April 2007
Last time I went out-of-town to visit family, I got a glimpse of what I’d be like as a parent. A bunch of people were over for my niece’s 4th birthday and she was getting into something she wasn’t supposed to. My mom told her to put it away 3 times, but nobody made a move to enforce this and her parents were in another room. So I stood up and said:
“Hey Emily! How would you like your Aunt Jenny to beat your ass for the first time?”
I removed the camera from around my neck, put it on a shelf, and started to walk over to her. She put that shit away before I even had to touch her. *smirk*
Every college has one… that guy who seems to be at every party and who takes twice as long to graduate as everyone else. Best of all, he usually has a mascot-like name and his presence at social functions is seen as an honor so he never pays for booze. At the university I attended, that man was known as Animal.
Animal had this tradition of sitting in a corner at a party with a beer-filled metal bucket. He never seemed to leave his spot unless it was to go to another party and being the royalty that he was, people were always more than happy to get his bucket filled for him. Nobody seemed to know much about who he really was, but there were rumors about how he’d been in school for 10 years or someone had ordered a pizza and he was the one who delivered it.
I graduated from college over 10 years ago, but he’s the sort of person you don’t forget even though you hardly knew him. On the rare occasion that I still swap college drinking stories with friends, Animal always gets a mention. I don’t even know his real name, but he gets brought up in those conversations more often than even the people who I considered close friends at the time.
I know that I talked to him on a few occasions and while I remember that he was nice, I was too shit-faced to remember what we actually talked about. I also know that I made several beer-bucket runs for him, especially at places were I knew the people throwing the party and could cut in line. Usually all I had to do was hold the bucket up and they knew who it was for. Yes, I was a “bucket bitch.”
I recently created a new account on MySpace and unlike the old one, this time I listed what college I went to. Just today, I got a friend request from THE Animal himself and I felt like I’d been blessed by the Pope.
As usual, Violent Acres and I agree on one of the many ways that people can be morons. Being a frequent rider of public transportation, I almost always have headphones on to tune out the crazy homeless people and get a few minutes of zone-out time on the way to and from work. I used to always be the person that strangers asked for the time and it drove me nuts. I guess there are worse things than seeming like an approachable human being, but when I’m wearing headphones I wrongly assumed that everyone knew that it was the international signal for “PISS OFF.”
So I quit wearing a watch. Now when someone points to their wrist and mouths “What time is it?”, I just point to my blank wrist, shrug, and look at them like the dumbass they are… all without removing my headphones.
Last week, my horoscope at the Onion was the best yet:
“If there’s a drinkable liquid in the world that doesn’t cause loss of motor function, impaired judgment, slurred speech, dehydration, and eventual unconsciousness, you don’t want to know about it.”
Yep, that about sums it up.
I think I’ve gotten to a point where I just assume that all straight men are misogynists like I am. On the way back from lunch yesterday, two male co-workers and I were talking about a female co-worker who annoys the shit out of everyone because she is in hysterics 99.9% of the time. I started off a sentence about her with: “She just needs to…”
and caught myself just in time to end it with “shut up.” I’m pretty sure what I was originally going to say would’ve offended at least one of the male co-workers, so it’s a good thing I managed to watch my mouth for once.
I’ve had not one, but TWO cab drivers hit on me and give me their phone number in the past week. WTF?
I read an article on the Consumerist blog the other day about the shady practices employed by Enterprise to get you to purchase extra insurance with your car rental. Once upon a time, I used to rent from them when I was going out-of-town to see my folks and needed to take some things that were too much to lug on Amtrak or ship. Their insurance sales tactics are the exact reason I quit renting from them and started shopping around more when I needed to rent a car. I’m glad that they’ve finally been outted for that behavior – it couldn’t happen to a nicer company!
One thing that I like about my current job is that I get to wear a lot of hats. I’m usually a web designer, but at this place I’m doing user-interface design, taking staff photos, designing “thank you” notes for the head of our tech division, making signs for the conference rooms, etc. I’ve joked with my boss about how the title on my business cards should read “Random Arty-Farty Person” since my duties span so many creative areas.
However, there is one duty that keeps coming up that doesn’t fit so neatly with the arty-farty stuff: Dating Consultant. Last week when I was taking staff photos of new employees, this woman walked out with me afterwards and asked where to go to meet single people since she had just moved here from San Francisco. I just told her to go out and do things that interested her and that she’d probably meet someone that way, but in all honesty I didn’t know what to tell her. I mean, I’m the person who is at my happiest when I’m single, so I’ve never looked for people to date despite the fact that I’ve done a fair amount of it.
This is not the first person at work to ask me for dating advice, either. A supervisor there is going through a divorce and she started to ask me dating questions when she found out I was divorced as well. Since her divorce isn’t even final yet, I told her to get a pool boy.
A scene from a wedding…
Family Friend: Wow, you look so much like your mother!
Me: She’s still got some catching up to do in the tattoo department, though.