Please retire now
Remember this postal worker? I had the pleasure of transacting business with her today. And when I say pleasure, I do not mean it.
I walked up to the counter, said hello (pleasantly), and told her I wanted to send my parcel priority mail with $25 insurance. Instead of asking me if I had anything liquid fragile, perishable, or hazardous1 in the mailer envelope, she said, “What have you got in there that’s worth $25?”
“It’s a photograph.”
“A photograph!?”
“Why are you insuring that?”
“Because it is valuable.”2
“So what’s it worth then?”
“Twenty-five dollars.” (Perhaps I said that a bit forcefully since everyone got really quiet in the post office.)
At this point she turns and walks to the door leading to the back of the vast, cavernous post office and yells at one of her colleagues to bring the new stamps up to the front. Because, I can only assume, there was a large, completely silent and invisible crowd of angry customers standing directly behind me waving knives and demanding the new stamps RIGHT NOW.
She wanders back a little while later and asks, “So how much did you want to insure this for? $50? $20?”
“Twenty-five dollars.”
“Oh.”
And then it was mercifully over.
1. Which I believe she is required, by law, to ask.
2. As in, it has a value of $25. Unless you are Karnak the Magnificent3 reincarnated and can discern the “true” (whatever that means) value of the contents of the mailer, shut the fuck up.
3. Oh, if only.
I hate the word rubric
I’m doing some consulting work that is both lucrative and soul-killing. But as I am more or less unemployed, beggars cannot be choosers. They can, however, be whiners, so I am going to take full advantage of that right now.
This task has consisted of taking jumbled information provided by a variety of sources and pulling it together for a catalog. This also involves mind-reading, stalking people for their biographical sketches (Why are people so loath to give up this information anyway? Especially people in the business of self-promotion?), and trying to avoid using words I despise like rubric, cadre, and formative.
This job is more or less really easy for me. The only obstacle to getting this done (besides a complete lack of any sort of descriptive text for one of the books and the biographical sketch problem already mentioned) is me because the text I am looking at makes my eyes glaze over.
Admittedly, this work would probably be a lot easier to tolerate if it came with an office, a steady salary, and some insurance.
I used to go out to parties and stand around
…’cause I was too nervous to really get down.
For the record, I have totally not been watching this over and over again all morning since Simon sent it to me.
No, really.
I haven’t.
*cough*
Insider political information courtesy of my cab driver (updated)
Sometimes I can stand a chatty cab drive and sometimes I cannot. I was somewhere in between today but decided to indulge this particular cab driver because he was so weirdly entertaining.
He started talking to me about politics almost as soon as my ass hit the seat. This is completely understandable seeing as how I was in said cab in Washington, DC.
He informed me of all the following things, in no particular order:
- Nick [sic] Romney seems pretty okay.
- John McCain is a good candidate. They’ve been to some of the same VFW meetings and he finds him a solid military man. Oh, and the military is really for men, according to the cabby. Women should raise the kids and cook dinner. Although (apologies for this tangent) when he saw a woman in uniform crossing the street in front of us, he said it made him proud to see women in the military. Maybe he thinks they serve by raising little be-uniformed kids and heating or hydrating the MREs for the guys.
- “Osama, er, Obama” seems pretty okay despite his name. He hasn’t heard anything bad about him so far.
- The current president is a nut.
- Thompson was a zombie.
- Huckabee is flaky.
- Giuliani should just drop out. No one cares about him.
- He has insider information that Senator Clinton has engaged in some “lesbian shenanigans” in town. I won’t go into why this is so appallingly stupid to me but suffice it to say that if there are two things that don’t shock me they are “lesbians” and anything described as “shenanigans.”
- Edited to add: And he can’t stand John Edwards because he is dragging his wife though this campaigning despite the cancer. (Because, I suppose, Elizabeth Edwards, being a mere woman, doesn’t have any say in any of this…?)
No need to thank me for this exciting political intel. In the grand tradition of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation, I think it is important to share and enjoy.
Sometimes I talk back to the television
And I say things like:
“Sure. If they had sights and … self-determination.”
Asteroids, I mean. Apparently, there are “wayward” asteroids out there that “have us in their sights” among other potential disasters.
Sigh.
Where the skies are so blue
I was talking to my friend Paul recently about how much I love the show Top Gear, which I have only recently started watching. Paul, it turns out, hates that show, even though he is a bit of a gear head, because they did the inevitable Let’s Go Taunt White Southerners bit on their show.
I understand his position entirely, myself being a bit sensitive about that particular party trick. As you may be aware, it is perfectly acceptable to make fun of poor white southerners. It might possibly be required. I have drawn a line in the sand more than once because various artists/shows/whatever have resorted to this.
So, at Paul’s suggestion, I looked up this particular footage online and am now providing it for your viewing pleasure. I’ll wait here while you watch it.
[approximately seven and a half minutes pass]
Welcome back! Let’s discuss.
I still like and will still watch Top Gear despite this and here’s why:
They more or less got what they deserved for doing something so goddamned stupid and genuinely dangerous. There’s also the fact that deciding that it is high entertainment to go somewhere and taunt the worst element of the people you find there is, frankly, painfully unoriginal. The fact that those folks aren’t as enlightened and sophisticated as these charming Englishmen think they should be is none of Top Gear’s business. What are they now? Missionaries? Anthropologists? And really, I don’t think they ended up looking nearly as intelligent and cool for doing this as they think. Perhaps they should just stick to what they know: cars.
Other things I found amusing:
- They actually did select some truly excellent vehicles for the rural south.
- They were genuinely terrified of the thunderstorm (don’t know if that made it into this particular video or not), which is very amusing to me.
- They knew–well at least one of them seemed to—that this was a wretched idea.
- Perhaps they will actually learn something from this although I doubt they’ll admit it.
- The woman at the gas station cracked my ass up. “Are you lookin’ to get beat up in a hick town?”
As a rural southerner (currently exiled in occupied Virginia but managing somehow to fit in), I am offended by what they did but hardly surprised. Mostly I am offended that they took such a cheap and easy shot. Is that really they best they could do? Was it at all necessary? Did it truly entertain? And if it did, what kind of audience are they trying to cultivate?
By doing this, they are no better than the people they were taunting.
Reason #4 to love America’s Finest News Source
If you don’t have access to The Onion’s weekly print edition, I feel very sorry for you. This is the single best above the fold headline ever.
Sometimes a change is good
I’ve had the same playlist of my iPod for months and months. It’s been good. I left it like it was because I was enjoying it and because it was so completely all over the place. I mean, really, my musical tastes are about as scattered as can be. I like what I like, no matter the genre, but I rarely like a whole bunch of any genre.
Yesterday, I changed it all out for a little more streamlined playlist that looks, in part, like this:
Although this doesn’t really show it the playlist is mostly Wilco, Van Morrison, and Sun Kil Moon1. There’s a smattering of stuff by other artists (Widespread Panic, Gordon Lightfoot, Katell Keineg2, Nick Drake, Molly Hatchet, The Band, Bill Withers, etc.) but mostly, it is the those three.
I’m enjoying it very much.
1. Thanks again for the SKM, Marigoldie.
2. Brought to my attention a few years ago by Cupcake.
