channonyarrow

I have comprehended a new thing.

I get really uncomfortable the very rare times that someone says, essentially, "Are you married?" as the follow up to finding out my name and clearly as the preface to asking me out. For a while, I figured that it was because my skeeve radar goes off - I am not the sort of person you just ask out, ask anyone who's seen me - and I distrust why you would ask and assume it has something to do with a lifelong desire to have someone you can debase and abuse and rah rah, my self-esteem is showing again.

But now I get it. (Yes, it bugs me for several hours when it happens, because I get annoyed that I evidently project "easily victimised" on all spectra.)

It bugs me because you don't even care to know me.

When the sum total of the information exchanged is "Hi, I'm so and so, I was watching you across the room," (or similar) and I say "Nice to meet you, I'm thus-and-such," DO NOT FOLLOW THIS UP BY SAYING "So, are you married?"

Hand to god, I will start responding to this with "No, and obviously we're totally compatible, because we are both carbon-based."

I like to laugh at the relationship surveys as much as anyone else, I really do. I like to mock Cosmo and the rest of them just like I like to mock cheerleaders, Oregon, and the colour mauve.

But dude, let me tell you: asking me if I'm married means that you don't even care. Srsly. If you really, truly, gave a shit (and didn't want someone you thought you could beat into catering to your filthy fetishes and living in your basement wrapped in only a burlap sack) you might want to try asking ... oh, maybe about ANYTHING I HAVE INDICATED I CARE ABOUT, given that I'm standing in the tech department and acting vaguely teacherly today. There are THINGS THAT COULD BE DISCUSSED HERE.

We could: find out that we're in a similar course for a similar reason! That we both really like X, Y, and Z! That we've both had Access/Visual Basic/Web Servers/Underwater Basket Weaving, and that we both found it fun/challenging/bloody impossible/ticklish! That we think the weather is being awfully crappy lately, but it looks like the sun is coming out! That I don't like X cuisine, but you know a fantastic X restaurant, meet you there at six? (Okay, whatever, I know that sounds like dialogue from a lame seventies movie.)

Apparently, Cosmo actually got it right: women like to be friends first.

In short, saying "Are you married?" when ALL YOU KNOW IS MY BLOODY NAME, is saying "I don't care about you as a person AT ALL," even if you don't think it is. You may think it's the most pragmatic statement ever, because it indicates that you'd like to ask me out, and it might even be that you choked in the clutch and said the wrong thing.

However: it reeks of desperation. If I were the sort to accept desperate offers, I would be living in Pakistan with some guy I met in a gay club in Valencia years ago. It's also REALLY FUCKING ANNOYING, because I am fundamentally tempted, every fucking time, to say "No, but I only got out of jail a week ago." Or "No, but only because I ate my husband." Or "No, but I'll marry you if you'll be my getaway driver - I think the cops are on their way." Or even "No, how big's your life insurance policy?"

At least ask me out, first! It's my job to say that my husband/wife/god/dog forbid it! That's how you get to know people!

I do not negotiate with terrorists, I do not pay with only pennies at the store, and I do not cater to desperation.

I also totally love the double shot of looking racist when I turn people down. "It's not your race I object to, it's the fact that you want it to rub the lotion on its skin that I object to."

I also have trouble believing that I'm discoursing on the art of getting a date. Let's take off the eau d'desperation and talk about other things! Like that you should not ask YOUR INSTRUCTOR (ie, me) whether I know X person at Hempfest. I hate to say it, because I LIKE hemp (hemp, not, not, not (infinitely fucking NOT) weed) as a concept. I think we should use more of it! I think it's awesome, ecologically friendly, and makes fucking durable paper. I also like hippies! I AM a hippie (in designer boots).

But, and I hate to say it because it turns me into my mother, I don't think "Ah, Hempfest - a joyous celebration of the miracle of hemp, which is totally ridiculously and arbitrarily mistreated by the government."

Instead, I think "Ah. You're one of the dicksmacks who ruins every fucking music festival I ever go to, you stoner bastard. Let me take your totally private and personal drug and jack it up a totally private and personal region of your body; I still haven't forgiven you for the business about looking for the cops under the fucking bed."

Bonus points, of course, if you also tell me that you've designed LOTS of web pages already, and you TOTALLY know what you're doing, even though you:
a) cannot put your style code in the right place;
b) cannot use the right fucking code in the first place wtf (wtf because I had LITERALLY WRITTEN IT ON THE BOARD);
c) cannot figure out how to upload an image to your server;
d) do not listen when I explain the somewhat complicated process;
e) do not even realise that I explained the process;
f) clearly cannot hear me over the sound of your own awesome ... which is obviously why you're taking an evidently (supposedly) remedial course in web design and I am instructing it. Like, for money and shit.

I am just on a tear today.

Oh, and other!dude? If you come back to my lab again and sit there and play games, I will throw you out. I haven't forgotten that you're Broken USB Drive Guy, and I hate you.

Aside from all that, I failed to file my unemployment today because I was in so much pain I forgot, I have like WAAAAAAY too many fucking textbooks to read this weekend (I get to do remedial networking AND remedial Operating Systems because I don't have the slightest clue what a kernel is, or a web garden, but the one makes me hungry and the other makes me think of bees, because dude ... worker processes? Yes, I AM a Mac.) and I need a Sherpa for Fridays because hauling 2 computers, FIVE textbooks, a calendar, and my files/power cords/etc around really sucks.

Seriously. I picked my purse today because I could put two of my damn textbooks in it. This apparently triggered the textbook gnomes, and my bossish person gave me four fucking more.

To read over the weekend.

Last point: I hate pirates, I hate Simplicity, and I hate sleeves, and I want to finish the fucking coat so I can post the pictures of it, but I also want to NEVER finish the fucking coat, because the fucking coat is fucking evil. I may buy a camera, but I also may save that money and pour it directly down my throat, in the form of bottles of gin, because that would be less painful.

How are you?

I'm getting a tattoo next Monday. I'm very excited, and completely freaked out about. This is not because this is somehow new (see also: I have five tattoos right now) but this is the first one that will not be easily covered up by clothing. And also, it's one of a pair.

So on my left wrist, as of next Monday, in a band around my wrist, it's gonna say "Live each day as if it's your last". On my right wrist at some point it'll say either "I am not afraid to keep on living" or "The sharpest lives are the deadliest to lead". This is not because I am either that emo or that suicidal but because what I really wanted was "Heaven help us" but I decided I didn't want to spend the rest of my life explaining that I'm not religious, and fuck me if I can pull a line out of "Heaven Help Us" that'll go around my tiny wrist (seriously, I have big hands and feet and delicate little wrists and ankles (wrists moreso than ankles, in fact)) and that doesn't require three more lines just to make it make sense.

Like this:
I'm at this old hotel
But I can't tell if I've been
Breathing or sleeping or screaming
or waiting for the man to call
And maybe all of the above
Cause mostly I've been sprawled
On these cathedral steps
While spitting out the blood and screaming

Make sense of that.

So. Famous Last Words = not my favourite song, but "I am not afraid to keep on living" is really something worth saying. "The sharpest lives are the deadliest to lead" also works for me.

I've decided I like Optima as a font, and I also really like the artist, who reminds me of my brother in a lot of ways. And I really, really like the symbols I'm using. The left hand is the subconscious, the right hand is the conscious, and the left hand is instinct, while the right is logic. I didn't know that until I googled hand symoblism right now, but I felt it important to consider the left hand the heart hand and the right hand the head hand, and maybe I just picked those up somewhere else. There's also lots of symbolism in rings and circles that I like, and since most peoples' first question has been "Why don't you just get it on the inside of your wrist where you can see all of it," that's the answer. Because I don't need to see it. I just need to remember it.

Because you know, the things I need to remember right now are not to panic and that whatever else happens, I really have an obsimpson. And those are places I've been. Getting tattoos of things that change doesn't bother me - whether I would be in the same relationship with the really ex if I met him now or I'd be shoving him off a cliff doesn't change that I have two tattoos of his art, and they're mine, made by him, and that's fine. That's where I was, and I don't regret being there, nor do I want to forget being there. So even if MCR releases an album of polka standards, even if I have another six-week-long panic attack, I will have my wrists to remind me:

Live each day as if it's your last.
I am not afraid to keep on living.

Dear mock_the_stupid members:

You people are, by and large, a group of utterly humourless twatmuffins, seriously. I posted a comment as a joke, and now we're off and running into a discussion of W3C protocols and whether Linux is or is not a problem? GET THE FUCK OVER YOURSELVES. Seriously!

Get therapy! Shoot yourselves in the head! Die in a fire! Something! Just shut the fuck up! It was a fucking joke!

No love,
Me

P.S. - I'm still using Safari.

*****

And, of particular interest for felisdemens, steamfashion. My socks, they be rocked.

*****

Dear Wikipedia user Crossbow1:

You just made my week. You said what I think, but you said it so much better than I could have.

Love bunches,
Me

( Cut because it's REALLY cryptic )

I was forced to order something that will be shipped UPS by the fact that I did not KNOW that the company's default option was UPS. I still hate UPS entirely. Let's see if my order ever gets to me!

I'm really fucking sick of being part of communities who decide that they are omgsofuckingspeshul, with shiny shit all over the top, that anything related to the topic at hand (ie, in this case, someone asking for help on a sewing project they had not yet started - the horror!) is deemed Off-Topic And Must Be Burninated With Fire.

What.

This is not me saying that you should come to my rp communities and spam with your love of rice vinegar. This is me saying that if you actually wish to involve people in the communities that you maintain, when they are posting something perhaps one degree Off Topic (ie, asking for help on a project they had not yet started, but if they had said "Dude, here's a picture and here's a receipt for some fabric, and now I need to know how the fuck to make this and by the way I'll post every single day for the next two weeks going 'ZOMG FUCKING CRISIS AND THE CAT ATE MY BABIES ANYWAY!'" it would miraculously be on topic)...that is in the category of Things That Make No Sense.

YOU love X. I love X. Someone wants help with X. This community exists to provide HELP with X...but only after you've sacrificed a calf. WHOOPS POST MUST BE DELETED.

And it wasn't even my post.

I think the thing that really makes me laugh is that this is a comm that sees about two or three posts a week - and the last eight have been from the same person. Who is, amazingly enough as these things go, not the mod.

Also, contradictory userinfos crack my shit up. As I told the mod, saying in one breath this is not the place to ask for advice, then in the next this is the place to ask for advice on *sewing* projects is what is known as "a contradiction in terms".

I realise that Bush is president. That does not mean that we can forget everything we ever learned about anything having to do with a) Logic or b) Grammar.

Also, in the categories of things that are also hilarious, this is the mod, if I recall correctly, who will say "You can leave the post up to get a few more answers, but then it must be deleted." Way to enforce topicity!

And it all reminds me of the wank that cropped up when zomgfuckingnoes some of us who belonged to a BDS comm would not put our birthdate in the userinfo. I have been tempted since to reapply (my ass was banned because I would not lie and tell them I was over eighteen! We all know that userinfos are magical invocations of truth and justice and apple pie and mom!) with a birthdate of 1927 and see if they believe that a, um, 80 year old is really reading badly-written MacManuscest. Ironically, I was honest about why I refused to put up my birthdate (I really hate autogenerated birthday reminders from people who have no other contact with me) and stated that my attestation of my legal age was in my userinfo. But no, I had to follow the Dark Powers Of Compulsion, which would not let me enter a false birthdate EVAR, and put in my actual birthdate!

in sum: comms are silly, but asshatted mods are even worse.

So Cingular calls me and asks me if they can speak to "Mr or Mrs channonyarrow." Already going "bwuh?" I say that I'm speaking. (What the hell, I owe them a lot of money.) They ask me to verify my last four digits of my social for them.

Wait, what? YOU call ME and want ME to VERIFY THAT I AM WHO I AM?

Asking why causes the blowup doll on the other end of the line to explode.

I did not, and I should have, ask HER to verify who SHE is.

But apparently she can't tell me what the call's about - beyond that it's a thank you call - without knowing that I am who I say I am. Jesus fuck, I answered the phone and it's not like you're saying you want to discuss my account, right?

WHY DO I HAVE TO PROVE WHO I AM SO THAT YOU CAN THANK ME FOR SOMETHING THAT I DID NOT DO?

So I hung up on her.

I think I need a new service provider.