Bitchy McBitcherson's Blog

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  • Yep, still typing

    This year marks the 12th Christmas we have not celebrated. We talked about it. We thought about it. We determined it was not providing us with the purported joy. We agreed. We decided. We quit. We told the people we felt we needed to.

    Our daughter is 11. She grew up not celebrating. While the concept of a child, and what I would teach them, was part of the decision, as a person she has been one of the difficult aspects of it. The feeling of being different, of not being normal, can be hard on a child. People like to poke at differences. They want to know why. They want the difference explained and defended, or *fixed*. They think they have the right to that.

    One December when she was 5 we went to get her picture taken at some crappy in store photo place. She was cute when she was 5 though, so any photos would do and the cheaper was much better for the wallet. A few reasonable sized photos, plus 200 little useless throw away ones so they could advertise a large bundle, for $4.99. It’s a long way from art, but it made my grandmother happy. The button pushing salesmonkey asked her what she was doing for Christmas and she shrugged and responded that we didn’t celebrate Christmas. Salesmonkey freaked out. “What do you mean?! What do you do?!” Salesmonkey stares at me wondering why my child is retarded and lying, “You do celebrate Christmas, don’t you? Why is she saying that?!” I shook my head. “Why not?!!!” Salesmonkey wailed. The kid was traumatized.

    A few weeks later, in January, we were at our favorite (at the time) sushi place. One of the chefs asked her what she had gotten for Christmas and she froze up. She did not want a repeat of the last scene. He asked again. She looked at me. He looked at me. Her behavior was quite odd. She was always extremely friendly with this chef and now it looked like she didn’t know how to speak. “We don’t celebrate Christmas,” I told him. He looked at her and smiled warmly, “Neither do I.” She beamed.

    One of the things that catches attention from certain people about not celebrating is the “not Christian” aspect. Most of the Christians we run into are used to being in the comfortable majority in the country. They’ve heard of the other big religions, but we don’t *look* (Muslim, Jewish, or one of them there “eastern religions”). This means we might be something else, something worse. I’m already long comfortable with the fact that in pretty much every aspect of my life, I am something worse, but this is another area that is harder on the kid.

    Like with most things, we couldn’t leave well enough alone, and we chose to homeschool. Now, most things about homeschooling are really wonderful, and we have some terrific friends who homeschool. However, there is a rather large sized portion of the homeschooling community who are not just “I was raised Christian, so I mark the Christian box” but are instead fervently Christian. We interact with these people at group events, classes, field trips, sports days and more. “What church do you go to?” is commonly asked within the first 5 sentences by many of these people. Now I cannot begin to give a rat’s ass about somebody who doesn’t want to talk to me anymore because I don’t go to church, I mean, really I am grateful if they are going to weed me out for that reason. Still a kid likes to have friends, and more than that. A kid does not like to be teased and bullied. Ever seen a 10 year old, and more than a foot taller, boy get physical with a 7 year old girl because when he asked if she believed in Jesus, she gave “In my family religion is personal and we don’t talk about it outside the home.”as her response? Well, I have.

    Over the years we’ve learned little tricks. Stick her in a Harry Potter t-shirt when going to an event with a new group. It keeps a certain element from even starting to interact with her. Avoid events from Thanksgiving through mid January. I don’t enjoy being out and about then anyway. We won’t lie, but why invite trouble, when it always shows up of its own accord. Yet here I am writing it out on LJ and posting it public. I asked her. None of those kids should be reading my posts anyway, but somebody might. Does she care? She said to post. At 11 she is obviously a lot more immune to the reactions on this subject than she was at 5.

    Things I have been called (not in jest) because I do not celebrate Christmas have included:

    • Grinch
    • Scrooge
    • smart
    • lucky
    • heathen
    • crazy
    • child abuser

    Yes, I’ve been told it is child abuse to not have her celebrate Christmas. Some people have cried actual tears upon hearing that we don’t celebrate.

    One relative lets their kids think we are Jewish so they don’t have to explain something else.

    My MIL quit giving us birthday gifts. Oh wait. She didn’t quit. She has become chronically late with them. She sends us gifts at Christmas, wrapped in Christmas paper and writes Happy Birthday on the cards. In case you are wondering, our birthdays are in July.

    Mainly people want to know what we DO instead. We don’t do anything specific. We are glad to have a day when people don’t tend to call, and we often accomplish stuff around the house and catch up on to do list stuff. The only thing that makes it different from other days is the fact that other people are busy celebrating it. If we eat out, we don’t have many options, but we’ve learned that we can usually find a Chinese restaurant open.

  • No Thanks

    It’s just not that magic to me.

    At 17 I got my first job in retail. Being trapped inside the mall for the entire holiday season, both the purchases and returns, was, let’s call it “unpleasant”. Working with the general public was not something I enjoyed on a normal day, but during the holiday season everything went to extra utter shit. The number of temper tantrums increased tenfold. There were people fighting with strangers over who was getting the last of some dumb piece of crap.

    Even on sale, it is an ugly damn sweater ladies. If you don’t both stop yanking at it you are going to ruin it, It will then be my job to damage it out, and since I already have more than enough to do today cleaning up after you fucks, it is really not going to make me happy. Merry Christmas.

    The closer it got to the big day, the longer my work hours and the shorter the shoppers’ tempers. Best of all, school was out for vacation so most shoppers were dragging along all form of snotty, fussing, writhing, complaining, demanding, brat with them.

    People could talk all they wanted about the magic of the season, but I saw what they were really like, and the overwhelming majority were not swept up in tides of joy, nor did they feel goodwill toward mankind. They felt aggravated, rushed, pressured, frantic, crazed and entitled. It was just like the rest of the year, only amplified. In my book giving some canned peaches to the food drive does not even out treating everyone at the mall like shit.

    Giftmas

    It all comes down to the gifts. I’m not opposed to giving gifts and I am not opposed to receiving them. I am a firm believer in the saying “It’s the thought that counts”, but I don’t interpret it the same way most people do. I do not think that just any gift will do because at least it shows they thought of you for a second. That is what a card or a phone call or an email is for. A gift shows what they are thinking of you, and if that thought is “Oh shit! I forgot to get you something and I really think I should because it is X day tomorrow. I was already in line when I realized this, but here is a random piece of crap set near the register lines for exactly this purpose.” I honestly don’t want it. I also really don’t want to give gifts like that.

    When I am out and about in the course of my life (or sitting on my ass surfing the web, as the case may be), and I stumble upon something that makes me think of a particular person, that is a gift worth considering. I don’t want to not buy it because there isn’t an X day until 9 months in the future. I don’t want to buy it and hide it in my cluttered closet for 10 months and find it after X day has passed.

    My father was never much of a gift giver, so when I was a teen I began to do the Christmas shopping from US. My action + his money, both names on the card. I’d start early and put thought into each and every gift, but I was a teen and not overly in touch with a lot of people on our list, so I probably had more misses than hits. As the time grew closer and I’d remember the people we’d left of the list, I would scramble to get *something*. I understand how it happens. I just hated the way it felt. If I didn’t know somebody well enough to buy a gift for them that they would actually like… If they weren’t on my mind enough that I remembered them when I put together the list… Why exactly should I be buying a present for them anyway? Because they were going to buy one for me? This was only of benefit to the retailers.

    This much is being spent on this person, so this much should be spent on that person. More expensive is *better*. They spent this much on me last year. The Christmas advertisements started at the beginning of November (they now start at the end of September is some stores). I was saturated with the commercialization of Christmas and I just wanted to wring it out. I did not feel holiday cheer, I felt holiday stress.

    This was what I was going to raise our family on? Yes, children LOVE Christmas. Children are selfish creatures. Humans are selfish creatures and the young ones have learned to hide it less. People pile tons of presents on them and that makes it an enjoyable holiday to them, and they want more. It wasn’t exactly a traditional I felt gung ho about passing on.

    If I am going to a person’s house for dinner, I bring along a bottle of wine or some other consumable I know they will actually use. If I am a house guest, I make sure to take them out to a nice meal. I am all for manners and thanking people by treating them to something. I’m just not that into providing a wrapped item because of a certain date on the calendar. I try to make sure the people I care about know it every day. If they need a certain amount of money spent on a certain date to know it, they probably don’t know me well enough that they should be expecting a gift from me anyhow. If I am going to attend a wedding or birthday party, then I will make a point of having a gift in time for the event, or I don’t attend. Like I said, I am not anti gift or anti manners. I just don’t want to be part of frenzied gift exchanges.

    None of the memorable gifts I have gotten showed up on Christmas. Many of my favorites showed up out of the blue, just because somebody happened to be thinking of me. It might be the gift giving season, but please, nothing for me.

  • I’ll Have a Hot Buttered Rum

    I am not Christian. I understand that a lot of people around the world celebrate Christmas as a secular holiday. Admittedly, I celebrated long after I realized I wasn’t Christian. Back when I decided to stop celebrating Christmas, I was still trying to achieve some sort of balance with certain factions of my blood relatives. They were very religious. It was an important holiday to them, and the secular celebration of it bothered them. I wanted to show some respect for their beliefs. I was planning to start a family of my own. I was trying to grasp what it was I was going to tell my child if I didn’t want to do the Jesus Christ’s birthday thing. I felt like it was more respectful of these relatives’ beliefs if I simply walked away from celebrating the holiday, rather than transforming it into a celebration of something that did fit into my world view better. In the intervening years I’ve gotten a far better picture of what those relatives, whose feelings I was worried about, really feel about me, and I am far less concerned now about trying to respect their beliefs. Still it did play a part in my decision.

    There is also a little thing oft referred to as family politics, as if regular politics weren’t ugly enough.

    My parents are divorced. They have been since I was very young. Where was I going for Christmas? Should I trade off every other year? Should I spend it with the one I wasn’t living with at the time? When I was a child they worked it out amongst themselves. If they argued about it, I was unaware or have blocked it out. I spent Christmas where I spent Christmas and probably got spoiled a little bit extra over the holidays because of it. I had fun with the people I was with. There were presents and twinkling lights, and a good many more sweets than I normally got to have. I missed the ones I wasn’t with. It was a “family holiday” and I was from a broken one.

    By the time I hit adolescence, the presents and the sweets mattered less to me. I was very aware I wasn’t Christian, although I wasn’t ready to tell people that yet. Instead I was trying to come to terms with this “Spirit of Christmas” or “Magic of Christmas” thing that people would go on about. It wasn’t what I saw. What I saw, was that the people who understood me, the people that I wanted to spend time with, were all stuck in a house with their relatives, while I was stuck in a house with my relatives. Yes, I was at that age when my peer group was becoming a stronger influence, than my parents. That was only part of it. I had also started to become a lot more aware of the various dynamics in the relationships around me, and I could see that I was not the only one who was not brimming with joy at every familial interaction. I was seeing things in the marriages of my relatives. I was hearing the exasperated tones. I noticed that people who rarely had a drink of alcohol had one for the holidays and that it was more a matter of dulling their senses than celebration. You shoved all the extendeds into one house together for a week and things got… tense. A game of Pictionary could end with somebody in tears, and I don’t mean one of the children. Once I was old enough to drive I would escape to spend time with my friends as soon as I could get away.

    When I met the person who would become my husband, it seemed inevitable that we would celebrate Christmas. We both always had. As we started to build our lives together we needed to sort out how we would celebrate the holiday as a family. As it happened, his parents divorced long ago too. So now we had 4 groups to choose from and no way to please everyone. It wasn’t just the basic 4 sets of our parents, we still had at least 1 grandparent living for each of those 4 parents.

    The first year we put up our own tree, which was fun and exciting. We got it for 5 bucks and had a lot of fun decorating. My mother bought us several very nice ornaments which was a gesture I really appreciate. We didn’t go visit her since she didn’t live locally. We had our own gift exchange at home, and we made some rounds to see the local friends and relatives.

    The next year my mother agreed to bring her family (both of my parents started new families after I was grown) to spend Christmas with us. I have to admit, this felt like a milestone. My mother and her family travelling to spend the holiday with us told me she believed I was a grown up, that she accepted my relationship, and knew I was really establishing my own household. It meant a lot to me. We got ourselves another 5 buck tree and decorated it. I planned my dinner menu (centered around a lamb roast). It would be our first Christmas that we were hosting. We also invited his mother and her husband. They said they would come. We did not invite my father over, who was also local. He had recently married a Buddhist they were still sorting out the Christmas thing. (I think now they celebrate it when they were spending it with my grandparents, and don’t otherwise, but I’m not certain. We have more interesting things to talk about.) This worked out better for us since we had a small apartment. On Christmas his mother didn’t call and didn’t show up. We waited a while and finally he called over to see when she’d be arriving, and she told him that she wasn’t feeling well.

    The next day we found out she was pissed off and offended that we were arrogant enough to think we could host our own Christmas. She had not gotten to have her own Christmas until she was married and had a child, and her son should come to her house for Christmas. The fact we had out of town guests did not figure into it. They were my guests.

    It became a bit of a thing, and she wouldn’t give us our gifts (including those by other people that were sent to her address) until we came to her house. At this point we were irritated and in the midst of a solidly petty and immature reaction ourselves, so we avoided going to her house completely. We’d meet for breakfast out at restaurants. It was many months until we ended up at and her house and got those gifts. Some were baked goods which were far from fresh at that point. Ghost of Christmas Past Shortbread Cookies, made with real butter and quite rancid.

    The whole thing left a bad taste in my mouth, literally and figuratively. To top it off, between the general stress of the season and the overwhelming workload of college life, we left the tree up long beyond the point of no return. We had managed to put the ornaments away, but once you pass the time that the garbage people will collect it on trash day, it became an effort to get rid of it. We didn’t have a truck to take it to the dump ourselves, and we were expending a lot of effort in a lot of other areas of our lives. The needles dried and many fell. The tree began to look much like a giant sized Charlie Brown tree. It stood as a reminder. When we got rid of it (way before we got those gifts, mind you) we knew it would be our last real tree. Before the next Christmas came along we’d already gotten the rest of the way through our decision making process. That was the last Christmas that we celebrated. It wasn’t particularly terrible. There were plenty of good parts to it. There just wasn’t the sort of personal meaning I was looking for.

  • [ adjective ] [ noun ] to you too

    It is that time of year again. “The Holidays” as if these are the only holidays. It is admittedly not my favorite time of the year, mainly as a matter of convenience. I don’t like how crowded the roads around the stores get. I don’t like how crowded the parking lots get. I don’t like how crowded the stores themselves get. I also don’t care for the vibe I get from inside stores. Because of all of this, I try to stay in my house as much as possible from Thanksgiving through early January, and that can get rather inconvenient. I find the rest of the year plenty inconvenient enough.

    Other things I do enjoy. I enjoy the colder weather at this time of the year. I like it when people carol door to door, but I haven’t had anyone do that in years. I like the decorations that many houses put up, especially the big elaborate homemade ones, and things with lots of sparkly lights. I don’t appreciate the vast aisles of decorations for sale in the stores, but that is just because it displaces normal items and I am stuck wandering around a store I already don’t wish to be in, in search of something that I would normally be able to find rapidly.

    The ever growing PC greeting crap going on surrounding the holidays is definitely getting on my nerves. Mainly because it leads to questions. People wishing me some sort of holiday nicety is one thing, people asking me directly about my holiday leanings is not nearly so welcome.

    Years ago everybody assumed we celebrated Christmas. People would wish us a Merry Christmas and we would smile and wish them one too. It was a honest sentiment, I certainly didn’t wish them an unMerry Christmas. Whatever form of greeting they wanted to offer, I’d offer them one back. If they wanted to say “Happy Holidays” that was fine by me too. It was easy.

    This week somebody started out happily with “Merry Christmas!”
    “You too.” I responded with a warm smile.
    Then she looked concerned and asked “Oh, but do you celebrate Christmas?”
    Not liking to lie directly, I inwardly sighed, and told her still with a smile. “No, we don’t.”
    “Oh, then I shouldn’t say that!”
    “Of course you should, it is a nice thing to wish us.”
    “Happy Hanukkah! Should I say that? Do you celebrate Hanukkah?”
    This was going exactly they way I did not want it to, but still smiling I told her, once again, that we did not. The look of confusion passed over her face. The look I’ve seen many times before.
    “Well, what do you celebrate?” she asked with concern.
    “Just the season,” I lied, or at least half lied. I mean, we celebrate New Years.
    “I don’t want to be inappropriate!” she called after us.

    It isn’t a secret that we don’t celebrate Christmas, but I am not going to have t-shirts printed either. It’s our personal choice. It works for us. It isn’t meant as a judgement on anybody else. It also isn’t something that I want to converse about endlessly with people as they go about their merry business. People are often curious however, so I might as well write it up once and then I can point people to it. Like with many aspects of our lives, there are several reasons behind our choice.

    I don’t believe in Santa Claus. I was brought up on Santa Claus. By the age of five I had serious doubts. It didn’t make sense to me, and yet my parents, both of them, had been telling me about Santa Claus. I left out snacks for this guy. Were they making it up? Were my parents the giver of gifts from Santa Claus? Were my parents eating the snacks? I began to question them as Christmas approached the year I was in kindergarten. They decided they were not ready to give up on the Santa Claus myth yet. One night while both parents were in the kitchen with me, Santa Claus gave me a call on the phone to reassure me that he was real, and he’d be leaving me gifts for Christmas. This bought my parents two more years before they were forced to admit the truth. It also had a lasting affect on just how much I believed what they had to tell me.

    I also just happen to think it is a creepy idea. I don’t want people breaking into my house, whether they be taking things or leaving things. I don’t like the idea of children sitting on random strangers laps at the mall. I also don’t think milk should be consumed after it has been sitting outside of the fridge for half the night, but that is just a whole other issue I have.

    I want my kid to behave because she should damn well behave herself. That is what is good for the family. That is what is good for society. That is what is good for her. It is certainly what is good for me, and that is pretty damn important to me. I do not want her to behave because there is some man watching her all the time who knows if she has been bad or good or naughty or nice or whatever. I don’t want her to behave better because she thinks she might get presents. I just want her to behave because she would be disappointed in herself if she didn’t. Furthermore, why should a guy in some red suit who lives almost half the globe away be determining what behavior is appropriate for her to start with?

    I say “I” not because this was a unilateral decision, but because I don’t want to speak for my husband on precisely what his experiences were (especially those before we met) or current beliefs are. We spoke about the issue and made the no Christmas decision as a team. We came into the relationship still celebrating and we did celebrate some together, but we decided to stop. We stopped before our daughter was born.

  • Post 2 of The Things I Like Series

    When I was in the third grade, I wrote, directed and acted in my first play. Yes, I was a control freak from the start. When I got older I remained involved with theatre, but gave up on the acting part. As part of our program in college, you had to get on stage, so you knew what it was like from that side. I hated it from that side.

    From the other side, well it was quite a love/hate relationship. It continues to this day. At this moment I rarely do work, although I’ve had multiple people encouraging me to start volunteering at local theaters. It is tempting. I really love that line of work, except when I am hating it.

    Lately, I mostly remain an audience member. Often I am disturbed by the audience behavior. Turn off your damn phones. Don’t bring children if they cannot sit still and shut up. Don’t come yourself if you cannot sit still and shut up. Do they comprehend that the people up on stage can hear them?

    Some of the shows I watched in the past year were because I actively wanted a chance to see them. Others I saw based on the recommendations of friends. Others we attended because we knew somebody involved in the show. Sometimes I enjoy myself very little. Sometimes I enjoy myself immensely. Occasionally I can make it through an entire show without once thinking about how I would have done it differently. This year that actually happened multiple times, which was nice.

    A year in theatre (somewhat in order):

    “A Christmas Carol” (December 2005)
    “A North Hollywood Canteen Holiday”
    “The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged)”
    “The Argonauts”
    “The Block”
    “I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change”
    “Don’t Dress for Dinner”
    “Hairspray”
    “Usher”
    “Urinetown”
    “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat”
    “The Real Inspector Hound”
    “Black Comedy”
    “Wicked”
    “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee”
    “Proof”
    “Sluts! The Musical”
    “Aesop’s Falables”
    “A Christmas Carol” (December 2006)

    The most recent “A Christmas Carol” that we attended (and we still have one more version of it to see this year) was put on at a private Christian school. I only found out where we were going an hour before we needed to leave the house. Not that knowing would have changed my agreement to go, it just would have changed my expectations a bit earlier. I thought we were going to a public high school production. It was a nice production. They obviously had a solid amount of money for costumes and actually did some very nice things with the set. I have to say I was impressed with the set. They were selling expensive jewelry outside to benefit the program and having a silent auction in the lobby as well. I suppose that is how they afford the nice costumes. There was the fairly typical mixture of talent levels for a school show. There were several nice singing voices. Overall, the whole accent thing did not go well, and I do not think the director should have had them attempt it. The show was performed in the school chapel. I have not been in a chapel since I worked as a wedding photographer. The pews were padded which was nice, but every little thump and movement carried all the way down, so the guy at the end of the row was irritating the crap out of me with his constant fidgeting. One of the many problems with having a very bad back is being quite sensitive to having seats knocked and shook. All in all, it was solid for a school production. They did Christian it up a, Jesus was mentioned multiple times during the play and the ghosts were termed “Angelic Spirits” first and thereafter were always referred to as spirits, never ghosts. I guess ghosts is a negative.

    When the play was finally over (this tale is one that I am extremely familiar with, and not one of my favorites to start, so it is no reflection on the show or anyone in it that I was happy to see it pass), I was thrilled because I was hungry for dinner, and more importantly I needed to find the restroom. I was unable to make a rapid exit because the lights immediately came up and the sermon and prayer session began. That hasn’t happened to me at a play before. I would seriously prefer it not happen again.

  • Post 1 of The Things I Like Series

    Having been raised to give some serious respect to Thumper’s Rule, I spend a lot of time silent. People who know me a little might be shocked to hear that, because I certainly don’t seem shy about complaining. People who know me well realize I keep much more of my rampant disgust and dissatisfaction to myself.

    So, I thought I’d try some posts about things that I actually like.

    But first, I’ll start with the negative.

    I have the shittiest luck in movie theaters. I can go to a matinee show of a film that has been in theaters for 8 weeks, and I will still have a shitty experience. When I go to the movie theater, one of the following will occur:

    • people will bring their 4 children ranging from infant to 8 years old to see an R-rated movie and let them run around screaming the whole time
    • people will let their child sit behind me and kick my seat the entire movie
    • people will answer their cell phone and talk to the person during the movie “nothing… just watching this dumb movie”
    • people will make-out stretched across the seats with their head almost in my lap
    • people will have belching contests and laugh hysterically at how cool they are
    • people will have blue flame contests and laugh hysterically at how cool they are
    • people will change their baby’s shitty diaper seat next to me and then leave the diaper sitting there
    • people who get off on violent rape scenes will sit next to me and become extremely and noisily excited during them
    • people will threaten to kill me because I ask them to be quiet
    • people will vomit and just continue sitting there
    • people will leave their young, unruly, poorly behaved, unsupervised, rude, snotty (usually literally) children to watch the film I am seeing, and go watch a different movie themselves

    Often, more than one of them occurs.

    It isn’t that I hate movie theaters, just people.

    Because movie theaters don’t work well for me, we use Netflix, and I find it a reasonably painless way to rent movies. Prior to Netflix, I hadn’t rented a movie in at least five years and was instead supplying any film watching desires with an out of control DVD purchasing addiction. Netflix did a lot to help soften the addiction. What is with the rating system though? 5 stars? Who can make any meaningful rating and comparison of a movie with a measly 5 stars. I need at least 10, and I really want at least 20 points on the rating curve to measure things effectively.

    They only give me 5 though, which makes some of my ratings come out a bit odd. There is always the quality factor to consider, as well as the enjoyment factor. Plus, how difficult am I to please in a particular genre? If I tend to hate movies in a genre and then enjoy one, it deserves a different boost to its rating than a movie that has everything going for it as far as my personal taste is concerned and yet only manages to not be disappointing. Even though at the end of the day I might think the second movie is better.

    Favorite is too strong of statement and I don’t use it often. I can’t even imaging trying to narrow it down to a favorite movie. I am just going to list a random 5 (not in order, nor necessarily the top 5) by genre, that I gave 5 Netflix stars to.

    Foreign: La Femme Nikita, Cinema Paradiso, The Wedding Banquet, Battle Royale, Amelie

    Animated: Bambi, My Neighbor Totoro, Kiki’s Delivery Service, Nightmare Before Christmas, The Iron Giant

    Comedy: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Heathers, Swingers, Dazed and Confused, Bring It On

    Drama: Dangerous Liaisons, The Shawshank Redemption, Dogfight, I Am Sam, Dead Poets Society

    Horror: Nightbreed, Scream, An American Werewolf in London, The Lost Boys, Something Wicked This Way Comes

    Action/Adventure: Thelma and Louise, Die Hard, Indiana Jones, War Games, Young Guns

    Thriller: Killing Zoe, Falling Down, The Usual Suspects, Death and the Maiden, Closet Land

    Romance: Garden State, The Man in the Moon, Before Sunset, Say Anything, Sliding Doors

    Sci-Fi/Fantasy: Serenity, Empire Strikes Back, Blade Runner, Highlander, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow

    So there, some things that I liked in some fashion for a wide range of reasons I am not going to detail out.

  • Aggravation, mental wiitardation, aggravation, a game we used to play

    I do my best to avoid going into any store that isn’t a grocery store from Thanksgiving until mid-January. Holiday crowds and holiday shopping irritate the shit out of me.

    When Nintendo announced the Revolution, I wanted one. When they announced that the official name would be Wii, I still wanted one, although I was not impressed by the name. The thing is, I wanted the console. I wanted Zelda. I wanted to rent other Wii games to play. What I really wanted was to preorder the fucking thing online from a retailer I actually have heard of, when it was convenient for me, and I was at the computer. Then I wanted that retailer to ship it to me as soon as possible, in a fair fashion based on when the order was made. If it got was sent out on launch day, great. If they fairly were not able to provide my order until January, fine. I just wanted it ordered and taken care of.

    Instead, even to get a preorder, one needed to wait in line, or hope to get it during the hour a place might accept preorders online. In many cases one was expected to preorder in offensive ways, “You have to agree to buy a bundle, but we don’t know what the bundle will consist of.” So preorders came and went and went and went, and I had no preorder.

    Now, if it were just me, I would be done. Whatfuckingever. My husband really really really wanted one. Being in the video game business, one would fantasize that it would be easier to get new consoles, and in some cases it is, but the timing of his recent job change kept him from getting one from his old company, and it was too late to arrange to get one through the new company. He really wanted a Wii, and I really like to provide him what he wants.

    Now, we might not see eye to eye on the exact point of when we get so annoyed with the whole purchasing process that it is time to simply say fuck it and wait until they are available everywhere easily, much less when to get so irritated that we wait until the fucking things can be found on clearance. However, we at least agree that we should not need to buy bundles that include shit that we don’t want. We should not have to wait out overnight, and we sure as fucking hell should not pay over retail.

    The night prior to launch found me, disturbingly, teaching my daughter how to purchase something online so that she could man Amazon.com at midnight while we went out to a 24 hour Walmart. No joy. Launch morning saw me hitting Target, TRU, Best Buy and Circuit City as well as continuing to try to order from Amazon and trying to get a Costco.com order. Nothing anywhere except an increasingly pissed off me.

    Now if everybody was buying one for themselves, it would be one thing, but the whole purchasing them to make a profit on ebay, while taking them away from people that just want to play, gets on my fucking nerves. I am even further fucking irritated by the dumbfuck parents who are so worried about putting what their spoiled brat wants under the tree for the dumbass holiday, that they will pay above retail on ebay. Not only do they encourage the asshole ebay hoarding behavior, but they just add to the fuckedupedness of their kids. This wouldn’t be so bad if they would just keep the kids in their basement forever, but they insist on letting them out of the house.

    So a couple of weeks have been spent, checking online multiple times a day, stopping by stores, making phone calls, and with each bit of effort expended my interest in the Wii has further waned. It is not a unique piece of artwork, or even a limited edition print. It is a consumer electronics item. I don’t like Nintendo fucking around with availability and I dislike the retailers fucking around with it even more. Get a shipment in and put it on sale, don’t hold it over for a certain date so you can create buzz and lines. Nothing like launching a product and quickly leading me to dislike all the companies involved within a short amount of time. Impressive.

    The online reports told me to once again expect limited quantities available this morning, so once again we woke up early and headed out into the foul holiday shopping world. The first store at 10 minutes before opening, the line outside was too long to even bother stopping. The second we drove past wasn’t opening for 2 hours and we were not going to wait that long. The third place we got to 15 minutes after opening, so we parked and went inside to see what was up. In the electronics department there was a line. They had 33 units and had handed out 33 tickets. We decided to lurk. A couple had 2 tickets but one of them had to leave for work and it was taking them forbloodyever to check people out, so the man had to bail and gave me his ticket. Another couple had seen the line and hopped in, they had no idea what for. When they finally got close enough that they saw what it was for, they didn’t want it. They gave one ticket to a lady who was there with her boyfriend. The other they gave to our friend. Our third friend did not luck out. We waited through all 33 sales in case somebody had a bad credit card situation.

    So now we have a Wii. My husband is happy. My daughter is happy. I am relieved to be done looking, but I am not happy. I am still irritated.

    On the PS3 he is just going to have to wait. I don’t want to set foot in a store until after the holidays are over.

  • Thursday Trio


    The Three Stooges
    Originally uploaded by mstori.

    Most Thursday nights we go on a special dog walk. The special aspect is that we have an extra dog (and his person) along with us. This causes London and Indy boundless spastic excitement. The thing that really strikes me though, is that they get completely hyper on Thursday nights even when the guests do not show up. Every Thursday night, they freak out.

    If we skip for more than two weeks in a row, the Thursday night freak outs die off, but as soon as the regular schedule is reestablished, Thursday evening behavior amps right up again.

    There are an unfortunate number of instances when I can’t keep track what day of the week it is, but the dogs…

  • Another step toward becoming a hermit, on a mountain… with a shotgun (and internet access)

    We were running out of things we needed, important things, like dog food. Since I know that if we go too long without dog food, we’ll become the food, I forced myself to go to the grocery store.

    I had forgotten to make a list, so the shopping experience took longer and was more frustrating than usual, except in many ways that is the usual. I even knocked an item off the shelf and broke it, creating a mess. “Clean up on aisle 13!” I was finally ready to checkout, and there was only one line open. There were 10 people ahead of me (but some were together), and as I waited 3 more people joined the line behind me. People were getting antsy.

    The Assistant Manager spoke to the cashier and then walked over to another lane. As the cashier informed the people in our line that another check stand would be opening, an older woman walked up with her cart to where the AM was getting signed in to the register. The AM had not turned on the light. The older woman asked, “Are you open?” Obviously she thought we were all stupid. Of course the line was open, but we couldn’t be bothered to ask and just preferred to queue up with more than a dozen other people. The AM pointed toward our long line and told her, “I’ll be opening up, but I’ll be taking the next person in line.”

    The older woman huffed and muttered something under her breath.

    Meanwhile, in the line I am waiting in, everybody looks at each other to determine who is splitting off and who is staying. The next person in line already had her items on the belt. The people behind her decided to peel off for the new lane. This was a group of six people who were all there together, but paying separately. They only had four items between them. The person directly in front of me elected to stay in line, so I went to the new line and one person behind me followed.

    The older woman was pissed. She grumbled her way over to the first line I had been in, at exactly the place she would have been had she got into line to start with, complaining the whole way about “people cutting in front of her”. When she got up to the cashier she asked who was in charge, and the cashier pointed to the AM. This angered the older woman even more. The AM is trying to answer her angry accusations from the other lane, which slows her considerably in getting through my order.

    This allowed the older woman to finish checking out before me. She then came over and started complaining up close and personal to the AM. The AM was trying to finish ringing me up, but the older woman kept interrupting her. She wanted the manager’s name and phone number and the AM told her it was printed on the bottom of her receipt. The older woman insisted that the AM write it down for her and write down her own name. The AM finished helping me first, enraging the customer further. Essentially she was pissed off because she thought that the AM should have only taken one person from the other line, and then allowed her to be second. She said the AM had treated her badly by saying she was “taking the next person in line” but then taking more than one per person from the line. Absolutely nobody had gotten checked out ahead of her who hadn’t already been in line when she came up to the front of the store. Not only that but all her arguing meant that two people finished AFTER she did. She didn’t even seem to be in much of a hurry, since she was still hanging out to gripe long after her own transaction was complete.

    I checked over my receipt until MrsGrumpyBritches finally stomped and muttered her way out the door, and then I gave the AM my business card and told her that if manager had any questions, she could call me.

    I try to avoid leaving my house, it rarely works out well for me. Stupid dogs.

  • IT

    There is a certain art to feeling sorry for oneself, and I definitely have an aptitude for it.

    There is a simple test to determine if you have an aptitude for this art too. Consider the following two statements.

    If things are going badly and something else bad happens, it goes to show that the universe is committed to kicking your ass and pissing on you while you are down.

    If things are going well and something bad happens, it just proves that you can’t even get enough time to enjoy the good before you are slammed with more problems.

    Do these statements both sound true to you? If so, you may already be an artist. Please draw Tippy or Cubby and send it to me for a full assessment.

    “Woe is me.” It isn’t pretty, but it sure does come easily to me.

    On Saturday we had two cute little zebra finches. On Sunday one fell suddenly ill. I made an attempt to save him, but while we did manage some improvement, in the end it was not enough. I failed. By afternoon, we only had one cute little zebra finch.

    This morning that sense of failure was still hanging on pretty strongly. As good as I am at feeling sorry for myself, I am much much better at feeling guilty. The Sunday guilt made way for the Monday guilt. I didn’t sleep well Monday night, probably the result of an over consumption of caffeine during the day. This morning I woke up “LATE”. I wasn’t actually late. It was 7am and I didn’t have anyplace I needed to be. I just woke up in the midst of that “oh crap I am so late” panic and started my day with the accompanying big dose of adrenaline. By around 9:45 I was seriously crashing and having an adrenaline hangover.

    However, I was determined to pretend to stay focused and get a little more caught up on one or two of the many things I am very far behind on. Then Indy started barking her fool head off, and the echo started London howling. Soon it became apparent that the cacophony was in need of some intervention. I went to the top of the stairs to call Indy up and let her know that while it was great she was protecting us from some horrible nasty, that the threat had passed and she could settle down.

    She came upstairs wondering if she might score a treat. I grabbed her around her middle and gave her some rough bouncy squeezes that cause her to make funny little grunting sounds. London is all about belly rubs, he will stay on his back for long stretches at a time as long as somebody will pay attention to his belly. Indy, she is a bit ticklish and prefers rougher treatment. She especially likes feet. She’ll lie down near where you are sitting and push her way under your feet to encourage you to step on her. She likes that. Apparently, the smellier the feet, the more she likes it. We’ve never had an in depth conversation about why, so don’t ask me. The point is, that she does not ask for, or often get, a lot of hands on attention to her belly.

    So here I am, making her squirm, and I find it. It. Not the Stephen King sewer clown. It. The thing I feel incapable of dealing with today. It. A lump on her abdomen. Now I am smart enough to know that I wouldn’t actually be any more enthusiastic about the discovery on any other day, but I have sufficient self-pity skills, so that I am able feel like it is happening at precisely the wrong instant.

    My immediate inclination is to go hide in a closet and just stay there, maybe until 2007. Instead I allowed myself a contained nervous breakdown and then pulled my shit a little bit together. I made a choice about which vet to take her to (I picked the one I have the least overall confidence in because a) she has the closest and least busy office b) all I need today are some basics, and that she should be able to do c) closest, quietest and least busy=the least trauma to myself and Indy d) I can always go see a preferred vet after I have the test results). I scheduled an appointment for this evening and then took some time to let my daughter know what was up.

    ETA: Biopsy says it is not cancer. This is good.