change the channel once in a while
Yesterday I was disappointed by not one but two transit loonies. The first one was on the subway, he had long gray dreadlocks and remarkably dirty jeans, and he was yelling about how women should stay absolutely silent and never speak, it’s in the Bible. Maybe it is, hell if I know, there certainly are enough wacky bronze-age rules in the Old Testament to make that plausible. Then he started lecturing about how Jesus did not like women either, notice how there were no female disciples? Okay crazy dude! On the other hand I sort of admired how he got his misogyny and his Christianity to link up all blatant and out in the open, rather than under cover of night like some right-wing Christians I could name.
Then on the bus this other crazy was talking to no one about how we all had our headphones in and our music on, no one TALKS to each other any more, no one makes BASIC HUMAN CONTACT, and I thought huh, an alienation-of-modern-man transit crazy, that’s something a little different at least. And I sort of felt like pointing out that it might be easier to talk to one’s fellow humans if some of those humans were not spraying spittle as they lectured everyone in shouting distance on their coldheartedness. But then, lo and behold, he (tenuously) connected our iPods and non-conversations to a lack of Jesus in our lives. For fuck’s sake, does everything have to come back to Jesus for the transit ranters? Can they maybe sometimes talk about flying saucers or chemtrails?
ODDS AND ENDS
1. I was on the El seated next to a normal-looking man, probably around my dad’s age. He made a call on his cell phone and suddenly he had this amazingly high-pitched baby voice, and his conversation was all like, “Okay sweetie! Can I bring you anything? Okay baby! I’m almost home! See you soon! Kissy kiss!” I almost turned to him and asked if he was talking to a kitten. Because that would be the only excuse for that voice.
2. More El escapades: I went down into the subway at Grand and a tourist-looking family was on the platform, and their 3- or 4-year-old daughter was sitting cross-legged at the EDGE of the platform. I mean the part where it gets all blue and bumpy, to warn blind people that they are too close to the train. Her knees were right at the edge and I probably could not control my OMG WTF face when I looked at the mom. They were just standing there talking like that was no kind of safety issue and I felt ready to puke.
3. Why do we say “desert island”? The island is not in a desert, it is in the ocean. Geographically, the island is also unlikely to feature desert-type terrain, as most uninhabited islands are either rocky or tropical or jungle-ish. Did “desert island” start out as “deserted island” and then people got linguistically lazy?
4. Similarly, I have seen a lot of signs lately for LAUNDRYMATS and that makes me sad. Why would you use a boring old real word like LAUNDRY when you could have the awesome futuristic prefix LAUNDRO? It sounds like a superhero. By the power of LAUNDRO!
5. These are my cats. Sweet Lola on the left, emotionally-damaged-but-I-like-him-anyway Rocko on the right.
6. This is Nora, adventuress and extreme angler, with yet another trophy.
FOUND A JOB
I feel like it finally might be okay to post about this. About two weeks ago LT rather abruptly quit his job. The “new” job, the job that he had only had since June. It’s a long story but basically the job was not as advertised, there was a lot of nasty politicking that bordered on outright abuse, people wanted him to solve all kinds of problems without letting him know the parameters of the problems, and so forth. I knew he did not love it, but in our limited work-related conversations it had been a bit hard to tease out how much was intolerable torture and how much was just the Drew Carey quote. “Oh, you hate your job? There’s a support group for that. It’s called EVERYBODY, and they meet at the bar.”
He did not use profanity, steal beer, and slide down the emergency chute, but he did quit in the middle of a meeting, so it was pretty close. I was initially a bit freaked about suddenly becoming a one-income family, but I knew he would get it together, and he did—he starts at something much better and at a comparable salary next week. In the meantime, I have had an at-home spouse in between all the interviews, which has been a mixed blessing as he is very bored and running out of projects. He painted the bedroom and fixed the vacuum cleaner, and I was afraid he was going to start homeschooling the cats if he didn’t find something soon. But he did, so relax, cats. You may remain ignorant.
Next week LT will start his new job, Nora will start a new school year, and what do I get that’s new? I should join a cult, or take up heroin, or start building model railroads. Something.
—mimi smartypants is open to suggestions.