25 Things

I carried this over from Facebook. I couldn't help it--it amuses me so!

1. I didn't learn how to ride a bike until first or second grade.
2. I detest perfume and cologne so much I'd try to outlaw them if I were a legislator.
3. I don't have any tattoos and I think my desire for them has passed. I am unique because I'm usually the only person in the room without a single tattoo.
4. If I were to get any tattoos, I'd want something referencing the novel The Master and Margarita, but nobody can draw the character of Koroviev the way I imagine him, so that will never happen.
5. I really wish that I could draw and paint the stuff I see in my head.
6. Sometimes I wish for that mind-erasing thing from Men In Black so I could read books or watch films/television shows for the first time over and over again.
7. I hate the way people use the phrase "How are you?" as part of a standardized, empty greeting sequence. Nobody wants to hear any answer other than that you are good, so it is a pointless, robotic exchange.
8. I read as many of other people's 25 Things as I could to figure out what to write here.
9. I'm an only child so I pretty much consider all of my friends and my immediate coworkers as siblings.
10. The song "New Year's Day" by U2 might be my favorite song of all time.
11. The more I do yoga the less I understand why everyone on Earth doesn't do it.
12. I grew up living next to a lake, and I swam in it every day of every summer for 5 years. This has pretty much sated my desire to swim for the rest of my life.
13. I love dogs and sometimes think they are a higher form of being. That is, until I see one do something like eat poop.
14. I can dish it out but I can't usually take it.
15. I've gone to restaurants and ordered nachos 5 times in the past 11 days. I might do it again today. (Pollo Rey nachos: thumbs way down. Casa Mexico nachos: thumbs up! Donnie Mac's: Thumbs way up! Cafe Ole: Holy grease, Batman!)
16. I love looking at embarassing old photos of people on Facebook. Keep 'em coming!
17. I believe veganism to be a form of masochism unless it's done for health reasons.
18. I correct grammar on Wikipedia if I have the time. (FYI: When referring to a person, the correct pronoun to use is WHO not THAT. Don't worry about whether to use "who" or "whom." For instance: "It was Benjamin Franklin WHO invented bifocal glasses;" not "It was Benjamin Franklin THAT invented bifocal glasses." Although this problem could be eliminated if the sentence were simplified to: "Benjamin Franklin invented bifocal glasses." See how much cleaner that is?).
19. I have a really good memory for conversations, even when I am drunk--unless Tyler is involved. (I don't know why Tyler messes up my memory).
20. I refuse to shop at Wal-Mart. Not even for some things. Those low prices come at a high cost.
21. Guacamole never tastes right to me.
22. Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday, probably because of the long weekend. I just wish its glory weren't sullied by Black Friday hype.
23. I don't like super depressing movies. Why do that to yourself?
24. I swear less than I used to, but I still want to slap this kid: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=99878812
25. I don't think I've ever said it out loud or in print, but I do want get married and have kids some day.

Come and get your soma

They're remodeling the Albertsons near my house, turning it from the poshest Albies in town to an even posher version of itself. All the signs have been rendered in a subdued light green and the ugly tile floors have been replaced by poured concrete. So basically, they're trying to make it look like a Whole Foods on the inside.

It's fine with me if they want to compete with Whole Foods, because it means their produce section will totally rock come summer and I will hopefully never have the problem I've had a few times in the past where they have no fresh Italian parsley on their shelves and instead have stocked a literal ton of curly parsley. Curly parsley is a garnish, not an ingredient in delicious soups, pasta, French potato salad, etc. (Do you hear that, Broadway and Beacon glorified-convienience-store pseudo-Albertsons?)

However, look at the photo above. Yes, the sign does say $7.59 per pound for those pretty yellow tomatoes. They were practically glowing; my cell phone photo doesn't do them justice. I was tempted to buy some until I saw that price. I'm not the biggest tomato fan, but I love yellow tomatoes--especially the small teardrop-shaped ones. Best caprese salad ever! I did not buy any of those expensive little buggers, and it's probably a good thing, because as my friend Tony said, "They never taste good when they're that pretty." True dat!

The thing I find kind of disturbing about this grocery store is the prolific number of televisions they have. They used to have flat-screen monitors in the produce section with short infomercials about various kinds of produce. It was kind of cool, because I thought maybe it would encourage people to be more adventurous about the fruits and veggies they eat, but the food segments were interspersed with crappy alarmist news stories about the flagging economy. The TVs were removed during the remodel, and I wonder if they'll bring them back at all; I doubt stories about economic decline will help to sell $7.59 / lb tomatoes.

This Albertsons and several others in town have installed TV screens at the checkout stands. They show clips of comedy shows to placate customers who are waiting in line. Wow. I did't realize how poor peoples' attention spans had become, that they can't handle waiting in line for a few minutes without television to entertain them. How very dystopian. Maybe if I'm lucky I can get soma while I wait in line, as well.

On a tangential note, I read on Wikipedia that Ridley Scott and Leonardo DiCaprio are working on a big-screen version of Brave New World. I don't think I like this idea.

My special power: invisibility

You know, a couple of months ago I made a commitment to myself to stop complaining, but sometimes complaining exorcises ideas that bother me and I am never bothered by them again. I hope that is the case right now. Also, I am a bit on the passive aggressive side and sometimes tend to complain to the wrong audience, rather than the one with whom I have my grievance. This is something I'm working on.

Mikela and I went to dinner tonight at a local pizza place and our conversation eventually came around to one of the seeming paradoxes of dealing with service industry people: the fact that if you are patient, polite, and understanding of how busy servers/bartenders/baristas are, they sometimes ignore you; while rude, pushy, demanding people (who often seem to be stingy tippers) get all the attention in the world.

At dinner, I stood at the bar forever and couldn't get a refill on my beer because I wasn't rude enough to elbow between people eating at the bar and get in the bartender's face (Not that I actually needed any more beer. What I did drink led to the crankiness you are now witnessing). The bartender couldn't be bothered to notice me even though two of her friends were standing right next to me. I always err on the side of being too timid in this type of situation, never saying "Excuse me!" when I need to, so the frustration I feel is ultimately at myself. I don't want to come off as an obnoxious asshole. Why should it matter, anyway? Do I care if the bartender thinks I'm a bitch? What's she going to do to me? How does she know I need something if I don't speak up? She's fucking busy. So what do I do? Why, complain to Mikela, hapless bystander, of course. And be a bad listener. Boo!

I'm afraid of acting like one of those people you're embarrassed to go out with: I used to have a roommate who was so demanding and rude that she would tip horribly if the server didn't banter and coddle her in a specific way. After the laundry list of special things said roommate asked for when ordering, I was lucky if a server even remembered to bring me water.



Conversely, when I want to be invisible it never happens. At work I can't have five minutes in a row without one of my coworkers walking by my desk and commenting on something totally stupid--usually it involves the look on my face. I'll be working quietly and someone will walk by my desk, stop, turn around, and come back to ask me if anything is wrong or why I look confused, bored, or annoyed. My all-time favorite has to be the time a guy came over, crouched down, looked up at the ceiling, and asked me "Is there something interesting up there?" I was in the middle of figuring out some really complicated problem when he interrupted me with his stupid question.

Several things that end in a big, long rant

I woke up today and went to Bad Boy Burger to get myself a breakfast burrito (nice alliteration, eh?) and noticed that the inversion is here. Yucky doodle.

Synchronicity is an interesting phenomenon I encounter pretty often. You could argue whether the instances I observe are "meaningful" or not, (see the Wikipedia entry for synchronicity), but they are definitely interesting and worth thinking about. Last weekend was a stellar weekend for synchronous events. I already talked about the Star Trek occurrence. On Friday I got a Happy Halloween text message from someone that said something like, "I love you and your friendship means a lot to me, but if zombies were chasing us, I'd totally trip your ass." After I read it, I noticed that the song "Zombie" by the Cranberries (Preachberries) was playing on my coworker's radio.

The next day, I was talking to April about synchronicity, and she said she'd been discussing it recently with one of her coworkers in regard to band names (apparently there is a weird phenomena wherein bands will pop up all over the place with the same or similar band names, album names, and song names, though the bands are all too obscure to have heard of each other), leading she and her coworker to believe in Jung's theory of the collective unconscious. Right after she told me this, I told her that she looked like Anne Hathaway from certain angles. She said that was funny because she used to date a guy who went to high school with Anne Hathaway and dated her. Obviously, I said, that guy has a thing for girls with dark hair and big, dark eyes. "Obviously," April agreed. A few minutes later I noticed a postcard on her fridge with a photo of a bodybuilder dousing himself with beer. "Is this Arnold Schwarzenegger?" I asked her. "I don't think so. Hey! That guy we were just talking about gave that to me--the one who dated Anne Hathaway."

Later that day, I had a random conversation with someone about Transformers. The next day, as I was driving home from my Flying Pie Pizza date and wondered, hm, am I going to see any corresponding reference to Transformers soon? When I got home, I decided to record The Simpsons and Family Guy, and wouldn't you know, my DVR informed me that The Simpsons' Treehouse of Horror featured a spoof of Transformers (and The Great Pumpkin).

This morning, as I was waiting for my coffee to brew so I could take it with me to Bad Boy, I started thinking about why I don't watch the Headline News during breakfast any more; because as we all know, the news in America is nothing but bad news--if it's not violence, it's at least people being nasty or negative in some way (especially on CNN Headline News). I picked up the very excellent Heart of a Dog, by Mikhail Bulgakov (who is possibly my greatest love), and read a few pages whilst my coffee was spluttering out the final drops into the pot. Here is the conversation I read:

"And--heaven preserve!--don't read any Soviet newspapers before dinner."

"Hm...But there are no others."

"That's just it, don't read any. You know, I carried out thirty tests at my hospital. And what do you think? Patients who read no newspapers feel excellent. But those whom I deliberately compelled to read Pravda lost weight."

"Hm..."

"But that isn't all. They had lowered knee-tap reflex, rotten appetite, a depressed state of mind."

There is more going on here than just stating that the news causes people to become depressed; it's an expression of Bulgakov's anti-Soviet sentiments and more. What's interesting to me is the question of why throughout history the news has seemed to consist of negative and depressing information.

Headline News is either a good or a bad example; I use it because it represents what the average citizen watches--not the more educated individuals who seek out more intellectual and complete news coverage. In each half hour, Headline News devotes about five or six minutes total to the actual headlines, while the other 24 minutes are devoted to commercials, the weather, financial updates, salutes to the troops, entertainment, and special interest stories. The last two minutes of each half hour are given to local news channels to give local news updates.

If you turn on Headline News during the non-headline periods, the features are more often than not (I'd say at least two-thirds of the time) needlessly negative--as are the two-minute local updates, which here in Boise are done by Channel 2 (8 if you have cable) CBS News. The CNN non-headline stories almost always consist of "eyewitness" videos people filmed on their cell phones and uploaded to CNN's website, or that come from surveillance systems at businesses.

Here are some of the things I've seen on these features (conveniently organized into their own obnoxious 30-minute eyewitness show titled "News to Me"): explosions, violent COPS-style arrests, car wrecks, fist-fights, people stealing gas, plane crashes, child abuse, drug abuse, people giving drugs to toddlers, a grown man punching a teenage girl in the face for cutting in line at a McDonald's, teenage girls ganging up on and beating the shit out of another teenage girl for "talking shit" (actually, this one made headlines everywhere)... The local news updates on CNN are always two minutes of local murders, rapes, assaults, arrests, drug-busts, fires...and nothing else.

Why do the news producers think people need to see this shit? And it is shit. It's fucking bullshit. Everyone knows that what attracts viewers/ratings is sensational shit like this, or political or other public figures bad-mouthing each other, (remember that stupid Donald Trump/Rosie O'Donnell pissing contest and how much news coverage it got?), but what I'm interested in is why? Is this really what people want to see? Have they grown so accustomed to seeing terrible shit on tv that they can't get enough of it? (Yes! Hence the popularity of awful torture films like the Saw series).

When I worked at the call center, I couldn't take a breath without some middle-aged woman in a nearby cubie saying to someone, "did you hear about that (insert horrible local child abuse/murder story here)?" They were never interested in discussing anything else and would talk about this stuff all day, every day. When I started working at my current job, I had a coworker who would try to read all the horrible local child abuse/murder cases aloud to me, and she'd get really frustrated when I told her I didn't want to hear them. She was one of the most unhappy people I've ever encountered in my life.

I just want to know: are people so un self-aware that they don't know this stuff is bad for them? Does the media know it's assisting to keep people in a constant state of depression? Why do people like to see/read so much about people being terrible to each other?

Not So Smart

As anyone knows who has iTunes, every few months a new version of iTunes is available and you must update your iTunes with each new version or else you can't very well sync iTunes with your iPod.

I updated iTunes today to version 8.0 like my computer suggested. Version 8.0 has a new feature called the Genius Sidebar. It claims to "make playlists from songs in your library that go great together." I've only been running it for an hour, so I don't think it's had enough songs run through it to make playlists. What I have noticed about it is this: it puts a link to the iTunes Music Store in your iTunes window. Then it oh-so-helpfully "recommends" songs and albums that you are "missing" from your ultimate playlist, providing a convenient button so you can purchase them without having to take the pesky extra step of clicking on the Music Store icon.

I don't want to sound like the whiny beatnik on Mad Men telling Don Draper that ad men are swine because they create want, but I've had enough with Apple's aggressive marketing. I can't update iTunes unless I download their internet navigation program, Safari, which I don't use.

So, Apple, quit trying to force things on me that I don't need. I don't have a Mac, and all of your aggressive marketing is only turning me off. Oh, yeah, I'm also tired of your Mac vs. PC commercials.

No more hateful updates, please

You know, I don't want to sit here and complain, but the internet invites and supports certain annoying behaviors that I have a hard time ignoring.

I was recently reading Natalie Dee's blog (thanks for the recommendation, Meggers), and Natalie wrote about how boring Twitter is. I couldn't agree more. I also know that Natalie would make fun of me for blogging about a blog about a website, but I strive for postmodernity in everything I do. Anyway, Twitter is pretty stupid. The only reason I have a membership to it is so I can update my Facebook status from my cell phone—just like a teenager, I know.

I like to update my Facebook status when I see something interesting, like a guy walking down the sidewalk dragging a giant cross that says "Jesus is Lord" all over it. Or, I was on the bus the other day and a guy behind me was trying to hit on a girl by telling her about his eating addiction, and all she could do was tell him how much she loves to drink and ponder whether drinking is what caused her to gain seven pounds in the last two weeks. Then, the guy got really judgy and started preaching at her and asking her what makes her like to drink—“So you like to feel numb?” ("No, I like to feel good," was her vapid response). Their respective words would have been funny in a vacuum, but it was really disturbing because the guy seemed at the same time both harmless and creepy, and the girl was too naïve to recognize that giving away information like that about yourself—loudly, on a bus full of strangers—isn't the safest thing for a girl to do.

So I send info like this to my silly Facebook status update because I find it interesting and I think others may find it interesting. It’s just a way to pass the time. Or, when a horrible freak accident claims the life of one of the most wonderful teachers I've ever had the privilege of taking a class from, the seemingly-shallow status update helps me to share my grief with others, as corny (or ridiculous) as that may sound.

However, I’m not fond of being subjected to the hateful whims of my friends. If I want to read someone complaining, I can read blogs where people complain. I don’t really like to be bombarded on my Facebook page by bitchy comments about how all the girls on the BSU campus are dressed like stupid little whores, or about how proud someone is of all the things that she hates. And I really don’t like it when people have this updating thing hooked up to their text messaging via Twitter so I get texts about this crap all day long. Because I am enough of a dork that I get a little thrill when I hear the beep-beep-beep of my cell phone and I will usually drop whatever I’m doing to see what the text says.

It’s really disappointing to see some extremely bitchy comment about something I don’t really care about; a comment that doesn't want a response from me but exists merely to hit me with negative energy. And maybe you feel the same way about this whole blog post, but you can choose not to read a blog. You can’t really choose not to read a text message, because—hey, there it is! You’ve already read it! And sure, Facebook isn’t really that important in the grand scheme of things, but it’s an indulgence that some people find fun and use to talk to their friends. It kind of ruins the fun when you have to be subjected to hateful messages every time you log in.

Bastards

The people at my HOA are trying to rip me off. The reason I know this is because they tried to rip me off just the other day. When I went to my mailbox on Friday, I found a dunning letter from the Homeowners Association which states very explicitly, "Your account has an unpaid balance of $(bald-faced lie) for past homeowner association dues...Not paying your dues causes the Homeowner's [sic] Association grave difficulties in maintaining the community and could result in devaluation."

I resent the use of the phrase "grave difficulties." A bit self-important, really. Grave difficulties like they won’t be able to buy the yearly supply of koi after herons eat all the existing ones? Truly, a situation of life and death.

When I called the HOA office to tell them my account is not behind, the girl on the other end of the phone told me sweetly that I was a month ahead in January but I never paid my February dues. I had my check history on the computer screen in front of me and it clearly showed check XXXX written to my HOA and cashed for $135 in February.

"Nope," she said confidently, "you didn't pay in February. You're probably just confused because you had the credit in January. I'm making a spreadsheet for you right now so you can see when you paid and when you didn't." I love how people think spreadsheets will solve everything. I got it, and it’s just a chart that says exactly what she told me: they have no record of my February payment but they have all the payments since then. I wanted to tell her that in this context a spreadsheet is totally meaningless because it is basically just a visual representation of their side of the story. It’s not from their bank or anything. It’s as meaningful as if I'd made a spreadsheet showing which of my shoes I wear the most.

I got a copy of the check from my bank, but since it's older than 90 days all they could provide me with is a shitty, pixelated copy that is faint and blurry. I took it to the HOA office, but of course it was totally useless as you can't see the endorsement stamp or read the account number it was deposited to. The girl called me back to tell me that a) she could gain no useful information from the shitty check copy, and b) she has no record of my check in their files, where they keep both a spreadsheet (!) of all the homeowners' payments and photocopies of all of the checks.

I printed the more recent checks off and took them to the office. By that time the nicer girl who works at the office was on her break, and in her place was the middle-aged, supremely evil office manager. The evil office manager proceeded to tell me in her very harsh voice that they never received a check from me in February. I gave her all of my check copies. It is clear from the newer check copies that the disputed check was deposited at the same bank in the same account, because you can tell that the bank stamp and the account stamp where it was deposited are the same as on the newer checks (which are much easier to read). She said she'd research it and get back to me on Tuesday, even though she still "can't read" the Feb check.

My HOA sends letters out every June to almost every resident in my complex stating that their dues are behind (they used to both mail a copy and tape a copy on everyone's door; a heinous waste of paper). They are total liars.

I hate Sundays

I went to the gym for the first time today, and the first thing I did was to lock my keys, purse, and cell phone in my car. I had to call my parents to come unlock my car. The gym only has one steam room, near the pool, and it's for men and women. Gross. There's a sauna in the locker room, but dry heat is gross. Later, after I worked out, I tried to go to Pollo Rey downtown, and discovered I've completely lost all ability to parallel park. Pollo Rey was closed anyway.

Simon Cowell and Polyanna, go to Hell!

(I reread this post about 3 years after I stopped working with the woman mentioned below. Within a week, I saw her whilst lunching downtown. The universe is messing with me!)

I feel like complaining, but I'm not sure what I want to complain about. There are just so many things. I just finished watching Wonderfalls, which was a really good show. It only lived to see thirteen episodes, but it was so much better than most of the tripe on tv. I hate reality tv! All of it! I wish it would all just disappear. Arrested Development is going off the air, it's just not fair! American Idol is stupider than anything I could have ever dreamed up. So is America's Next Top Model, Survivor, Fear Factor, all of it!

Television ratings seem to be determined by the lowest common denominator. And Fox, though they air weird shows, don't give them much of a chance beyond that. Now I've discovered another show I like, Bones, which is sort of like CSI only better, partly because it stars David Boreanaz, a.k.a. Angel, and Zooey Deschanel's beautiful sister, Emily. But now they've put it up against Lost, which is one of the most popular shows on TV. I had to get a dual tuner DVR just to deal with this.

Are they stupid? I think they are stupid. I think anyone who watches American Idol and then discusses it at work the next day is stupid. I hate Simon Cowell, Paula Abdul, Ryan Seacrest, and that dude who had gastric bypass surgery. I also hate myself for knowing this much about any of them. But I can't escape it! My coworkers talk about it, my friends have forced me to watch it before, it's always on my MSN homepage, and it's all they ever want to talk about on Headline News in the morning! Fuck American Idol! Fuck it right in the ear! I realize I sound like my crazy, embittered grandma, but I don't care. Sometimes the simplest sentiments express things best. And spare me the crap about watching too much TV. All shows aren't crap. Being preachy is crappy, though.

Another thing that really annoys me but is unrelated, is this woman in my office. Her name is, approximately, Julie Anjeweirdo. She's one of those annoying Mormon ladies who thinks she knows better than everyone else, even though she's totally frumpy. Why on earth should anyone listen to a frump? And she seems to do even less work than I do.

Whenever I call her to ask her a question about the ever-changing rules, policies, and procedures of our corporation, she can't ever understand what I say the first time. Every conversation starts out with me telling her that I have a question about x, and whether x be simple or complex, she always, always, always answers me with, "What? What are you talking about? I don't understand what you're saying!" This is because she's not listening. She has the particular position she has because she doesn't really have to do much work.

But the thing that she does that annoys me the most, the thing that just makes me crazy, is that whenever I say something about how this or that policy is unclear or something unfair has been done to a customer, she always says, "Don't say that, be positive!"

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I hate it when people say that! Stating a fact such as, "Mr. Jones doesn't understand why he's been double-charged for every package he's sent in the past month," is not "being negative." Sure, the subject of the sentence is negative--our company is ripping Mr. Jones off, but to be negative would be to say something like, "Our shitty company has been ripping Mr. Jones off for the past month! We suck!" What is the "positive" way to say this? "Mr. Jones wants to congratulate us for so cleverly ripping him off all month?" Idiot.

Or she'll bring out that rusty old adage, "Don't say 'hate.' You don't really 'hate' anything!" Yes, yes, in fact, I do "hate." And what I hate is when people talk to me like I'm five years old! Especially when I'm maybe a million times smarter than they are! Of course, if that's the only way she can ever feel superior to someone, I guess I really shouldn't take that away from her...

My biggest pet peeve

I hate it when someone either sees or smells your food at work and says, "Eew, what is that?" I think it's really rude. Like, I don't look at someone and say, "Eew, what are you wearing?" even though that would be a valid question to many people at work, as would be, "What did you do to your hair?" or "What look were you going for when you put your makeup on, pill-popping middle-aged mom? Oh, whoops!"

There was really one lady in particular who used to do this, but she's dead now. Well, not really, but dead to my office, since she quit and everyone hated her. She was a crazy bitch and used to sit in the break room and harass everyone about their food, because everything looked wierd to her. Then I sat by this other girl who, I swear, complained about being able to smell other people's food before they had even taken it out of their cars and brought it inside the building. I read something in Miss Manners or something similar where someone complained about their cubicle mate's stinky food, and Miss Manners or whomever told them to get over it. If I were of some other ethnicity and someone said that about my ethnic food, I'd tell them they were racist.

Maybe I should coin a new phrase and call these people "foodist." And not like the gourmet type of foodist, or foodie. But someone who fears or is offended by strange food that someone else is eating whilst minding her own business and not trying to force others to like!

I say this because I made soup last night, and while it is very yummy, it will probably look wierd and smell strongly, since it has corn, green chilies, and cheese in a creamy base. Oh, yeah, and it has cumin in it, which is very smelly. And I've become apprehensive of bringing anything to work that isn't a frozen dinner because it causes people to freak out so much, which causes me to get pissed off!

Questions Are the Bane of My Existence, or, Anyone Who Tells You That “There Are No Stupid Questions” is Either A Liar, An Idiot, or Selling Something

This scroll was created protect me from stupid, rude, prying, inappropriate and otherwise annoying questions. Perhaps I am a bit immature, but it’s not just silly, pointless, or redundant questions that get on my nerves; it drives me bonkers to be asked any question at all. It would not, however, be practical to have a scroll that protects me from all questions, so I made it to guard against unnecessary and annoying ones.
The reason I hate being asked questions probably has to do with the fact that I work at a call center for a shipping company and my job is to answer questions all day long—usually the same idiotic questions over and over again such as: “This sticker says ‘peel backing from other side’—how do I do that?” and, “Do you need to know that I’m sending a urine specimen?” and my personal favorite, “What phone number did I just call?” It could also be the result of a lifetime of in-your-face parenting I’ve received as an only child. For some reason, being an only child means that about 90% of your conversations with your parents consist of them asking you annoying questions—often the same ones over and over again, like, “Since when don’t you drink cream and sugar in your coffee?” and, “What do you mean, you don’t like cauliflower?” and, “Have I told you how much weight I’ve lost since Christmas?”
The tedium of being forced to endure these pointless and endless questions is enough to make a person scratch their eyes out—or worse. This feeling is represented by the image at the top of my scroll, that of a child in a pose much like the figure in Edvard Munch’s “The Scream.” The boy is pulling the skin of his own face in an expression of pure exasperation while multitudes of question marks dance around his head and eventually make their way into his ear. The long, thin scroll was the perfect format for elongating and stretching this image to get even more of a resemblance to “The Scream,” I also stretched the bottom image to mirror this effect.
The question marks all around the boy’s head appear to have him hemmed in, trapped; he will never get away from questions unless he becomes a recluse or dies. His face is pulled and distorted in anguish because he knows he must endure so many tedious inquiries while traipsing the halls of life. The symbol in the scroll’s center is very simple: a question mark with the international sign for “no” over it. I chose this symbol because it is easily recognizable and sums up the concept of this scroll without using any words. Stretched as it is, the question mark almost begins to resemble a face with its mouth open, like the boy in the top photo.
The lower picture shows two men in the poses of Hear No Evil and Speak No Evil, pulled long to accommodate both the format of the scroll and to mimic the image at the top. The concept of hear no evil and speak no evil completes this scroll. Speak no evil to me in the form of idiotic questions so that I will hear no evil and you will see no evil perpetrated by me upon your person. Just above it is a list giving examples of the type of queries banned by the scroll, ending in the most ironic of all stupid questions, “Can I ask a stupid question?” which answers itself because yes, obviously you can ask a stupid question. You just did.
I chose the back of a jersey fabric flocked with black velvet designs for the verso side of my scroll. This was done purely for aesthetic reasons so that the design side would be scroll’s recto side and would be interesting to look at as well. The photo and text areas were printed using Microsoft Word and were placed on the scroll using iron-on transfer printer paper.

Bad Jenny!

Sometimes my job is just intolerable. And sometimes, I let it get to me. Like today. I got this call from this frigging asshole who was really rude and told me and my company to shove it because he got a bill for something he imported into this country. People simply can't comprehend the fact that when they import things into this or any other country, the government charges taxes on the items and they are not immune from it just because they don't like it. He told me that in the future, my company shouldn't deliver anything to him if the person sending it has asked for him to pay for it because he doesn't like our company. Like my company has anything to do with Customs charging him for imports. So I did him one better and contacted his local delivery office and let them know that he hates our company and that he wants to refuse any and all packages we have for him in the future.

I had to ask him for his address so I could pass along his message, and when he told me his street name, he spat it out really fast, which was impossible to understand given that he had a very thick accent. He was annoyed that I had to ask for his address in the first place and didn't just magically know it, but, you know, I had to know where we weren't to deliver the cursed packages in the future. So he said it again very fast. The name he said sounded like "Chris Lake Road," and I thought that might not be right because that's a fucking stupid name for a lake or a street (as would be Mike Lake, or Jen Lake, or Dave Lake--you get the point). So he replies with, "We are speaking English here, aren't we?" And I wanted to reply, "Well, I am. You aren't, sexist bastard." But all I said was, "Please spell your street name for me." It was Chris Lake fucking Road.

After I got his unpleasant ass off my phone, I thought, "You fucking asshole. I could call Homeland Security on your ass and totally make something up and make your life hell." It was horrible! But I think people make things hard for themselves when they refuse to be polite at all.

So fuck him.

I don't usually have a problem with people who have accents, unlike most of the people I work with. They are just plain racist and I am not like that. But rude people are rude people, regardless. I would never really call anyone on his ass. I'm sure it's not that easy, anyway. I'll just live with the satisfaction that the rude people I talk to every day make their own lives a frustrating hell by being assholes. But I hope his local delivery office keeps packages from getting to him. And I hope our billing office keeps sending him bills for things he's not getting.