Once upon a time, I was in a video store with my then boyfriend trying to pick out a movie to watch. I picked up John Carpenter's Vampires, and proceeded to tell the boy about the coolest scene in the movie, where a guy uses his hot-from-being-fired gun to cauterize a wound he received. Said boyfriend looks at me, shakes his head, and says, "You're not like other girls, Betty."
Name::Braindead Betty From::Indy, Indiana, United States
Wait, maybe I should back up a little bit. Obviously I understand at least a little bit about men. How else could I have gotten one to marry somebody as crazy as me? What I don't understand is how men interact with other men. I think that a lot of this has to do with the fact that I spent my formative adult years with goth and emo whiney boys who never acted like men to begin with.*
This came up over the weekend while Jay and I watched "Secret Window." (Which was not nearly as horrible as I had been led to believe. Still not great, but not horrible either.) Jay and I got to talking about the behavior of the soon-to-be-ex-wife's new boyfriend in the movie. Whereas I thought he was being an emotionally supportive, helpful significant other, Jay thought he was being an intrusive ass. Apparently there is some kind of pecking order, testosterone thing between exe's and current's, at least according to Jay.
We girls keep it much simpler. According to us, you have no previous women in your life. And if, for some strange reason, you do...they're much uglier than we are. And that's it.
I guess it could be worse. At least they're not peeing on our legs. Although sometimes I think Jay would like to.
*Which is not to say that all goth and emo boys act like this. If you have more eyeliner on than your girlfriend however, this probably applies to you.
I don't know if I was almost a witness to a crime last night or not. I keep trying to convince myself that there's a perfectly reasonable explanation for what happened...
Jay and I have some neighbors that we've long suspected of having a less-than-legitimate second income source. They've actually been pretty good neighbors. They don't cause trouble or disturbances. At least, they hadn't before last night. I had just fallen asleep when I was awoken with the unmistakable sound of gunfire. I heard 4 shots fired, and honestly, I kind of flipped out and froze. I didn't know what to think or do. It took about 5 minutes for the cops to show up, and at that point I knew that everybody in our house was fine, so I went back to sleep. There wasn't any crime scene tape up this morning, so things must've turned out okay. I'm guessing that someone got drunk and dumb is all.
That wasn't nearly as scary as the time I actually got shot at, though. Back when I was young and stupid, I was spending an evening with my best friend at the time and her boyfriend. We were driving back to their house from another friend's apartment when we all heard that loud POP that we've come to know and love. Then I felt something on my face. I looked over, and the car window was gone. I had glass all in my hair and all over my face. It turns out that I was pretty lucky, as the bullet apparently went just under my chin, and didn't hit me at all. It was one of those cases of just being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and not one I'd ever like to experience again. It does, however, come in very handy during games of "I never."
Have you heard that they're trying to make spanking your children illegal in California? I'm not trying to spark a huge pro vs. con spanking debate here, but no matter which side of that fence you're on, I don't know how any parent can stand for this. Abuse is already illegal; how much further do we want to let the government into our private lives?
Jay brought up what I thought was a good point when I was talking to him about this. He asked me, "If you can't spank your kids, can you build a cage with a bathroom to put them in when they need to be punished?" I told him that I thought that fell under the abuse category and he responded, "That's how adults are punished."
I wonder what a certain California legislator would say to that.
One of the best things about working a customer service/call center type of job is getting to see the interesting names & addresses of other people. I've helped both Mrs. Rosemary Thyme and Miss Princess Prince in the past. I've met people who live at 420 High Street, and these examples don't evin begin to touch what people come up with for email addresses.
Today I helped someone who lives on "Adventure Avenue." Besides making me think of both possible children's TV shows and the song "Electric Avenue," by Eddy Grant, it also made me wonder what kind of pressure someone who lives on that street must feel. If you lived on Adventure Avenue do you think you'd feel like every day had to have some exciting adventure to be complete? I know I've heard about people petitioning to change the name of Gay Street, so people must feel like their address reflects them in some way. I think I'm content living on a street named after some long-dead white guy.
By the way, you can thank me later for getting "Electric Avenue" stuck in your head all day.
I don't like to play the helpless little girl card. (Except with Jay, who knows it's a load of crap, anyway.) When it comes to cars, I may not be a mechanic, but I know the basics. You know, how to change oil, change a tire, do a tune-up, change a fan belt, etc. So it wasn't any big deal when Jay called me at work yesterday to ask me to check my oil before I headed home. Apparently, there was a big oil stain in the driveway. Yuck.
After I got done at work I went out to the parking lot and popped my hood. One of the guys I work with was also leaving at the same time, and when the hood went up, he beelined over.
Him: "Need some help?" Me: "I'm just checking my oil. Thanks, but I've got it." Him: "Oh, that's okay; I'll help!" He pulls out a dipstick and tells me that it looks fine...
Me: "That's great, but I wanted to check my oil, not my transmission fluid."
I think I found an answer to the problem I mentioned here. No, not the driving...as far as I know science has yet to come up with a cure for stupid. In regards to the food thing, however, I posted this sign at work today:
Fuck off and die, Indiana drivers. Do you see that 12+ inches of snow out there? That means it would be prudent to drive a reasonable speed, and leave plenty of following space between you and the car in front of you. Also, we get black ice every year, why do you act like it's some crazy, new phenomenon every year?
Fuck off and die, coworkers. I'm not your fucking commisary. If you wanted food, you should've bought it on your way here, like I did. Didn't anybody ever tell you how dangerous it is to try and finagle chocolate out of a pregnant woman?
Happy Valentine's Day. And if you'll allow me a bit of self-congratulations, happy blogiversary to me, too. It just so happened to be Valentine's Day last year when I started this little blog-thing.
I don't exactly care for doing the expected thing, so instead of going on a long tirade about how ridiculous Valentine's Day is, or getting all mushy about the people I love, I thought I'd tell about my best Valentine's Day ever. It's probably not what you expect.
My junior year in high school, the AIDS awareness group I was involved in was invited to attend the Ryan White National Youth Conference. I know Valentine's Day is supposed to be the holiday of love, but the outpouring of love I witnessed at that conference was amazing. It didn't matter if you were living with HIV/AIDS, if you were, like me, someone who had lost a family member to the disease, or if you were just someone who cared enough to help. Whatever motivation had brought you there, you were family. There were people from all walks of life and all backgrounds. I don't think I've ever seen such acceptance.
I met several people that week who I laughed with, cried with, and learned with. As usually happens (especially with busy high schoolers), when we went home and back to our regular lives we ended up losing contact, but for that one Valentines's Day, we were family.
In case you haven't heard, Anna Nicole Smith died. Sorry, I just felt like I was the one person in America who hadn't commented on it.
When did we turn into the ultimate nation of voyeurs? I'll admit, I'm no better than anyone else. I have DListed and Go Fug Yourself in my blogroll, both blogs dedicated to celebrities. It's kind of unsettling though, when the day after an (at best) B-List celebrity dies, video of her receiving CPR while wating on paramedics hits the internet.
It's not even confined to celebrities, though. Think about what blogging is all about. It's the ultimate exhibitionist/voyeur combo. You get to examine the minutae of everyday people's lives when reading their blogs. Is this us taking "keeping up with the Joneses" to the next level, or is it that we're dissatisfied with our own lives and want to live vicariously through others? (Sorry if that's the case and you're reading here.)
I guess there's not really a point to this; I'm not going to quit spilling my life out onto the web, and I'm certainly not going to stop reading about others. I guess it just falls back to the credo of, "everything in moderation." Let's try to stop resembling a pack of drooling hyenas the next time a celeb flashes her coochie, and maybe we can start taking baby-steps back to sanity.
One of the things that sucks about being from Indiana is the way people talk. It's enough to drive a person crazy about the third time you hear someone refer to "worshing" their hands. Or heading down to the "crick" to do a little fishin'. What can you expect from a state whose nickname is sometimes credited to the habit of asking "Whose ear?" when finding a stray one on the floor after a fight?
Having lived my whole life here, and having family from both Kentucky and Alabama, has made me pretty much immune to most of Hoosierspeak. There are just a couple words that really get my goat though. One of which is "irregardless." Quick, before you check out the link, tell me, do you think irregardless is a word? My friends and I had an argument about this the other night with everybody teaming up against me, and I'm just curious what the non-Hoosiers out there think.
RSM recently talked about her relationship with her mother and gave some examples of punishments she received growing up. It made me think of me and my mom, and some of the things we went through when I was growing up.
My parents were great at punishments. I'm sure I stretched their imagination a time or two, because I was always getting in trouble, but they sure never let me down in my belief that their sole purpose in life was to make me miserable. The simplest thing they did, and the one that caused me the most heartache, was that they would never ground me for a definite time frame. When my friends screwed up, they got grounded for two weeks, or a month, or whatever their parents deemed appropriate. When I screwed up, how long did I get grounded? "As long as I feel like it." was my dad's standard response. It made making plans a real pain in the butt.
Some of the better punishments my parents came up with involved touring a working convent, moving my bed into their room (when I got caught sneaking out at night), and threatening to throw all my clothes away and buy me nothing but Tommy Hilfiger instead. I know to some people that probably would've been a dream come true, but I hung out with the goths and the skaters and the punks. It would've been hell. Actually, this must've been the most effective threat that my mother ever came up with, because it never actually progressed past the threat stage.
I actually moved out of my parents house the first time because of a punishment that I felt was unfair. I had stayed out past curfew (my 11:00 curfew at 18 years old and already graduated from high school), and when I got home, my dad was waiting up for me. No big surprise there, but what he did next pissed me off to no end. He made me sit in the living room and stay awake ALL NIGHT LONG. Looking back, I see his point, that I made him miss sleep, so he would make me miss sleep, but at the time I was livid enough to pack up all my stuff the next day and move in with some friends. And I do still to this day think 11:00 is a ridiculous curfew for an 18 year old high school graduate.
Luckily, my parents and I both survived adolescence with very few psychological scars, and we're closer now than ever. It's amazing what grandkids will do to mellow a person out.
Let me preface this by saying, I love my job. I make good money for what I do, I have benefits, I get to goof off a good bit, but by and far the best thing about my job is my coworkers. From my immediate boss who's as big of a geek as I am and discusses movie and comic book trivia with me all the time to the airhead in accounts payable who tries to argue theology with me all the way up to the president of the company, who is the sweetest, babe-in-the-woods innocent lady ever. Sometimes though, even people that you adore can get on your last nerve. This past weekend, there were 3 regional conferences that our company needed to be represented at. The president's husband got to go to Destin, Florida. The VP got to go to Dallas, Texas. I got to jet off to exotic, exciting...Appleton, Wisconsin. I completely understand why I got the crappy place. Low man on the totem pole and all that jazz. The thing that absolutely drives me crazy is the fact that the president's husband made a huge production out of going to Destin, like it was going to be so horrible. *Said in dramatic, fake-southern-drawl, Scarlett-in-Gone-With-the-Wind type of voice* Because it's such a loooong drive to Florida, and I'll be gone longer and bla, bla, bla... *end sappy voice* And then, yesterday, as we were comparing notes about our seperate trips, he had the nerve to complain about how "chilly" Destin was. I'm willing to bet no matter what the temperature was there, it was better than my -30°F weekend. Just a guess.
