kdiddy.org

I’m not, by nature, a violent person. At least I don’t think so. I used to describe myself as having a short temper. But I think that was a combination of two things: my admittedly bad habit of getting irritated too easily and my tendency in my earlier days to bother having an opinion or caring about stuff that wasn’t actually worth the effort. I’ve gotten physical a few times. One time that stands out is when I was about 10 and at a high school reunion picnic with my parents. Some kid was harassing me and the other kids I was playing with. I became furious. I pushed him. He pushed back. He won. I got gravel embedded under the skin of my palms, which hurt like hell.

Most of the time, if I’m angry about something, I’ll rant about wanting to sock someone, and maybe in the moment I do. But I know that it’s not really worth whatever consequences would follow.

My thought process was not as logical this past Friday night.

I was out to see the husband’s band and a few DJs and I was, admittedly, intoxicated. I was, however, behaving and just generally having a good time, and tweeting things like:

Just don't ask me to explain any of these.

At one point, however, some guy who was not holding himself together, stumbled through the crowd and was dragging another inebriate, who was dragging a bar stool. This choo-choo train of fail ran right into me, knocking me down and trampling me a bit. My memory of this event is fuzzy, but my sister-in-law tells me that I stood up and thrust two middle fingers in the air. I then approached the guy who ran into me and talked to him for a bit in what I’m sure was an enlightening conversation. I then removed his glasses, set them on the table next to him, and slapped him across the face.

Photographers were on hand to capture my self-image

There was no retaliation on his part or on the part of his companions. Probably because I was nice enough to spare his glasses. I wear glasses. I know they’re expensive. If I had a slap coming, I would want to make sure my glasses wouldn’t get bent.

I’m really thankful that it didn’t escalate. Obviously because I wouldn’t want to test out whether or not I had any actual fighting skills but also because people starting fights at bars is so cliche and trashy. But I’m mostly just really…impressed? surprised? with myself that I got up the guts to do such a thing when the situation really called for it.

That said, I’m pretty sure I’m hanging up my gloves.

I know that the internet is already sick of hearing about this, because it happened like HOURS ago and plus earthquakes happen other places and other things happen, too, and GOD WHY DO WE TALK ABOUT ANYTHING ON THE INTERNET AT ALL JUST BE QUIET EVERYONE. (I’m truly puzzled by this because now that we have all of the communication that we could possibly want, I think we’re realizing, “Oh, right, I want you to shut your face.” More than two tweets in a row about any possible subject and the “Move on, already!” brigade shows up. “Talk about something else for three seconds until I get sick of that and then await further instructions!” Jesus. Go for a walk.)

Anyway, at some point fairly recently, the husband and I were talking about how not into natural disasters we are. I mean, Pittsburgh has its faults, but the worst thing you can say about it, weather-wise, is that winter steps on your neck every year. And aside from the odd blizzard, even that isn’t too bad. We like going about our days not worrying about hurricanes or tornadoes (much). And I think we had watched a video of the earthquake in Japan and were both like, “EFF THAT! I am so glad we don’t have those here. I am not into earthquakes at all.”

Obviously, I had no idea what an earthquake was like. And yesterday, while I was sitting at my desk and felt the building move, a lot of thoughts went through my head.

“I’m pretty sure the building’s moving. That’s odd. It generally doesn’t do that. It kinda feels like how the new Target does when cars drive in the parking garage beneath it. But…we don’t have a parking garage in this building. Maybe they’re doing some kind of heavy construction on this building? But it’s silent. Oh, shit. I bet I’m having a stroke. Or the psychosis is finally taking full control. ”

Then I noticed some of the stuff on my desk vibrating and finally, in a very tiny voice, said, “Um, is the building moving?” Tiny voice because if you’re pretty sure that your brain is imploding, you’re not really keen to announce it. “HEY GUYS! THE BUILDING IS MOVING AND ALSO PUDDING ROGER THAT GOING TO POOP ON THE FLOOR NOW!” But one of my co-workers confirmed that she felt it, too, and had been similarly hesitant to survey everyone else. However, my other co-workers did not feel anything, which put us back to being concerned.

“Could it have been an earthquake?”

“NOOOO! We don’t have those here…Er, well, I guess there was that one about a year ago. Hmm…”

Now, this is, I think, just the cutest thing I’ve ever done: I opened a new tab, pulled up Google, and typed, “earthquakes.”

Just that. Not “earthquakes Pittsburgh” or even “earthquakes WTF?” Like, I went to Google and basically just HURR DURRed at it. But Google knew exactly what I needed and pointed me directly to the NSGS site…which told me that, yes, there was just an earthquake in Virginia and you felt it where you are and aren’t you sweet, just sitting there through it.

“You guys…that WAS an earthquake! Ack! We were supposed to stand in the doorway!” So, I got up and stood in the doorway, even though by that point the earthquake had ended about 10 minutes ago. My emergency preparedness is on a bit of a delay.

Then I got kind of scared. Remembering how it felt made me dizzy and hearing everyone poo-poo it didn’t help. I know that they happen everywhere all the time and are much worse, but the first time experiencing it was pretty scary. I feel fairly certain that West Coast residents might remember being aware of an earthquake for the first time and being freaked out by it, so a little bit of sympathy would have been nice. Just sayin’.

I posted on MamaDojo the other day that I’ve been putting some effort into my appearance. For me, 32 has been a particularly shifty year when it comes to my self-image. I’ve never been so at peace with my body, but I’ve also never been so proactive in changing it. Well, changing probably isn’t the best way to put it. I think I’m finally at a point where I’m recognizing how good this bag of bones has been to me and I want to treat it right. I eat well, making almost all of my meals with a focus on what my body needs, what will make it feel good. I exercise, but not so much that I risk hurting myself. I regard the tiny lines that are quietly etching their way around my eyes with a sense of, “I was wondering when you’d show up.”

Pretty much the opposite of what I was doing 15 years ago when my body was, outwardly, Holy Shit Amazing to most standards.

This is not to say that I’m “cured” of all of that nonsense. I still fret about the size of my belly and how weird it is that the meat on the side of my left knee is so much bigger than that of my right. Stuff like that.

But I’m noticing that I want to be more…visible? Like I mentioned in my MamaDojo post, Joan from Mad Men rocks my world. She’s got boobs. She’s got hips. She’s got an ass. And we know all of this, but more importantly, we know that she knows it. I’ve been trying to adopt some of that attitude while remaining true to the fact that I like being comfortable and somewhat conservative.

So, today, I was a little apprehensive about my outfit, especially when the husband sized me up and said, “What…what’s with this outfit?” I then peppered him with questions, paranoid that I was, to use a somewhat offensive and not at all feminist word*, skanky. Of course, this recalled another hilarious exchange between the two of us when I had some anxiety over a pair of shorts that were shorter than I usually buy.

“Are they skanky?” I fretted.

“I think you and I have very different definitions of skanky,” he replied. “You look like you’re about to go golfing.”

“But not, like, skanky golfing?” I confirmed, because you know how skanky golfing is totally a thing.

I just want to make sure that I’m not overdoing it and that I’m projecting a relatively youthful vibe without looking like I’m denial over the fact that I’m 32.

So, here’s me in the bathroom at work this morning while our network was down. (What else was I supposed to do? Write things down on paper? Pssh.) I’ll provide the inner monologue.

Conservative shot…terrified someone will walk in.

Try to emulate one of those ladies who document their outfits everyday…ow, I think I pulled something.

Getting really daring now. Attempting to look up without falling over. Oh, why does my posture look weird? Can you tell that I have a wad of paper towels in my left hand?

I need to stop messing around. Jaunty, flirty pose. Vogue.

Not pictured is a bracelet I was wearing this morning…until I remembered that I really don’t like wearing bracelets.

It’s shorter than I would normally go for and the addition of a belt was, to me, completely impulsive and weird. And I would have worn a necklace but I was so thrown off by the belt and the bracelet that I was worried my head would explode. But how do you think I’m doing?

* I’m usually really conscious of my language but sometimes I just have to go there.

It’s a rainy Saturday and I spent all afternoon at one of my grandmother’s Ladies’ Lunches. So I have that post-being-dressed-up fatigue and don’t want to do anything but bum around the internet. So, here we are.

About a year or so ago, I subscribed to this site that posted old VHS videos. I never really thought about it, but there was a lot going on in the world of home entertainment in the 80s and most of it was…not good. And the people behind the site managed to find some real treasures, even if they were just video greeting cards that people did for someone’s 40th birthday or something.

Anyway, I didn’t notice that nothing from the site had come through my Google Reader in quite some time until I was killing some time the other day, unsubscribing from stuff that had been abandoned. (The internet is littered with the dessicated corpses of blogs and websites that people lose enthusiasm for. It’s kind of depressing, especially when you remember a site that you used to really love and go there only to find tumbleweeds. There needs to be some kind of orphanage for these sites. Or at least a proper burial. Or perhaps I need to quit anthropomorphizing the internet. Does this mean the matrix has me?) So I clicked through and found that they had moved to a new site and collaborated with someone else doing the same thing. The whole operation is now at Found Footage Fest.

A recent favorite of mine is Shattered: When Your Kid’s on Drugs, which seems to be a pretty typical, “I smoked pot for the first time on Friday and now it’s Monday and I’ve given away all of my possessions for crack and I think I may have murdered my parents and it burns when I pee,” scare movie that they’ve been rehashing every generation since the days of Reefer Madness (and earlier, I’m sure).

What’s especially terrific about it is the cast. It stars Judd Nelson, who I thought for sure had a prolific drug problem but apparently not; Burt Reynolds, who, bless his heart, never had a thought that wasn’t written for him first; Dermot Mulroney, whose only movie roles I can ever remember are Bad Girls and Point of No Return and I’m pretty sure I’m the only person to have seen these movies because when we see him in something and the husband asks me, “What was he in?” I say, “Bad Girls and Point of No Return and I think he’s married to Catherine Keener,” he looks at me with a rather puzzled expression.

Best of all, Shattered stars Megan Follows as a budding crack-ho-to-be. Megan Follows, of course, was in the Anne of Green Gables movies, which were partially responsible for my pre-teen/early teen identity because I had red hair and was dramatic and liked puffy sleeves, which is perhaps the only fashion item that the Victorian era and 80s wedding dresses had in common. One time, I randomly found a small bottle of ipecac in the copier room at work and went on and on about how Anne and Diane saved Diane’s little sister with ipecac because the doctor couldn’t get there and blah blah blah Lady of Shallot Gil Miranda blah. And I wondered why I couldn’t get a boyfriend.

Perhaps it would be best if I just stopped here and showed you the video I’m talking about.

I’ve heard from various sources that you’re supposed to get your hair trimmed every six weeks. This sounds nice and all, but I’ve always fancied it to be excessive, both in terms of maintenance and cost. Granted, I tend to let things go longer than I should, but usually get my hair cut maybe twice a year.

My most recent trim was back in September and I went to another salon on the main boulevard in my neighborhood. The one that I first went to last summer, the one that the husband feared would give me poofy bangs, was fine, but they seemed slightly put out that I was messing with the age curve.

So, in September I went to another place that served a slightly younger clientele and got a haircut that I wasn’t sure about at first, but turned out to be just fine. And it got me parting my hair slightly off-center, which, when I look back on 2009, will stand out as one of life’s big events. What Master’s degree? DID YOU SEE MY PART?!?!?

So, with my ends looking mighty unhealthy, I headed down to the same place on Saturday. I wanted to keep the little side bang, take off a few inches, and get some layers.

The haircut portion of my visit was fine and I addressed the de rigeur pitching of Redken products with aplomb.

When it came time to dry my hair, the stylist said, “Now, last time, we dried your hair straight. Could we try playing up your curl this time?” Eh, sure, go for it. I always have stylists dry it straight because it always looks so smooth and pretty, but change is good, right?

Well, 5 curl-defining products, a diffuser, and a curling iron later, I found myself staring at this:

The stylist, bless her heart, was so excited about the Bon Jovi masterpiece atop my head that when she asked me, “Do you like it?” I had to reply, “Yes, of course!” I normally wouldn’t endorse lying, but like I said, the cut was fine and this style would go away just fine. In the meantime, I just tried to stifle my laughter and wondered if I could find neon spandex pants at the thrift store.

When I walked into my house, the look on the husband’s face was one of horror mixed with whatever contortion happens when you try to stifle laughter. I couldn’t contain myself and cracked up.

It’s calmed down considerably since I washed it, but if you’re in need of a groupie for your 80s revival band, I’m available.

With the Master’s degree pretty much over and done with (or, as I told my friend Jennie the other day, “It was time to put that bitch to rest,”), I am all set to dive into holiday stuff.

I have this emotional quirk that doesn’t allow me to enjoy things if I have some stressful thing looming over my head. So, even though I started listening to Christmas music weeks ago and busted out the It’s a Wonderful Life and National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation DVDs embarrassingly early, I was really holding back my excitement for this time of year until Tuesday’s presentation was firmly in the past.

As I’ve mentioned, this year I’m really into Christmas because it means lots of time to hang out with my family and the end of a year that’s been kind of shitty. And I’m sorry to brag, but my family is rad as hell. So, this weekend, I’m hoping to finish some cleaning and decorating projects and perhaps get our tree.

Our celebration of Christmas is very secular. The husband is an atheist. I’m comfortably unsure, though definitely very happy without an organized religion. And the baby…well, the one thing that we feel strongly about is that he’s too young to really ponder the enormity of things like faith and existence, so assigning him our choice of religion (or lack thereof) is inappropriate. And so we’re kind of just waiting for him to ask us questions.

Anyway, all of this is to say that our version of Christmas marches alongside the traditional version and looks much the same, but we center it around different things. And, really, I think inventing new traditions, borrowing from what came before you and shaping it into something new and good is pretty rad.

In our sporadic discussions of religion, we’ve told the baby that we (or at least I) would be happy to explore options if he were ever interested. Last night, he asked us about the possibility of celebrating Hanukkah.

I was all for it, noting that we might need to get a few things and figure out generally what one does during the Festival of Lights. “I’ll look it up on Wikipedia,” I promised, knowing that I needed to fill in the holes of what I knew…dreidel…oil…latkes…8 days.

I knew that Hanukkah was coming up but I was kind of surprised to find that the whole thing starts tonight, leaving me literally no time to obtain a menorah and whatnot.

So, there’s us. Lapsed Catholics, failed Jews. Story of my life.

I think we might still improvise the whole thing, just to get a feel for it. Then next year we’ll firm it up a bit.

*A common exchange amongst speakers of Pittsburghese. Translates to: “Did you eat yet?” “No. Did you?” Has been adapted to become the name of a local eatery.

One of my quirky pet peeves is inefficiency. Specifically, inefficient packaging. As insignificant as a concern as this may be, I think it will start to have significant consequences as people rely more on e-commerce and shipping in terms of costs, both financial and environmental.

So, for the baby’s birthday, I ordered (shh, don’t tell) this safety knife set because he always wants to help me cook and I want him to have 10 intact digits. Like I said, I’m quirky.

Today, the knife set and the other gifts that I ordered arrived and I gleefully set about opening boxes. I couldn’t quite remember what was due, so when I got to the biggest box, I wasn’t sure what was inside.

I offer my foot for scale, if that helps. I wear a size 8, 8 1/2.

Another shot of the impressive box, complete with my stained shirt. (My grandmother gave me four shirts for my birthday. I’ve worn three. I’ve also stained three. Eff my life.)

At this point, seeing the cooking.com tape, I’m figuring it’s the knife set, but I’m not yet concerned about the size because I didn’t check the dimensions when I ordered it. Maybe that makes me a bad consumer. I don’t know.

Ooh, looks enticing.

Dig, dig, dig. “Any minute now,” I say to myself, “I’m going to reach the gift. Sweet!”

Eventually, I reach China this:

I know what you’re thinking: SRSLY?

Srsly.

I estimated this to be 27 feet of Fill-Air. TWENTY-SEVEN FEET. All for this.

And, look, I get it. I ordered this around the busiest shopping time of the year. I can only imagine the fatigue that the shipping staff of cooking.com and amazon.com were experiencing and I’m sure they were experiencing packaging challenges that would make me barf. But this is really ridiculous. It’s inefficient and wasteful and frankly I expect better.

My great-uncle brought it back from Italy after World War II and gave it to my grandmother. I wore it on our wedding day.

My plans for today included laundry, eating, maybe going to the nail shop, taking a nap, and whatever the female equivalent is of laying on the couch and scratching one’s balls.

Instead, the mail came. And in the mail there was a letter from PNC Bank’s collections department.

Oh, yes they did.

I haven’t blown up like that in awhile. I was shaking. I was screaming. I confessed to wanting to do very illegal things to every PNC branch in the city. I called several different numbers (because of course they kept bouncing me around) and bitched at every single customer service rep I talked to. I don’t normally do that, because I know that most people are just doing their jobs and trying to scrape by themselves. But I now have a pretty decent amount of contempt for all bank employees, since this is some divide and conquer bullshit. Give broke people a somewhat decent job screwing over other broke people, all the while gambling away their retirement funds…it all makes me sick.

But what I found out from one poor woman who had the shitty fate of talking to me was that when I settled my account once and for all (or so I thought) about a month ago, the money that I handed over never went through and I was once again responsible for $137.74. That amount includes a $29.95 fraudulent charge that I disputed, the investigation fee (since they somehow found in favor of the merchant, which is a whole other WTF), and a couple overdraft fees thrown in for good measure.

“So I give your institution money that I can’t afford to hand over and which your institution does not deserve, all in the name of just getting you out of my life, and you guys lost that money?”

“Well, ma’am…” she said WITH ATTITUDE.

“Oh, well, that’s a real crackerjack operation you guys are running over there. Seriously. Awesome fucking work. I’ll go to the branch AGAIN and settle this AGAIN.”

When I got to the bank, I sat down with a guy (let’s call him “Skippy”) I’d dealt with at least two other times in this debacle and who had been a douche to me before. I considered the possibility that I would leave that building in handcuffs and charged with assault and like, terroristic communist threats or something.

As Skippy explained to me, when I settled my account the last time, they sent the general ledger credit slip to their collections department and that department rejected the slip for some reason. Skippy insisted that I had done nothing wrong and could consider myself free and clear.

“Oh. So you guys made a mistake.”

“Eh, no, it’s not a mistake,” Skippy replied. The collections department rejects these slips for any number of reasons, like the teller didn’t sign her name clearly enough or didn’t list all of the information on the slip.

“So you guys made a mistake.”

“No,” Skippy insisted. They had done everything correctly with my payment, just in a way that resulted in me getting a threatening letter from the collections department.

“I’m sorry, Skippy. I may be a writer and not a financial whiz like you kids here, but that sounds like you guys made a mistake.”

Skippy, ever the optimist, maintained that they had fucked up in the correct manner, and that if I received any more letters detailing their stellar operations to let him know, so that he and I could again discuss the details of the awesome way that they continue taking money from me and being idiots.

What’s really fucked up is that there is no “closing” my account with them. If PNC insists that I arranged payment to a merchant through them, they will re-open my account to “honor their agreement,” once again putting me in arrears. And considering I already had one fraudulent charge to a business that I’d never heard of and never received anything from honored by PNC, it seems reasonable for me to worry that they have the power to conjure up any number of charges that they can honor and bleed me for money for who knows how long.

All in all, trying to close my account has cost me close to $2,000, mostly in fees and trying to clear the new and exciting negative balances that they keep dreaming up. I never did get my hands on my economic stimulus. All of that went to PNC.

Do you want to know why we’re in an economic crisis right now? Because the people who run our financial institutions and businesses are shitty business people. They are stupid. They don’t understand how economics work and think that their crafty methods of screwing people over are brilliant moves. We have a generation of failures running this country.

As I just said when I shared this on Google Reader, “There’s an Ice Cube ‘It Was a Good Day,’ ‘didn’t even have to use my AK’ joke in here somewhere and I just can’t get it out.”

Why, yes, I am avoiding thinking about my Grammar mid-term that starts in an hour and a half. Why do you ask?