Cherie Amour," paying special attention to that bent note in the line, "In a ca-aaa-fe, or sometimes on a crowded street..." -- "Aileen! I haven't heard you sing in WEEKS!")
And I'm not gonna tell anyone about it afterwards.
No One Is To Blame
During some debate, Joe Biden once said something about how you can question a man's actions, but you should never question his motives.
This spoke to me, and I still go back to it again and again. Not just in general, but especially in my current situation.
I just need to be really clear: There are no villains here.
What we have are two people who made decisions that ended up hurting one, and perhaps both, in deep ways. People who thought they knew what they were doing, who went into a relationship with an outline of how it was supposed to progress but ended up, as we all do anyway, making it up as we went along.
I thought I was the girl who couldn't be got, the Chupacabra of every married man's fantasy -- the girl who could be had without being had. I subscribed to Chris Rock's notion that the only thing that keeps men faithful in their marriages is opportunity. (Okay, I still do subscribe to that notion, for 99.9% of men. I just happened to meet and fall in love with one of those 0.1% guys)
I don't know what his deepest motives were, and I never will. He did tell me the most blatant -- that he thought his marriage was over and that he was ready for an affair. So why pick the girl-formerly-known-as Jane and not someone nearer at hand? Who knows? Maybe because I had been so open about things on my blog and he thought, here is a girl who will walk me into this new phase of my life and she will come out unscathed? Maybe because there was something gettable about me? Maybe because he didn't know me at all before we met and the strangers-passing-in-the-night-with-no-hard-feelings had some sort of romantic appeal. Maybe he just liked how I wrote and that made him want to fuck me.
The point is, I am not privy to that information and never will be.
So I can't write his larger motivations for getting into it, or for getting out of it. You have to take some things at face value, don't you? You can wish a single had Ben Franklin's face on it, but don't try to buy dinner with it.
Women, being women, have some reflexive need to try to find reasons for things happening. And, oh boy, will they go off on wild flights of fancy to do this. They will make up stories out of whole cloth to explain away the end of a relationship without even realizing they are doing it. When they've constructed a satisfying narrative to palliate their insecurities and fears and ignorance, then they feel safe walking away from a hurtful relationship. (This explains all that bullshit they do about "Maybe he got scaaaaared." God, I hate when chicks do this. You women give the rest of us a bad name sometimes. Me? I've always believed in the "he's just not that into you," explanation. I just wasn't smart enough to parlay it into a bazillion-selling book and a TV talk show like Greg Behrendt did.)
I'll be the first to admit I do this, too, but my instinctive reason, my go-to choice in self-hatred is, "It must be because I wasn't pretty enough."
It frankly bugs the shit out of me when people say, "Everything happens for a reason." You know what? NO...it doesn't. Most times, things just happen. The universe isn't out there constructing some fairy tale for you out of events and people. The universe isn't personal, folks. Sorry to break that to you.
So, for me, things happened. I got hurt. This doesn't mean I am a good person, and he is a bad person. In fact, when people feel the need to ascribe shit to him in order to bolster their idea of who I am, that's when I take a step backward and say, whoa, whoa, whoa. Hold on there. I then have to remind them: Hey, do you think I would choose an ASSHOLE to fall in love with? Do you know me at all?
Neither of us did the right thing.
Neither of us did the wrong thing.
We were both right, and we were both wrong.
We did human things, and we have to forgive ourselves and each other.
This spoke to me, and I still go back to it again and again. Not just in general, but especially in my current situation.
I just need to be really clear: There are no villains here.
What we have are two people who made decisions that ended up hurting one, and perhaps both, in deep ways. People who thought they knew what they were doing, who went into a relationship with an outline of how it was supposed to progress but ended up, as we all do anyway, making it up as we went along.
I thought I was the girl who couldn't be got, the Chupacabra of every married man's fantasy -- the girl who could be had without being had. I subscribed to Chris Rock's notion that the only thing that keeps men faithful in their marriages is opportunity. (Okay, I still do subscribe to that notion, for 99.9% of men. I just happened to meet and fall in love with one of those 0.1% guys)
I don't know what his deepest motives were, and I never will. He did tell me the most blatant -- that he thought his marriage was over and that he was ready for an affair. So why pick the girl-formerly-known-as Jane and not someone nearer at hand? Who knows? Maybe because I had been so open about things on my blog and he thought, here is a girl who will walk me into this new phase of my life and she will come out unscathed? Maybe because there was something gettable about me? Maybe because he didn't know me at all before we met and the strangers-passing-in-the-night-with-no-hard-feelings had some sort of romantic appeal. Maybe he just liked how I wrote and that made him want to fuck me.
The point is, I am not privy to that information and never will be.
So I can't write his larger motivations for getting into it, or for getting out of it. You have to take some things at face value, don't you? You can wish a single had Ben Franklin's face on it, but don't try to buy dinner with it.
Women, being women, have some reflexive need to try to find reasons for things happening. And, oh boy, will they go off on wild flights of fancy to do this. They will make up stories out of whole cloth to explain away the end of a relationship without even realizing they are doing it. When they've constructed a satisfying narrative to palliate their insecurities and fears and ignorance, then they feel safe walking away from a hurtful relationship. (This explains all that bullshit they do about "Maybe he got scaaaaared." God, I hate when chicks do this. You women give the rest of us a bad name sometimes. Me? I've always believed in the "he's just not that into you," explanation. I just wasn't smart enough to parlay it into a bazillion-selling book and a TV talk show like Greg Behrendt did.)
I'll be the first to admit I do this, too, but my instinctive reason, my go-to choice in self-hatred is, "It must be because I wasn't pretty enough."
It frankly bugs the shit out of me when people say, "Everything happens for a reason." You know what? NO...it doesn't. Most times, things just happen. The universe isn't out there constructing some fairy tale for you out of events and people. The universe isn't personal, folks. Sorry to break that to you.
So, for me, things happened. I got hurt. This doesn't mean I am a good person, and he is a bad person. In fact, when people feel the need to ascribe shit to him in order to bolster their idea of who I am, that's when I take a step backward and say, whoa, whoa, whoa. Hold on there. I then have to remind them: Hey, do you think I would choose an ASSHOLE to fall in love with? Do you know me at all?
Neither of us did the right thing.
Neither of us did the wrong thing.
We were both right, and we were both wrong.
We did human things, and we have to forgive ourselves and each other.