The Polite Police

Eat Me

2010-05-23T12:27:00.000-07:00

Now I know this post is going to ruffle some feathers, but I don’t want to chicken out and shy away from a critical issue that must be addressed. So before you start squawking, let me put a few things on the…ahem…table. I have nothing against picky eaters and even less against people with particular dietary restrictions. Some of the world’s heathen populations eat animals that Gd has commanded us to leave alone, like pork, stingray, and sometimes panda. I recognize that it is tricky to avoid going straight to hell when you’re in a place like Tallahassee (pun INtended) and I’m not unsympathetic to the plight of folks there trying to walk the path of truth and righteousness. However, with that big ideological-hypocrite-sized caveat out of the way, I submit to you that if you are one of these individuals, you have two and only two mutually exclusive options. I will list them in sequence:

1) Eat the food put in front of you.

2) Don’t eat it.

For my dear readers who like to play the role of my little inedible dancing monkey pets that I know some of you are, at this very moment, puttering and sputtering and trying to formulate a coherent sentence to try to tell me that my list is restrictive and ignores man’s capacity for freedom, flexibility, and adaptation. While you “chew” on that, the rest of us are going to proceed with an earnest discussion of why people who make fussy food requests at a meal that someone else prepared are societal bottom-feeders who should only ever be served gluten free dry bread and filtered tap water.

There are two main dynamics that get me hotter than a bottle of Sriracha. The first, coincidentally is the subset of the population that likes to compensate for their physical inadequacies by incessantly requesting hot sauce (or really any random condiment) when they’re out dining at restaurants (using that term loosely enough to cover McDonald’s). “Excuse me, waiter, this filet mignon is delicious but I’m still anxious about my inability to satisfy my wife. Can you please bring me a bottle of hot sauce so that I can prove to her that I’m a man capable of tending to her needs?” You know what comes next. “Mmmmm, (sniffle, choke) this red meat is delicious. And the lethal serving of Texas Pete’s brings out all of the red-blooded goodness (tears streaming down his face).” I’m not even going to address the cruel irony of being at once both pretentious (asking for some special ingredient) and classless (ruining a perfectly good meal with said ingredient that would have the chef rolling over in his grave…if he were dead). The focus of this discussion, and really life, is how the manner in which you eat your meal affects me. Of course we have the general awkwardness of not knowing whether we can eat our piping hot and well-prepared meals while you wait for the waiter (irony number 2) to run down the street to the grocery store and buy a bottle of whatever random thing that restaurant would never even keep in the kitchen because it’s so disgusting, or we should hurl dinner rolls at you so hard that you pass out and then we can eat our food in peace. Either way, we need a mechanism to force you to internalize the social discomfort you inflict on others. Fair warning, my preference is for plan B. The other big problem (here comes irony number 3) is that if you have such a sophisticated palette, why are we not at your house eating your food? My hypothesis is that someone at the table thinks your food tastes like dog chow…drenched in hot sauce. In fact, you may even think your food takes like dog chow drenched in hot sauce. In which case, you should just sit there, ashamed at your ham-fistedness in the kitchen and quietly enjoy your edible human meal so we do not have to spend the evening reliving the night you gave us all dry heaves.

On to the second course. If you have ever tried selecting from the in-flight meal options on an airline website these days (I know, airline food, right?), you know already exactly what I’m talking about. There is a stunning variety of the number of different kinds of –tarians who will only eat food grown in hermetically sealed hydroponic gardens by Austrian nuns in a Leper colony. I struggle to convey how precisely this situation captures the self-important, self-indulgent absurdity that has seized our communities. No one expects airline food to be tasty. In fact, I’ll bet that every mother on the plane has a stash of something she knows her kids will eat in case they wind up with the kind of fare that this woe-begotten traveler, uh, gotten: http://blogs.creativeloafing.com/dailyloaf/2009/01/28/dear-richard-branson-best-complaint-about-airline-food-or-anything-ever/. But simply not eating a terrible meal is not sufficient for our fussy foodies. No indeed. They must have the opportunity to turn their noses up at precisely the combination of ingredients and degrees of dead flesh (don’t even get me started on the delusional hypocrisy of being pescatarian) that they prefer, under threat of unmeritorious nuisance suit. Apart from the selfishness of trying to turn every food experience into a made-to-order nutritional regimen, there is the much more important matter of cost. Every time you insist on special food accommodations, you increase the cost to the rest of us who would happily pay $100 less for a plane ticket and eat our rubber chicken in peace. A brief lesson in economics: chefs get paid for their time, the price of food incorporates the cost of the chef’s time, the cost of the ingredients, and the degree of WASTE. You are the only one who wants wheatgrass and kale puree next to your oat-burger and yet we all pay for the cost of throwing away everything that you don’t eat (because, of course, no one else wants to eat it).

My solution is as simple as it is implementable. If someone serves you something that you can’t or won’t eat, then don’t eat it. This will have the salutary side effect of making it easier for you to keep your yap shut. Problem. Solved.

Go F*nd Yourself

2010-01-04T21:00:00.000-08:00

Let me get this straight, MTV is now promoting a new show where 20 year olds check things off of their bucket lists? Can this be right? What on earth wouldn’t be on the life-long “to-do” list of someone that has been alive for approximately 5 minutes? “Ok, we smoked a bong while watching a re-run of yesterday’s Tyra, cross that off the list.” Well, congratulations, MTV, you have officially green-lighted the most vapid and self-indulgent journey ever launched into the beef tripe of youthful American angst. Exhibit A: http://www.theburiedlife.com/.

To begin with the most infuriating aspect of the show, we should consider the unabashed egoism that attends this fiasco. Our…ahem…heroes, in their short little lives have accomplished nothing, contributed nothing, and learned nothing before setting out on a narcissistic path (see e.g. the camera crew following their every move) to personal fulfillment. Impatience is too kind a word for the gall that these children have, with the ink still wet on their equivalency degrees, to whine that their lives are without meaning. I’ll bet if they had to do even an hour of the kind of work most people in this world have to endure just to keep their families fed, they would find it satisfying enough not to have to wash their hipster-chic wardrobe in a muddy river filled with dung and tapeworms.

But this is all theoretical. Let’s run down a few of the most offensive items on the aforementioned bucket list:

1. “Become a licensed minister”: Over the course of human history, countless millions of people have been killed, tortured, or exiled because of their religious beliefs. But you know what would be a real gas? What if a bunch of unemployed attention whores boiled it all down to a five minute gag reel? That would be hilarious. And evidently, mastering the imponderables of human existence is easier than say “learn[ing] how to play an instrument” which remains on the list and incomplete.

2. “Start a dance in a public place”: I suppose one way to get a lot of people moving all at once would be to yell fire in a crowded theater. On second thought, though, this approach is sub-optimal since it would take years to process and appeal the felony charges. Better yet, it would probably be more efficient (and make television gold) for me and my jackass friends to walk outside our hotbox of an apartment, ’80s boom box in tow like DJ what’s-his-face, and just starting f-ing dancing. That would be so sweet. And then tons of other people would totally join in and for a brief moment, we’d forget about all that divides us and just be in the…moment. Yes, this is the perfect solution to world hunger and childhood diseases. Never mind the fact that if I put the same level of effort into an actual job, any actual job, I could probably make enough money to save an entire village in Africa. No, this will be way better, and something everyone should do, just once, with the few precious moments we have on this earth.

3. “Win and yell, ‘Bingo!’ at a Bingo hall”: Does anyone else not find this patently offensive to the people who actually frequent Bingo halls? As the balls drop out of the hopper, like the sands through an hour glass, so pour out the regulars’ hopes of crossing anything else off of their bucket lists besides getting through this particular game of Bingo. What cruel mocking it is to snatch this simple joy from their arthritic claws and turn it into another of MTV’s exploitation-paloozas in worship of youth and stupidity.

Well I have a bucket list of my own. If you’ll indulge me:

1. Cause a crowd of people to point and laugh at (NOT “with”) the jackasses on MTV’s “The Buried Life”

2. Watch the cast of MTV’s “The Buried Life” pick up garbage alongside the highway

3. Convince each member of the cast of MTV’s “The Buried Life” to get matching tattoos that say “I’m a complete tool” on their foreheads

Who’s with me?

A Thousand Words That Cannot Be Uttered in Public

2009-08-27T19:31:00.000-07:00

Imagine that there are exactly one point six feet of space between you and your untimely demise at the hand of a steep cliff perched high atop jagged rocks battered by the foreboding seas below. You step gingerly along the way so as not to disturb any of the pebbles that might be the lynch pin holding together the teetering mass of earth beneath your feet. So far so good…now if you can just make it around this corner, you’ll have a wide plateau safely underfoot and you can relax and enjoy the view while you go to town on the ham and cheese sandwich warmed over in your backpack by a combination of sweat and sun. But just as you round the bend, you discover something blocking your way. Actually it’s two somethings. And it turns out that both somethings are wearing inappropriately tight pants cropped halfway down the shin. Both somethings are also sporting a healthy roll of flab under their inappropriately tight t-shirts and are held together by an inappropriate fanny pack strapped around their middle regions (and apologies for the redundancy…I know there is no such thing as an appropriate fanny pack…no need to write me letters). Then the most appalling cut of all, one something is holding a giant black camera in one hand and gesticulating vaguely with his other in order to get the second something to move just a hair to the right, that’s it, right there, perfect…don’t move. In fact, no one can move because this bizarre charade has taken up the entire path and an inch more to the right would have sent something number two to meet his maker.

For those who do not yet get the…ahem…picture, I’ll spell it out for you. I am fed up with tourists blocking crowded public streets to try to get a snapshot of their friend with the whole of the Manhattan skyline in the background. Invariably, one person will sidle up next to an important landmark. The other person, lacking opposable thumbs or a camera with a lens that can zoom both in and out will have to walk approximately one football field away to capture the breathtaking scene. The rest of us, who are just trying to make it to the Starbucks before we deck the next Greenpeace “intern” pestering us on the sidewalk, have to stand back a respectful distance while Ansel Adams consults with the art director in between frames. All of this effort wasted on a photo that is not worth anyone’s time, and more importantly, not worth my time. The same reason why people hate sitting through slideshows of your trip to the Everglades is the same reason why I have started to march right through these absurdly elaborate photo ops. The pictures are always terrible, no one cares, and I want some coffee.

Now we’ve cast the “somethings” in our little drama as European, but to be fair, this malady is not isolated to Europe. Indeed it has spread across the globe faster than either the Bubonic plague or a Coldplay-induced coma. We now see evidence of snap-happy, obtrusive shutterbugs everywhere from the northern (and southern, eastern, and western) regions of Japan to the icy tundra of Minnesota (at least this is what researchers have been able to gather from the t-shirts worn by subjects who appear to be suffering from the classic symptoms). This all begs a very crucial question. If we have learned anything from the indigenous peoples of Papua New Guinea, it’s that taking a picture of someone is a surefire way to steal his or hear soul and lock it away for eternity inside one’s camera. Why then do so many people persist in obstructing traffic to get the perfect shot of their jackass friend doing the YMCA in front of the Taj Mahal? What is it that turns amateur photographers into professional wastes of space?

Which brings us to Ashton Kutcher. I blame him for much of this epidemic. In particular, I blame the stunning features which make him so mischievously appealing in those Nikon commercials despite not having showered in several days (I’ll assume this is just to avoid awkward encounters in the hallway with his sixteen year old step-daughter and not due the fact that he could not find his way out of a wet paper bag unless Demi pinned instructions to his jacket). If he’s going to continue to peddle the fantasy that his particular camera takes off ten pounds of ugly, he better add a user agreement to avoid liability when I send the camera off the cliff right after something number two, just to make sure we capture the full impact.

I S*it You Not

2009-06-15T12:02:00.000-07:00

Picture it, I’m at the sink in the restroom, getting my anti-swine-flu precautions on when I hear, “So I don’t know if you got my text message or not, but like Jen has VIP tickets to the Vince Gill concert tonight.” I think to myself, “I love Vince Gill but I don’t have any idea who you are or who Jen is for that matter and frankly, I have no idea where your voice is even coming from.” And thank goodness I did not say it out loud because before I could respond some unheard person beat me to the punch and next I hear, “ok awesome, we can get some beer and meet there at like 5.” And then it hits me. The disembodied voice is coming from the bathroom stall! And the voiceless respondent is on said pooper’s cell phone!

I never in my wildest imagination thought we’d have to address this but the [ahem…subject matter of this post] seems to finally have hit the fan. And while I am all for multi-tasking, we have officially reached the limit, as I will demonstrate with a little hypothetical. You are chatting with your friend on the phone making plans to get burgers after work. In fact, you can picture in your brain the juicy looking slab of ground chuck with just a hint Dijon mustard and grilled onion bunting peeking out the sides. Your mouth starts to water as you choose a time and location for this get together and make the presumptuous decision in your head to order fries AND onion rings for the table. Suddenly a worm hole opens up allowing you to defy the laws of the time-space continuum and actually see your friend as he is talking to you making plans to get hamburgers. Your cell phone drops to the ground and smashes into as many little pieces as the shards of your immortal soul when you discover that your burger buddy is taking care of business while he’s taking care of business. You are thinking of tonight’s tasty nouveau American and he is still working on getting rid of last night’s ill advised Mexican. This latest etiquette abomination has now cost you your love of hamburgers, cell phones, and the auto-flush feature on the American Standard, all in one…uh…sitting.

Of course we hold culprits of such offenses to human decency to account for their actions, but there is another co-conspirator that merits mention, and elimination. I’m going to place the blame squarely on the Real World and its misbegotten step child Big Brother. TMI does not even begin to describe the gaping hole in the floodgates of the participants’ shame. Watching people sitting around at a slumber party playing truth or dare seems harmless enough, just some engaging young people swapping jokes and stories and the occasional venereal disease. But cameras in the bathrooms? I can imagine few things more repulsive than calculating the amount of soap it will require our protagonists to wash off last night’s bad decisions.

At least the television version of the problem we’re discussing affords us the small comfort of clinging to the fourth wall. We can keep a safe distance on the other side of the glass and pretend that it’s all pretend, it’s all a fiction concocted to entertain us, it could never happen in our own existence. That is why it is absolutely soul crushing when we discover individuals like the one profiled above in person. He reminds us of the depths to which our species has sunk and we begin to question whether his life is really worth living. The answer dear-hearts is that in the real “real world”…it’s not. So for the future, I’d suggest hanging up the phone when you cross the forbidden threshold or else the disease you pick up from that toilet seat will be the least of your worries.

The Emperor's New T-Shirt

2009-05-24T09:04:00.001-07:00

There is something of a delicious (read: appalling) irony of New York calling itself the fashion capital of the world. The latest trend apparently is to not wear any clothes. At least this is what I gather from the fact that no one seems to put on actual clothes anymore. The streets are filled with half-dressed do-nothings wearing wholly insufficient amounts of shirt. On a good day you can spot at least a baker’s dozen of these individuals sporting only a v neck undershirt and a keffia.

If we were inclined to give our sartorial offenders the benefit of the doubt, we might presume that they are such busy and productive people that they simply do not have time to put on clothes in the morning. If they’re not out of the house in fewer than the 30 seconds it would have taken to put on an actual shirt, the nuclear launch codes will fall into the hands of the terrorists. And of course by nuclear launch codes I mean excessively tight pants, and by terrorists, I mean people who wake up before the breakfast menu items are no longer available at McDonalds.

An alternative explanation is that New Yorkers are so post-fashion that no actual clothes could possibly capture their trail-blazing sense of style. The internal monologue goes something like this: “Wearing clothes is so April of 2009. Wouldn’t it be edgy slash borderline indecent exposure if I just walked around in my underwear? Yes, yes it would. I’m gonna do it, here I go, out the door, wearing nothing by my crocs and the wife beater I fell asleep in last night. [Shields his eyes as he walks outside into the 2 pm sunlight]. Hey, it’s working! People are really intrigued. I am so fashion forward that I’m giving these jokers whiplash.”

But the most likely explanation of all, sad to say, is that our friends on the metaphorical and physical island are mindless snobs who would wear anything “on trend” as long as it’s overpriced. See e.g. American Apparel. A metaphor about bridges and lemmings comes to mind, but I’ll leave that for you fully clothed readers to figure out.

Of course this forum is something of a how-to on manners and etiquette, our lack of a proper title notwithstanding, so those of you who have been following along may wonder how this discussion relates to the theme. The fundamental problem is simple: we do not want people walking around in their underwear because they are generally flabby, sweaty, and altogether disgusting. We know this is true and before you release your indignant guffaw, think back to the last time someone asked you to pose for a Mr. or Ms. can’t-pay-for-my-education calendar and then let’s move on. The more complicated issue then is the insufficient clothing worn by people who we might prefer to see with even less clothing. Walking around showing off the fruits of your exercise bulimia is an affront to all job-holding, red-meat eating Americans trying to get through the day without a constant reminder of the crippling self-consciousness. I’m sorry if your daddy didn’t love you as a child and if you want to shake your moneymaker in the privacy of a dark bar or hipster coffeehouse, that’s your business. But for heaven’s sake put some clothes on when you go out in daylight.

Fail Blazer

2009-02-07T08:22:00.000-08:00

Ladies, I’m giving you the week off. There is an epidemic going on in this country that has been affecting only the male of the species so I would suggest that you quarantine yourselves while we purge the population of those that have been infected. It would probably be a good idea to tuck the kiddies into bed while you’re at it because this installment is going to be a bit “adult.”

Now gentlemen, I give you…your comeuppance. It seems that throughout your formative years, you were so busy learning how to spit and to calculate the elapsed time since the last airing of Sports Center that you never learned how to dress yourselves. Time and again I walk past an otherwise neat and earnest young go-getter only to shrink back in horror when I observe the sartorial atrocities he has committed. We are going to catalogue them from most to least egregious but you should note that these offenses are different only in degree (and yes, I am aware that, technically, there are no degrees of egregiousness, but I could do without the back talk). They all share the common characteristic of announcing to the world that you were raised by wolves.

Just the other day I almost bounced a young man from an interview I was not even conducting because I saw him marching toward his inquisition wearing a blazer and slacks of the same color. Those of you thinking to yourselves, “Wow, that sounds like a pretty snappy combo,” are beyond salvation and should consider occupations that require you to use no discretion whatsoever; perhaps a garbage man, or a senator. The problem is that by trying to make a “suit” out of “not a suit,” you project an image of being a lazy slob who will cut corners and cannot be bothered to observe even the most elementary of social graces. A prospective employer or client might wonder, if you are willing to patch this little ensemble together, what sort of duct taped, jerry-rigged mass of techno scrap you are going to produce for them with the money you were supposed to use to install a new network server. “Oh don’t worry sir, Linux works just like Windows only cheaper…of course it shuts down periodically and without warning but if you just hold the ‘ctrl’ key at all times, that seems to do the trick.”

The blazer bonanza is perhaps the gateway offense to the next issue on our agenda…vents and tags. Something on the Y chromosome must make the menfolk terrified of threads because it seems you cannot bear to cut anything that is sewn to the clothes you buy. I shudder to reflect on the countless cases of a vented jacket or overcoat still bearing the telltale “x” stitch holding the back in place like a glaring scarlet letter as an eternal reminder of your sin against good manners…eternal, that is, until you remove it. For those of you having trouble following this discussion, I will put it in terms that you can understand: the string holding the flappy thing together on your new suit is meant to be CUT OFF! The same goes for the label on the sleeve to remind you which has-been designer happened to have their shipment of merchandise on sale the day you went to TJMaxx. No one cares that your ill fitting duds were hand-crafted by Alfredo Linguine in Florence, China so just bag the tag and we can all move one with our lives.

However what I absolutely cannot understand is whether you have just been oblivious to the buttons under your short collar or were confused about their function. Normally, when you see a button and a button hole, instinct should take over and impel you toward social self preservation. But we must have found the missing link because I continue to see gents out and about without a care in the world and their collars flapping in the breeze. This is not the natural order of things. A truly well crafted collar will be stiff and have a slot for a small piece of metal or plastic to keep it straight and neat. Naturally, though, this is too advanced a concept for you so the good folks at the shirt manufacturers have simplified things. No need to keep track of extra components. The buttons are right there for your use, every time, right were they should be…directly under the holes into which you are supposed to push them (TWSS…but there’s no time, but she did, but there’s no time).

As per usual, I will not leave you without a solution. First of all, you should stop being such a tightwad. Get a little extravagant and make a trip to Filene’s Basement for a proper suit. It may cost you a little more than your usual $15 blue light special, but I promise you it is worth a couple of weeks of downgrading to Red Stripe from your usual PBR. Secondly, stop being such a lazy so-and-so. I know you have the manual dexterity of mentally challenged walrus but they even make special scissors for people like you now so there’s really no excuse. As for the shirt situation, just take one day and walk around your house gathering your shirts up off of the floor, or the back of the chair, or under the kitchen sink and button the collars while you’re watching PTI. Whatever you do, though, do NOT miss the third re-run of Sports Center. It always, ALWAYS has new information than it had the two times before.

Oh! A Gime!

2008-12-22T14:11:00.000-08:00

I am confident that Queen Elizabeth sweats. I am equally confident that she does not grunt like a baboon or groom her nose hairs in the gym. She manages to keep her composure at the age of 82 years young. So what is your excuse you ill-mannered sack of crap? I will never for the life of me understand why people find it acceptable to behave so disgustingly when they are working out. At any rate, I will not let that deter me from my purpose of cataloging the depths to which human civilization has sunk.

I think it only fitting to begin with the beginners. I know you have seen these individuals. They stroll in chattering with two or three of their flabbiest, most irritating friends, all decked out in matching track suits (or for men, those ridiculous over-sized basketball shorts that hang down to your ankles because they are designed for folks much taller and more athletic than you). They then gather around some complicated, and inevitably popular machine and stare at it like they’re in an art museum. You’ll notice them hide their confusion by continuing to chatter as they sit backwards in the seat, put their hands tentatively on the foot rest and thrust outward just hard enough to give themselves a hernia. Eventually they roll onto the floor clutching their side and crawl over to the next machine you want to use so that they can further injure themselves while also keeping you from getting on with your workout. Ordinarily, I’d say killing two birds with one stone is great, unless you happen to be one of the birds.

The beginners are followed closely behind, literally, by a hoard of wife-beater wearing steroid junkies who love the gym more than life and themselves more than the gym. They identify themselves as members of this genus by pausing after every three reps to check themselves out in the mirror. Adding to the freakishness is the fact that they perform this ritual in pairs.

“Wow, Franz,” says Hans, “that last set really makes the hairs on your arm look especially buff.”

“Thanks Hans,” says Franz, “if you check me out from a forty-five degree angle I hardly look pudgy at all in this wife beater.”

While I find this whole production odd, I would not necessarily commit these folks just for a bit of delusional body dysmorphia. What is clinically nutso, however, is when the same individuals press themselves right up against the mirror to explore the various orifices of their face. I know you know what I’m talking about so you can just take your guffaw and muffle it. It continues to baffle me that people who take no care to groom themselves at home, suddenly feel a social pressure to inspect their faces for deer tics while they are in the gym. I suppose what I’m really asking is why are they susceptible to one form of shaming and not another? Surely there’s plenty of shame to go around.

Last but not least, we have the screamers. This is a subset of the steroid junkies who manage to be irritating both during and between exercises. Now it is worth mentioning that in whatever gym you frequent, no one is going to the Olympics. They are probably not even going to make it past the Krispy Kreme next door. The only point then of their loud panting and vociferating seems to be to draw attention to their narcissistic mirror-loving selves and their heterosexual gym partners. While I try not to get graphic, I hope you’ll humor me with a little exercise. Imagine that these grunting primates are sitting on a toilet rather than a weight bench. If you’re as disgusted as I am, you’ll take advantage of the next available opportunity to drop an unfortunately placed free weight on one of their hormone swollen feet.

Back that thang up. . .

2008-12-05T21:31:00.000-08:00

. . .at your peril. Since we all seem to be having so much trouble understanding the basic tenets of human decency, maybe we can start by taking a lesson from the machines. Have you ever noticed how trucks, tractors, forklifts, boats, barges and even the occasional dirigible all make a beeping noise when they back up? Why do you think that is? (I’ll pause while you let that sink in). So it turns out that this irritating chirping has a valuable function, alerting whatever detritus has been stashed behind said object to get out of the damn way. Ok so that’s one for the mechanical engineers (licking finger and gesturing to make a vertical line in the air).

In fact, I dare say the beeping feature is so useful that the science club even has a leg up on the almighty on this point. This is because you, clunky and mechanical though you are, do not possess such a talent. When you back up, no one sees it coming. Your generous hind-quarters turn you into a human wrecking ball and woe betide your mother’s porcelain kittens if they should be in your path. You have knocked over drinks, trampled on toes, and even ruined a few priceless antiques all for want of a horn and a sense of direction. Actually, if we’re honest with ourselves, the real problem is that you are completely oblivious to your surroundings. This has become so common a theme that I’ve given up trying to get you to change.

What would please me to no end, however, would be for you to stop randomly backing into stuff. At the lunch counter, the water fountain, even getting tickets for a move, just turn and walk forward. It’s that simple. Indeed even if you are from New Jersey, or are Zoolander, you have no excuse because I am completely indifferent as to whether you turn right or left (insert lame political pun here). What I cannot abide is the idea that you are so egoistic that you think what you cannot see does not exist. You have no idea whether there is someone behind you and therefore, in the wheel inside a ball inside your empty skull, there must not be. So there you go arms a’flailin’, backpack bustin’, treating the world as though there weren’t 6 billion other people in it who might not have gotten the memo that you’re entitled to go lumbering around wherever you please.

As I foreshadowed in the last paragraph, it is worth mentioning the exponential irritation that the addition of a backpack adds to this situation. Given that you do not even have functional control over the appendages that are attached to you, I cannot comprehend how you could expect to manage a contraption that adds such heft and girth to your already unmanageable frame. But I suppose you have proven me right yet again, because you do not expect to manage yourself at all. Instead, you expect to bump and push and maneuver through whatever objects, non-living or otherwise, that happen to be situated between you and the precise spot on the floor you have selected to place your feet. Part of me has to admire that kind of confidence and determination. Another, less forgiving part of me thinks there’s a special place in hell for people like you where the devil uses his Jansport to beat you to a pulp.

Shut Your Mouth

2008-10-19T18:39:00.001-07:00

If the good Lord had intended for you to use your tongue to give someone a dental exam, we would not have Hepatitis. It so happens, though, that your last round of collagen injections is not what is causing your lips to be all puffy and filled with toxins; that friends, is what we call natural selection. Despite what you may be thinking, I am not here to admonish your “cavalier behavior.” What you do in plain view of the neighbors because you forgot to close your blinds is your own business; which brings me to my point. If you want to slobber all over your significant other like a Saint Bernard, that is none of my business and I’d like to keep it that way.

It seems our fair city has been afflicted with an epidemic of offensive public displays of total lack of self control. Everywhere I cast my eyes I encounter young people making soft core on city streets without a paycheck or a camera. Of course the reason they are not getting a paycheck is because no one is buying what they are selling. Eyes Wide Shut notwithstanding, do not be fooled by the idealized portrayals of romance purveyed by that most honest and productive of our American industries. Watching two people trying to suck the saliva off of each other’s uvulas is not an attractive sight.

What continues to gall me is why people find it acceptable to succumb to this temptation while forgoing so many others. Other than our striped-shirted friends who from time to time take the trouble to cross the great water, we do not defecate in the streets. Nor do we clip our fingernails in a library (sigh, that is a story for another day). Nor do we throw our empty plastic bottle into the spokes of the bicyclist who nearly killed us running a red light (though one of these days, one of them is going to get it and then we’ll see them try to ring that damn bell with a broken wrist). When dogs cannot control their urge to hump things, we put them in crates and don’t think for a second that I would not do the same to you if anyone made a crate big enough.

A related issue is the need for 1) fat and 2) insecure (see #1) men to always grab onto areas of their unsuspecting female companions’ anatomy that normally require a special doctor. This looks as though they are addressing one of two concerns. Either they are worried that their conquest will somehow escape (and who could blame her?), or they are checking to make sure that all of the expected parts are indeed there. In any case, whether she has designs to flee or is somehow missing an essential component without which she is worthless to you is none of mine or anyone else’s business (so long as your story does not wind up on a very special Law & Order). So we must find some solution to my having to watch you attempt to reduce to possession that poor waif who only wanted a big diamond and modest domestic staff. Here again, we can look to Mother Nature for guidance. When animals in the wild want to mark their territory, they just pee on it. Alright then gentlemen, button up those striped shirts and let ‘er rip, so long as you get that out of the way at home.

English M!@#f!@#...Do You Speak It?!?

2008-09-28T20:20:00.001-07:00

The other day at the Barney’s warehouse sale, I saw two Russians invade and occupy a rack of neckties marked up to 70% off of their original prices. At least, that’s what I thought they were doing, I don’t speak Russian. And lucky for them because they were talking loud enough for the whole room to hear them; and believe you me, I would have gladly sacrificed the armload of goodies I was holding to keep that treasure trove out of the hands of the Reds. But a moment’s hesitation caught me flat footed as I wondered whether they maybe just thought this was a black market of some kind (after all, there was a shockingly high number of security guards (who demonstrated a shockingly low level of productivity)). If they thought they were going to find a crucible of yellowcake under the discarded remnants of DKNY’s bad year at the office, I wasn’t going to be the one to stop them.

This raises the much larger but less national-security-related issue of people speaking foreign languages loudly in public places where others cannot understand them. Now I’m going to pick up where your mothers left off (or rather never started) and pull a page straight out of Miss Manners: this is RUDE! No one cares what you say in your home or what you whisper privately to the boy walking with you hoping that you get laryngitis. What makes this behavior so abhorrent is that it shows a conscious disregard for the other human beings in your presence.

I know I’m not alone in this. Joe Biden can’t even stand to be around people who speak English with an accent. Having to deal with someone who doesn’t speak English at all would probably make his hairs stand on end. And who could blame him? If you don’t take a stand early, you could end up with some kind of fungus.

On the other side of the coin (which ironically contains words in Latin) there are the feelings and sensitivities of the non-natives to consider. Perhaps carving out a bubble of isolation in our helter-skelter discount-seeking marketplace of ideas is exactly the respite they need after a long hard day of enjoying personal freedom and living under the blanket of protection afforded by our massive national security apparatus. After all, George Washington was mister isolationist (he would have won Mister Universe as well but it turns out he was bald as a ripe tomato without the powdered wigs).

Coming back to my side of the coin, I say go isolate yourself at home. The world is filled with enough misunderstanding and egoism to sink the ship that brought you here. I’d prefer you not go to such pains to make it clear that you see me as a household moveable that you are free to alternatively ignore and hold your drinks without a coaster. I am a human being, not a human thinking, not a human doing, and not a human who is afraid to knock the teeth out of a mouth that does not treat me as such.

STFU...Seriously

2008-09-06T23:30:00.000-07:00

Alright girls, I don’t know which of the X chromosomes contains the gene that causes you to squeal like a stuck pig every time you experience an emotion in public but it has to stop. My ears are still ringing from an encounter with a couple of 18 year old coeds shrieking with delight over their discovery of a new way to lace their Chucks. At least I think they were delighted. The noise is virtually indistinguishable from the apparent cries of anguish I heard moments later when they discovered that someone else had already discovered that lacing method.

Yes it seems one can’t walk a city block without a blood-curdling cry puncturing one’s ear drums and there’s a particular demographic to blame. Young women all over the country are using more words in more ways (well, probably repeating many of the same words over and over) than ever before using text messages, instant messages, Blackberry messages and carrier pigeons; yet when it comes time to express any sentiment more complicated than “I want a Diet Coke,” they return to a state of nature and scream like a howler monkey without the charm. I find it hard to believe that the fairer sex has picked up so foul an affectation by accident and I have a few theories about the true culprit.

I’m no Dr. Phil, but I’d say safe money is on you ladies being desperate for attention. You’ve already had a swing-and-a-miss trying to use looks or personality to get people to notice you so you turn on your siren and try catch some pedestrian off guard long enough to get your hooks in. I’ll tell you why this is a terrible idea just a minute but suffice it to say (not “sufficeth” for you Rhodes scholars out there) that this is sure to fail.

Think about this from the perspective of your prey. They are temperamental, narrowly focused, and easily distracted. They get one taste of your best banshee impression, do a quick over-under on how long it will take before they have to kill you to get the ringing to stop and decide that they cannot prepare a justifiable homicide defense by next week. So they keep moving and the dance begins again.

The much bigger issue here is the girl crying wolf. Eventually, humans will evolve to the point that they can tune out all the sound in your register, and then we have real problems because one of these days the hem of your dress is going to get caught in an escalator or your hair will catch on fire because you leaned too far over the candle on the table at that nice restaurant (how I wish this had not really happened) and no one will pay you any mind, thinking it’s just your usual mating ritual.

And don’t come crying to me when that happens. If I haven’t already learned to block you out by then, I will just laugh and laugh and laugh. So it’s time to take a stand for feminism ladies. Save your dresses and your tresses by corking your pie hole next time you have the urge to get vocal.

Consumer demands on the rise…so is my disgust

2008-08-16T17:36:00.000-07:00

Check it. I’m in the airport at 0-dark-hundred trying to juice up my computer by a Starbucks kiosk. Of course, I cannot leave my bags unattended, especially with the K-9 team just yards away and a baggie full of beef jerky in my suitcase. So there sits the holy grail, taunting me, mocking me and there I sit, paralyzed with longing for what can never be.

Now, I tell you that to tell you this. There was a line full of people of all stripes queuing up for all sorts of complicated libations and all I want is hot, black coffee. These jokers have the gall to get snippy about the perceived Spartan conditions at the airport Starbucks. “There’s no cinnamon, well fine then!” “Excuse me, I ordered a regular triple fat calorie-laden fake-coffee chocolate drink, not a medium double fat half-calorie fake-chocolate coffee drink…gosh, get it right!”

I’m so appalled by this display I don’t even know where to begin, so I guess I’ll begin with me. If you’re looking for an analogy, I guess you could say I’m the Christian Children’s Fund kids and the fussy patrons are Sally Struthers. I don’t need to bear witness to your excesses while I make due without. Some of us have no coffee at all and you’re making a scene over a powder that you’ll never be able to taste anyway? I would have traded places in a heartbeat. You sit here by the single electrical outlet in the entire terminal at the international airport in the nation’s capital. I’ll take your place in line and be damn glad of the opportunity. Ok, that’s thing 1.

Thing 2 is, you’re in an airport filled with places to get coffee. In fact, I don’t think there was a single food outlet that didn’t have some kind of coffee drink available. But you’re here at Starbucks because a) you’re a sissy who can’t take it straight, or be b) you’re a status “lady of the night” and wouldn’t be caught dead with a cup that didn’t have that weird mermaid lady on it. So as far as I’m concerned, your frustration with the airport barrista is a kind of cosmic justice. Of course they don’t have cinnamon. It’s an airport, not a grocery store. They also don’t have turnips or beef tripe. Are you going to whine about that too? Probably not, because putting all that junk in coffee would be weird. Well then, I think I’ve made point (folding hands behind head and stretching out legs while crossing them).

Just in case some of you are not catching my drift (perhaps because you’re berating some poor service employee to cover up your own sense of inadequacy) I’ll put this another way. The world is not here to serve you. If it were, then the check-out lady at the WalMart would not have let you leave the store looking like that. But she did because it’s not her place to stage an intervention about your horrible, horrible life choices. If you ever find anyone that can stand you, maybe they can take a crack at it. Although heaven help them if they forget to bring the Sweet ‘n Low.

What’s Wrong With America: Part I

2008-06-22T10:58:00.000-07:00

The problem that I have with human beings is twofold, keeping in mind that I take as a given the fact that the only difference between humans and dolphins is that humans have invented language (both animals are mammals with blowholes). First, there’s the physical annoyance of noise pollution, which seems to be most pronounced in the females of the species between the ages of 13 and 40. Second, there’s content component of speech which is like a kind of demented Google where people blurt out all sorts of incoherent and useless information as though it were fact…so I guess, actually it’s like actual Google. Though, unfortunately, I don’t have the capability to make this an audio-visual experience, I think an example might serve as a good jumping off point for our conversation (and yes, this exchange did actually happen, though I desperately wish that it hadn’t):

(Scene: It’s 7 pm on the Washington DC metro, which means you have a lot of irritated bureaucrats who just want to sit in silence and be pissed that their incompetent bosses made them work past the 5pm quittin’ bell.)

Man on Metro: Hi, how long have you been here?

Apparently British woman: Just a few days.

Man on Metro: I find it very confusing to get around this city, don’t you?

Apparently British woman: No, not really.

Man on Metro: I’ve been here three days, I just moved to Virginia from California. Where do you live?

Apparently British woman’s husband: We’re just visiting.

Man on Metro: I noticed you had an accent, where are you from?

Apparently British woman’s husband: We’re from London.

Man on Metro: I visited London once about 30 years ago. I really liked it a lot. Although, isn’t it true that the women there do not have a lot of educational opportunities?

Apparently British woman: Not really. Our daughter goes to university.

Man on Metro: Well, I guess things are changing. Who is going to win the election?

Apparently British woman’s husband: I wouldn’t know, we don’t really follow that stuff very closely.

Man on Metro: I’ll tell you [long pause, then says knowingly:] Barack Obama.

Apparently British woman: [Getting off at next available stop.] Nice meeting you.

Everyone please stop talking. It was one thing when you were just pissing me off…I’m fairly docile and I can’t find the key to my gun cabinet. But this is getting out of hand; you’re becoming a national embarrassment. The problem is that the world thinks Americans are stupid, and this is based solely on the fact that only the stupid ones don’t know when to shut their yap. So please, if you value world order, pipe down before I cause an international incident with your face.

I Have Lots of Questions…Number One…How Dare You?

2008-05-28T21:34:00.000-07:00

When I speak to the organ grinder, I don’t expect the monkey to answer. So why is it that whenever someone has the opportunity to interview a living legend in front of an audience the baboon with the cue cards ends up doing most of the talking? I got to witness just such a display the other night at a talk by Elie Wiesel (and if you don’t think he’s a living legend, I’m blackballing you from the island). Here you have a guy who has probably taught humans more about humanity than anyone on the planet, and the jerk asking the questions is all like “Oy, if you think that’s bad, let me tell you about some farshtinkener delicatessen in Brooklyn.” Now listen you cradle-robbing blowhard, no one cares what you have to say so kindly shut your gob.

This episode brings to mind an episode of Katie Couric’s daytime dramedy a few years back: http://video.msn.com/video.aspx?mkt=en-US&brand=&vid=ce93bf2c-9fde-4c96-945c-1cdaa941c1eb. Katie, what are you doing?!? You are sitting across from a national treasure and you cut off her sentences? I have a news flash for you (pun INtended), when the flaming ball of failure that your primetime show has become finally runs out of gas (pun INtended) and is replaced by a gameshow where people compete to see who can belch the loudest, folks will still love Maya Angelou and they will still not give a rat’s patootie about whether you like corn.

Sad to say, though, the outrages committed by the appointed moderators are only the tip of the iceberg. I know we’ve all been held hostage in a Q&A where there’s too much Q because some A has decided his BS doesn’t stink. Every weirdo with a fanny pack and an ax to grind bellies up to the front of the line to give his or her view of philosophy and world events as if the honored speaker is going to say, “You there in the hemp pants, that’s the most brilliant question slash alternative short lecture I’ve ever heard! Will you co-author my next book?” If that ever actually happened, I’d probably wet myself. Fortunately, you’re more likely to hear the guy go “I don’t really understand you’re question and we’re out of time anyway.” Thus, my drawers are dry, your face is red, and we all live to pester each other another day.

But it boggles the mind that people could be so self-absorbed and slash or so oblivious as to steamroll over the words of thinkers so much smarter and more eloquent than they. I’m even more surprised that these folks abide this kind of indignity. Although, I suppose it is because they have charitable and generous souls. I do not suffer from this affliction so I’m going to give it to you straight: if I ever catch you horning in on the few short moments that an audience has with our most beloved public figures, I will clobber you over the head with your own microphone. Then at least you’ll look as foolish as you sound.

This post has been brought to you by the letters Q and A and by Dennis Prager and Kelly Kapoor.

Into the Drink

2008-05-21T07:19:00.000-07:00

My drunk friends always tell me, “alcohol is a social lubricant.” I always tell them that I want to see what dictionary they are using because the last time I checked, spilling a 40 down the front of your shirt doesn’t facilitate anything. I suppose it removes a barrier between me silently judging you and me sharing a full-throated critique of the hot mess you’ve become after barely sniffing your preferred lube, but I doubt this is what you were going for. So I feel that this is an opportune moment to dispel some of the myths surrounding the greasing qualities of booze.

Alcohol transfers people to a parallel universe, divorced from reality. Like the good people of Lake Woebegone, all the men are strong, all the women are beautiful, and all the STDs are in remission. But once you put the cork back on your Garrison Keillor fantasy land you come crashing back to reality where all the men are unemployed, all the women are fugly, and that itchy burning won’t go away. And the kicker is that no one will ever know just how shameful your walk home the next morning really was because any pictures of your fugly, unemployed one night stand will have been magically deleted from your camera…or if you’re lucky, you’ll have spilled some social lubricant on it and it will be fried.

This raises the broader issue of waste. There are children starving in third world countries and you have gone through three digital cameras in two years because you get all butter fingersy around any drink with vodka and something fruity. And that doesn’t even begin to address the outrages your cell phone has suffered. It’s a wonder no one has picked up one of your lost cell phones and used it to stalk you or send you cancer or something. They totally could because you leave your cell phones everywhere. Heaven help me I cannot understand who you need to be calling at 1 am with a lime ricky in one hand and a ciggy falling out of the other. I guess you could say that alcohol speeds up the process by which you part with your money, but again, I don’t think this was what you had in mind.

Then we have a flotilla of awkward social encounters that will cause you even more angst than the drawer full of Plan Bs in the bathroom. Do you remember going up to that attractive person and waxing philosophical about how super-awesome it is to live rent-free in your parents’ basement and play video games all day? How about the drunken text message to your ex that came out like garbled Morse Code except for the one coherent sentence that you managed to mash into the keypad with your fingers which was “I m drnk…”? It seems that social lubricant only works well at sending you into a shame spiral that you won’t even discover until you wake up the next day with a raging headache and vomit in your hair. You’ll listen to a series of voicemail messages that start out extolling your wicked awesome drunkenness but will steadily deteriorate as friends ask you to call them back when you get up to make sure you lived through the night, and finally, the rehab clinic calls to tell you there’s a van waiting outside.

I raise this issue here not because I care about emotional toll that drinking takes on you; I could not care less about you. Rather, drunkenness is a problem because you are no fun to be around when you’re drunk and I have no interest in babysitting some sloppy disaster at the bar. You are smelly and incoherent and take up a lot more space when you’re sloshed and I am in no mood. If we add up the costs of the externalities you impose when you drink, the total would be enough for Sally Struthers to save an entire village. The bottom line, here, is that it is not polite to get so lubed up that you turn into a puddle of deadweight loss for humanity.

Peep Show

2008-05-07T07:11:00.000-07:00

I paid zero dollars for this newspaper and I’ll be damned if I’m going to let some mooch read it over my shoulder for free. It’s not even so much the mooching that bothers me; I was probably going to just throw the thing nonchalantly on the ground after I was finished anyway. What really steams my milk is the invasion of personal space. At one level, I do not need all of your carbon dioxide and methane gas creating a thick smog right over my head. At a deeper level, how do I know you’re not going to shiv (see: shank) me? Lurking up behind a person to catch a glimpse of the latest Doonesbury cartoon is not worth the awkward standoff between us and our carefully sharpened sporks, I promise.

Also, let’s not forget the space invaders that come with instructions:
“Wait, I’m not finished with that page.”
“Hang on, scroll down to the bottom real quick.”
“Oh my gosh, I can’t believe you’re reading this filth.”

If I’m looking at something and I know you’re there, it means I have made a conscious decision not to talk to you. When you interject your two cents, you have not only broken the fourth wall that was so tenuously supporting my sanity in the first place, but also severed whatever loose thread of an idea was holding my reading material together, allowing me to learn something in the process of ignoring you. At least make it worth my while to have you ruin my day if you’re going to do this and share something enlightening. Usually though, people like to use a topical snippet from my reading material to drag me kicking and screaming into the social quicksand I was trying to avoid in the first place. “Speaking of the Pope, my mother had a bunion the size of my fist removed the other day.” And eureka, we’ve found something more noxious than your personal gas cloud.

Sticking your big bazzoo right behind a person’s head is also a safety hazard. If I were to read something hysterically funny and rear my head back with uproarious laughter, I might accidentally break your nose sending small pieces of shattered bone back into your brain where they would cause you to stop living. I would feel just awful if that happened and goodness knows I have enough guilt issues without pulling a Marsha Brady on your schnoz.

I think the biggest problem, though, is that your surreptitious spying is a proxy for behavior in which even you would be too embarrassed to engage. You would never walk up to a stranger and ask, “Hey, can I borrow your laptop real quick so I can check the box scores from last night’s baseball match?” But this is exactly what you’re doing when you sneak a peek in public. And lest you think I’m the only one getting all hot and bothered about this problem, the good folks at 3M (who brought you Post-It Notes, and Scotch Tape, and the letter M, and the number 3), also saw a social malady that needed a cure: http://solutions.3m.com/wps/portal/3M/en_US/ComputerFilter/Home/. So I suggest you take a hint before I find a way to whittle a Command Hook into a throwing star.

Click it Good!

2008-04-30T09:35:00.000-07:00

Damn that “reply all” button. It has a way of turning every clickster into an amateur comedian and floods my inbox with groan-worthy puns and a raft of highly personal RSVPs that constitute TMI to the max. I think it is that everyone is so starved for attention and validation that they can’t help their itchy trigger finger when they see a long recipient list and the opportunity to memorialize their wit in the bowels of the Google servers until the second coming. Maybe they think that if there’s a William Morris agent hidden somewhere on one of these lists, a well-timed “your mom” joke will mean sweet release from their cubicle and the guy who smells like bad gouda sitting in the next cell over.

You should know at this point that I can already hear you fuss-budgets clicking your tongues and saying exasperatedly, “Why don’t you just delete them you lazy so-and-so?” My reasons are multi-fold. For one, I like to keep an archive of all my correspondence. If there’s ever a mass-tort litigation over the scheduling of a lunch meeting to discuss the schedule of meetings for the next three months, I want to have all of my ducks in a row. Besides, if I’m ticking off a list of e-mails to delete, I might accidentally get rid of the one with Giada’s Passion Fruit Mousse recipe and there’s nowhere else that I would possibly be able to find that again. Thirdly, why should I take more time and energy sifting through someone else’s e-diarrhea when that person couldn’t be bothered to distinguish between the button with one little arrow and the button with two little arrows?

This e-mail phenomenon has taught us that people cannot be made to shed their animal instincts just because they’ve started to walk upright. This is the major flaw in Darwin’s theory. If a hundred monkeys locked in a room can produce Shakespeare, why can’t people at least bother to spell out “lol” (which I doubt they’re really doing anyway) when they decide to broaden the radius of people disturbed by their self-absorbed attention grabbing beyond those within earshot? We could all take a lesson from the monkeys to form a nice heuristic for when it’s appropriate to use this powerful feature. If your message is not ten syllables with beats at 2, 4, 6, 8, and 10, keep it to yourself.

Notwithstanding a penchant for hyperbole, the reply-all abusers are not the drum majors in the parade of horribles that we’ve been discussing. They’re more like the baton twirlers…mildly irritating, totally useless participants in a larger spectacle that is a black mark on our civilization. Put differently, it’s the social engineering version of the law of large numbers. How many pointless megabytes of social desperation will it take to clog our information technology infrastructure? Send out an unflattering picture of Hillary with a shotgun and a 40 to a bunch of people and wait ten minutes. If you can resist the urge to take out a hammer and smash your own computer just to stop the dinging, you’ve got an iron will or a defective eardrum. The rest of us are going to have to re-learn how to make fire.

Crossing the Line

2008-04-17T08:41:00.000-07:00

“I’d like a double tall, half-caf….hold on a sec…no not you….what?....double tall, half-caf., low foam, high fiber…No way! I can’t believe he said that to you!....Wait, where’s my latte? Do you need me to repeat my order?” If your blood is not as boiling as the hot coffee I’m about to spill on all of those line-clogging cell phone junkies, I’m sorry that my little dramatization has gone over your head. Standing in line (or “on line” if you’re in New York where everyone else seems to be able to see some imaginary line on the ground leading up to every cashier, ticket window, and gyro cart) is frustrating enough without having your ears assaulted by the conversational table scraps of a would-be socialite who may as well be gabbing with the time-teller for as much substance as she’s transmitting through that cancer machine. I know this sounds harsh, but let’s be honest, if you’re waiting for someone to make change for a $20 because you just couldn’t live without a fresh role of Bubble-Tape, you’re probably not having philosophical debate about Jesus v. the Constitution with the person on the other end.

Not that I have a Marxist regard for service employees, but I find this behavior to be rude, largely because it is demeaning. Who do these people think they are that the poor barrista (Fritalian for “slave-wage coffee jockey”) doesn’t deserve their undivided attention when trying to serve them efficiently so they will get back out onto the street where they will be everyone else’s problem? If we’re honest with ourselves, you guys and gals would be cleaning that barrista’s toilets if you did not have someone else’s money to spend on gourmet French roast and oversized sunglasses. So it seems the least we could do is show a little human courtesy to the folks by whose good graces you are saved from having to figure out how to work that damn contraption in your kitchen with the glass pourer-dealie and the pouch with the black powdery-thingies in it.

I raise this issue because we’ve stumbled onto a societal prisoner’s dilemma. I too would like to be pouring over every detail of what I had for breakfast with whoever accidentally hits the “talk” instead of the “ignore” button when they see me calling. But I refrain because I’m not self-absorbed enough to commit the offensive behavior discussed above and still sleep at night (although who could sleep when there are so many interesting things to say about the piece of chewing gum I saw on the sidewalk this afternoon?). Other than personal shame (which, to be honest, has not been much of a barrier in the past), what’s my incentive not to pick up the phone as well? At least then I’d have something to distract me while Liz Smith over there narrates the menu to her conversation partner to help her decide which Egg McMuffin will go best with a Bloody Mary. And thus the problem snowballs to the point where our poor cashier has capitalized on our absent-mindedness to embezzle more than the GDP of Mauritania out of the change drawer.

Not that I’m shilling for Visa, but to illustrate my point, see if you can spot the most offensive person in this ad: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6332303939470321646&q=visa+commerical+food+court&total=2&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=0&hl=en . I’ll give you 2 guesses. Then I’m calling in the soup nazi.

You Are a Waste of Space

2008-04-08T21:29:00.000-07:00

Do you remember those clever signs on the Washington Metro that were made up words with fake definitions as public service announcements? My favorite was “escalump: n. a person who becomes a human speed bump by suddenly stopping at the top or bottom of Metro escalators.” Apparently the mass transit officials in town felt that not stopping to check your watch at the bottom of a crowded escalator was such an underappreciated social norm that they had to alert people to the proper way to ride a moving staircase (it really boils down to walk, stand there, walk again). If it were any easier a child could do it…wait…children can do it, which leaves you on very thin ice.

I have to say that I think this sign is very unfair to speed bumps. At least they help to slow traffic on dangerous roads and do not waste precious resources like air and food as do the humanoid forms of social detritus that we’re discussing here. It seems like any place that serves as a choke point is also a magnet for gatherings of the self-absorbed and oblivious. We saw a version of this when discussing our clogged city sidewalks. The same is true of a crowded restaurant entryway. By all means, please finish picking the broccoli out of your teeth and dumping the bowl of mints into your purse before moving your recently expanded waistlines out from between me and my three hours worth of complementary dinner rolls.

But we see this problem in other places as well. We’ve all seen the i-bankers so absorbed in conversation that they have to stop just outside the main entrance of a 50 story office building to finish sharing their brilliant insights into the role of agricultural commodities in their getting hammered at the bar in 20 minutes. It’s almost as if the further they get from the building, the dumber they become so they have to drop all of their impressive knowledge within a 5 foot radius of the front door. This theory makes sense given how dumb they seem to be by the time they get to the bar.

We also see a strange phenomenon in revolving doors. Turns out, there is some mechanism placed just inside the center pole that causes cell phones to ring only once, maybe twice at most. This is evidenced by the fact that no matter where a person is in the process of walking forward while also possibly pushing the door, he or she feels a keen sense of urgency about fumbling through every pocket on every garment on his or her person to answer the phone. “Logjam be damned, this could be Ed McMahon and if I don’t catch this by the second ring, I’ll never forgive myself.” Of course, the odds of it being Ed McMahon, or even a worthwhile long distance offer, are about as good as you using the word logjam, making the discounted, risk-adjusted value of this phone call about half a cent. So let’s make a deal. I’ll pay everyone a penny to just let it ring until they get through the door. You get some positive NPV out of the deal and I get a decent shot at putting my groceries away before the plastic bag handles sever the finger I would need to effectively communicate with you.

About Face

2008-04-01T05:06:00.000-07:00

We are having a bathroom crisis in this country. It seems that more and more people are choosing to forgo this household feature, knowing that the subway will be a perfectly satisfactory place to carry out their morning regimen (not “regime”, as some of you over-achievers like to say…that would be a different kind of subway ride altogether). Either that, or people are confused by the name “bathroom”. Surely you can take baths in it, but you can also do so much more. You can comb your hair, brush your teeth, and put on your makeup. You can even put some salve on that flesh-eating virus that is causing your face to fall off in the seat next to me.

We’ve all seen these people. You’ll be in class and some girl will whip out a pleather bag filled with all manner of brush and powder and goop. She’ll jab at her face with each one for about 15 seconds and then move onto the next. After ten minutes she’ll look like the ‘tute you passed on your way to the hot dog stand because she looked too desperate. In the meantime, she’s stunk up the place with a stench reminiscent of Crabtree & Evelyn but mixed with like ammonia. And all this beauty is an ugly business. In the process of tarting herself up, this chick has felt the need to pick all the glop and schmutz off of each item in her accoutrement and flick it “down at her side” which functionally is “on your leg.” It’s the same thing as sausage-making, folks; no one wants to see the process and they have to be hung-over to appreciate the results anyway.

Sad to say the fellas are not immune from this disease either. Gentlemen, there are no holes in your head in which it is acceptable to stick your finger when you’re in public. If your ear or your nose or your trachea is bothering you, this is either a non-emergency, in which case there’s plenty of time to excuse yourself to the bathroom, or it is an emergency, in which case you should be using that finger to call 911. In either case, you should not be anywhere near me when your head is being serviced. I do not think I’m being particularly sensitive about hygiene here. If a guy sneezing in an elevator can cause SARS, surely the skin dander that you’re setting loose as you pick at your face could set off a fresh batch of leprosy. And now that I am on record, no one can say I didn’t warn them. When I’m hunkered down with a radiation containment suit and tissue boxes on my feet but am Ebola-free, who’ll be laughing then?

But there’s a part of me that has to laugh at the irony of this public grooming epidemic. Isn’t the point of getting ready before you leave the house to appear as you want to be seen by others? When you’re smearing lipstick across your cheek as the train makes a sharp right, the cat’s out of the bag. We know what you look like with makeup and without it, and frankly, we’re indifferent. But assuming you think there’s a difference, let’s put your best face forward and emerge from your hovel ready to receive the onslaught of judgment and disdain that we are waiting to hurl at you with a stiff and perfectly outlined upper lip.

Clothes that Make a Statement...That We'd Have to Bleep Out

2008-03-24T21:52:00.000-07:00

This site is about to get a little blue. Brace yourselves; I’m going to tell you where you cannot wear jeans. I can already hear your indignant scoffing and you can just save it because I’m not having it. Spending $200 on indigo-dyed cotton does not make you look rich and it does not make you classy. It does make you a sucker. And I have absolutely no idea why being a sucker should qualify you for entry into the last bastions of civilized society like the opera, or a fancy restaurant, or a house of worship, or your great-aunt’s funeral.

On one level, I’m complaining because I don’t want to have to look at you in all your muffin-topped glory while I’m trying to pry my $40 worth out of the business end of a lobster claw. Most people have no conception of what they look like to others and most people wear jeans too often, which begs the question, did the fun-house mirror come with the jeans or is it just my good fortune that you happen to own both? Likewise, Gd may not care what you wear to commune with a greater power, but I would rather not spend the hour seeing you constantly adjust yourself in the next pew, so if you’d be kind enough to wear something that involves folding your hands neatly in your lap, maybe both our prayers could be answered.

Even more than the fact that your sartorial impropriety is an eyesore to the general public, there is something sinister which transforms this indiscretion from a fashion faux pas into outright violation of your obligations under our social compact. By wearing denim without regard to time, place, or occasion, you are sending a signal to the world that this gathering is no more important to you than loafing around on your sofa watching a NASCAR re-run from 1997. True as this may be, it is rude to flaunt it in others’ faces. Those little old ladies did not spend fours hours in a salon gettin their hair did just so you can roll straight in from plowing the back 40 with a toothpick hanging out the side of your disrespectful mouth. Which brings us to the second point you will try to make in the midst of your self indulgent whining. “Why you gotta narc [do the kids still say this?] on my good time? Why can’t you just let me be who I am?” Well if who you are is a self-centered slob, then be my guest, just be yourself in private, or in a saloon, or in Canada.

If I haven’t given you reason enough to buy a pair of real pants, consider the fate of Britney and Justin. After stepping out in the best blue-jean patches that could be sewn together by third-world refugees living in a garage in east LA, this May-June romance wound up on the same trash heap of cultural scraps that produced the outfits they were wearing. So the moral of the story is, if you don’t want to end up 40 pounds heavier and back in the double-wide where you started, let’s show a little decorum in public.

Put Your Bun Back in the Oven

2008-03-19T10:12:00.000-07:00

I think this would be a good opportunity to clarify the record on a few things. It’s not that I don’t like children; it’s that I don’t like your children. To be specific, I don’t like the way your children behave. To be more specific, I don’t like the way that your inept parenting has created an army of pocket-sized hooligans (in certain parts of the Spanish speaking world, they say “bichos” which translates to “critters”) scuttling about under foot causing untold spoilage to the world’s supply of seersucker fashions. Parents these days seem to have decided to raise their children free-range, allowing them to pitter patter around any locale no matter how public, or crowded, or dangerous and to rub their grubby hands all over anything that catches their fancy no matter how shiny, or pointy, or mine.

In the event that parents are simply misinformed about the quality of their child-rearing skills, let’s take a moment to provide some helpful feedback.

Your children are not cute. I know you thought that mewling, puking bundle of joy you brought home from the hospital was so adorable that you could just eat it up, but you are the only one. No one else in the room was wearing their pregnancy goggles; they were just glad to see you had quit craving Chunky Monkey with roasted red peppers on top and didn’t want to say anything that might knock you off the wagon again. The consequence of this perception disconnect is that you think watching your little apple dumpling “explore its surrounds” is cheek-pinching cute, but, here again, you’re out on a limb on this one. Knocking over every piece of breakable merchandise that’s fewer than 3 feet off the ground is not cute. Squealing loud enough to puncture my eardrum whenever you shove that stupid noise-making toy in its face (which you insist on doing every time you find yourself someplace the child would find boring (which of course is because the child is not supposed to be there)) is not cute. And toddling around a busy restaurant with hot plates and sharp knives is not cute (and it’s not even funny, this is just plain dangerous).

No one is impressed by your parenting. I think this is the issue that really gets us to the crux of your pathology. I always see the parents with the worst behaved children making the biggest show of what great parents they are. But this only exacerbates the underlying problem which is that you pay more attention to appearances and to other people than to your own child. You shower your child with excessive praise whenever it poops its pants; or you try to engage in calm, rational pro-con analysis when the little monster has hoisted a glass jar of tomato sauce over its head with a terrifying gleam in its eye. These would be perfect “teachable” moments for you to step in and be a parent rather than a two-bit child psychologist. How would a good parent have handled this situation? “Madison! [it’s always Madison] You put that down or I will slap you into next Tuesday!” No fuss, no muss. And there’s no need to worry about onlookers calling child welfare on you. With so many kids with stupid names being raised by so many parents with a penchant for giving their kids stupid names, they’ll never be able to track you down.

Lest anyone think that I have just been drinking too much haterade (shout out to “red” for that one), I’ll end on a positive note by talking about kids I can stand slash find mildly amusing. There are of course kids whose parents made them dress up like adults out of a need for some sort demented Gypsy Rose Lee kind of vicarious fulfillment. I also heart the kids who are a little too honest about their parents’ private business to strangers; like those Chewy granola bar commercials where the kid is at a wedding and goes, “My mom says she can't believe you wore white." It’s not that this latter category is particularly well behaved; I just think they offer a deliciously ironic sort of revenge for the sloppy upbringing of which the general public usually bears the brunt. Now if only every parent would shove a granola bar in their kid’s mouth when they started acting up, the world would be a happier place.

The Ants Go Marching Two-by-Two...and I Put a Quick End to That!

2008-03-12T22:09:00.000-07:00

I know for a fact that the story of Noah and the Ark is bunk. I know because the Bible claims he boarded the animals onto his watercraft two-by-two. But ask anyone who has ever slogged through the crowded streets of New York and they will tell you that pair-wise foot travel is the most rage-inducingly inefficient way to do anything.

When I first noticed myself getting angered by this (which, coincidentally, was also the first time I encountered this), I was concerned that my gag reflex might just be a little too sensitive. I said to myself, “maybe you’re just a sourpuss and no one else really cares.” Perhaps, I thought, this was really a displaced reaction to those tacky paparazzi photos where you see a B-list celebrity couple try to ugly themselves up when they walk out of the house and hold hands walking through the parking lot of the Gulp ‘N Blow so that everyone knows that 1) they’re in a relationship with someone who is so pretty that any effort to uglify him or herself is just futile, 2) money can’t buy taste, and 3) they have a total disdain for the American public.

I think the real answer is jealousy. I’m jealous that these gimpy slackers have the luxury of ambling along the sidewalk shoulder to shoulder in the middle of the day clutching shopping bags and furry dogs that would have been eaten already if we lived in another time and place. Where are these folks going? Or, the better question would be, where are they not going? Don’t they have jobs? Don’t they have somewhere to be (besides right in my way)? There is absolutely nothing to stop and smell in New York that won’t give you cancer so I cannot fathom why people refuse to move it along when they’re out in public.

To add insult to injury, these are the same individuals who will be talking on their cell phones recounting every tedious detail of their miserable failure of a social life. Judging from the way they zigzag across the entire width of the public commons, they’re still feeling the effects of last night’s strike-out fest, and I in turn am feeling the emotional effects of communism writ small. I pay through the nose in taxes (well not “I”, but like, the “royal I”) in order to not have to walk in traffic. In hogging the sidewalk, our useless, dog-toting, social lepers have taken a part of my soul, but more importantly a part of my money, and that would be enough to make anyone angry.

Clogging up a crowded place involves a form of self-absorbed obliviousness that I think society should not tolerate. Apropos of our chewing discussion, the most obvious contraption to combat such a problem would be a cow-catcher. A blunt instrument to be sure, but if you are one of the perpetrators of this offense you have shown yourself to be impervious to all of the more subtle social cues in your surroundings. And I can assure you that a light but forceful love-tap from a half-ton locomotive attachment will not be nearly as unpleasant as the world of pain it would prevent me from unleashing on your jobless ass.

Mastication in Public

2008-03-05T21:48:00.000-08:00

A little something to chew on as you consider whether we have evolved or devolved from our chimpanzee ancestors: why do people gnaw on food with their mouths agape like some sort of inbred mongrel? Setting aside the question of people who have colds (who should be 1) eating soup anyway or 2) not in public), this is among the most disgusting displays of which the human body is capable. And you don’t even have to take my word for it. There is an airline affinity group that is simply agog over this epidemic: http://www.airliners.net/discussions/non_aviation/read.main/1824645/ . And just so that this powerful irony is not lost on anyone, these are people who like airlines and are still so disgusted when someone is chewing his (excuse me, his or her) cud within earshot that it gets their tea kettles rattling. I myself am so apoplectic about this problem that I’m having trouble getting through in a compelling way.

Let’s try this. Let’s take the often used cud-chewing metaphor. I’m speaking now to the perpetrators of this crime against human decency.

This is how people perceive you:

So your presence conjures up images of a barnyard animal that eats grass, regurgitates it, swallows it again, lather, rinse, repeat. But I see no reason why this should deter you since everyone around you is probably already regurgitating anyway thanks to the quick work you made of that week-old banana.

Now, coming back to those members of society who’ve learned to walk upright, create fire, and keep our digestive processes entirely inside our corpuses, I do think there’s hope for the future. I think we have to believe that we are the change we know we can be. When the cynics tell us we’re naïve to think that we can live in a world where we believe in the power of our own sense of self-satisfaction, I say we turn the page to a new chapter in our civilization.

And so, here is my modest proposal. First, we must model the behavior we expect to see in others. I myself have been tempted to crunch on a big bundle of celery sticks one at a time, tongue wagging, food bits falling out of the largest hole in my head, just to make the point to these mouth-breathers how displeasing their behavior is to others. However in this situation, two wrongs don’t make a right, but they do make me want to jab myself in the temples with a fork. So for the love of creamed corn, do not solve the world’s problems by demonstrating its worst qualities.

Not to worry, though, I would not leave you without recourse. Nothing is more satisfying or efficient than violent self help. To that end, I propose a proactive measure. You know, I heard once (and I really should try to attribute it because it’s so true) that it takes 247 muscles in your face to frown but only 5 muscles to reach out your hand and bitchslap someone across the face. An alternative for you pacifist Code Pinkers out there would be to go to the offender’s office or place of business and shout obscenities at them while wearing the Keds you tried to dye with Pepto-Bismol in your sink last night. This also, is an effective approach.

Finally, don’t under-estimate the twin Judeo-Catholic powers of guilt and shaming. It might go something like this, “We spent all that money sending you to fancy college so you could sit in the basement smoking pot with your friends all day?!? And chew with your mouth closed!” It might also be along the lines of, “I blame myself for not raising you with manners or respect for others. I am sorry to have failed you, and everyone in the world that now has to put up with you, so miserably.”

Places Not to Talk, Part I: The Quiet Car on Amtrak

2008-02-28T08:30:00.000-08:00

Folks, do I have a sign on my back or something? Does it say, “please both bother me and disobey clearly posted signage” on my forehead? It seems like every time I ride the train I get stuck sitting by the bitch on rails who can’t keep her damn yap shut, and suffice it to say, I am less than thrilled about this cosmic phenomenon.

There is of course the obvious irritation of trying to decipher one Ruthie’s 30 page diatribes on how men have done her wrong while having some she-devil squawking about the synergies that she’s going to help create when she gets to whatever low-level strategy session (it’s always a strategy session) the fates have cruelly (for me) scheduled on this day. Although, even this I could abide if we were both left to our own devices on whatever train car we happened to board. But I, I planned ahead. I followed the rules. I knew I would want to sit in peace and quiet and listen to the sound of my brain cells atrophy while I leaf through the latest inTouch magazine. So I picked the one and only car that Amtrak has made available for just this purpose. I asked the station attendant which car this was. I made a b-line for it, knocking over 2 grandmothers and what I can only assume was a liver-transplant patient in order to choose my seat at one of those table dealies by the window so I could plug in my ipod whilst I travel. It so happens that my view from the seat I chose includes no fewer than four, four signs assuring me that I am indeed in the right place for people who have already had their glass of “shut the hell up” for the morning. But my antagonist, she took a different approach. She decided that signage was a waste of time. She could not be bothered to take advantage of her literacy for even the fraction of a second it would have taken to avoid giving me this ulcer. Alternatively, she did see the signs and decided that her synergies just could not be contained, by space, time, or human decency. She did, however, take the time to pick out a seat right across the aisle from mine with her gay (allegedly) traveling companion. Surely she must have read whatever bulletin has been going around telling people to come sit by me and demonstrate that selfishness is the new black, even though the four signs were too much trouble. So to summarize point one, disobeying rules designed to keep our society ordered and respectful makes me want to create synergies between my foot and your pooper.

But there’s selfishness and there’s selfishness, which brings us to point two. When you are in anyplace that is otherwise quiet, and start talking, you make the choice for everyone else that it will no longer be a quiet place. How self-involved and oblivious does a person have to be to think they should get to do this? Evidently, as self-involved and oblivious as this synergy chick across the aisle. If I were not so disgusted by her behavior, I’d have to stand back and marvel at the kind of mind that gets a person up in the morning, knowing that she will have to be selected out of the gene pool in order for us to have an ordered society.

In conclusion, if you are talking in a place that is designated as one that should be quiet, you are stopping the march of human progress and that makes you a terrible person.