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Dear Blood Manor

5 Nov

To Whom it May Concern:

My name is Rebekah and last Thursday after work my friend Jessy and I visited your establishment. For Jessy, who loves all things scary and apparently was not afraid of a movie called The Babadook (which, admittedly, I have never heard of and will never be seeing) this was an outing to be excited about. But for me? Totally different story. I agreed to go because I am always down for an adventure but immediately after agreeing I thought to myself,

Self, that was maybe the stupidest decision you ever made.

You see, I startle quite easily. If there is a thunder storm I jump at every single clap. You could say to me,

Rebekah, I am going to hide out around the corner of this hallway and then when you come down the hall and get to that outlet over there I am going to jump out and scream BOO!

And I will walk down the hallway, completely aware of your plan, and still have a near heart attack. It’s awful. I haven’t watched a scary movie since the 7th grade when a few of my girlfriends and I watched Psycho in the basement of my friend’s house. I didn’t sleep through the night for weeks afterwards and I still have flashbacks of that scene where Norman Bates watched the car sink in the lake whenever I see a bag of Raisinets. There was this one time, over a Labor Day weekend, when my roommates and my then-boyfriend were all out of town and I was home by myself and decided to have a Law and Order: SVU marathon in my bedroom. That night I had a dream that I was the victim in the show and that when I went on the witness stand I realized that the judge in the case was actually my attacker and I had to sit there and continue to testify while he stared at me and then all of a sudden <flash forward> and I was running through some dark, damp house and he was chasing after me with a hammer. Only he wasn’t running. He was walking, calmly, and I knew that he would eventually catch me because I was headed for the roof even though I am fully aware that people in these shows always head for the roof and that is their demise because once you get to the top of whatever building there is nowhere else to go but down or dead. Anyway, I woke up at that point and nearly gave myself a stroke from fear when I thought that a sweatshirt hanging over an open closet door was actually a homicidal maniac watching me sleep, waiting for the perfect moment to bash my head in. As you can imagine I am not well suited for haunted houses.

The days leading up to our visit were a blur of anxiety for me. I am not someone who likes to flake and I had given my word so I knew that barring a freak fire that I would have no role in igniting (….) I would be walking through that haunted house. And then, the day came. All day long I hoped my friend Jessy would forget (there was no way) or just become tired and decide she didn’t want to go (she is the energizer bunny!). I thought maybe she would smell the fear radiating off my body and think, well, maybe this isn’t the best idea. But no. There was no escape. So we got on the train and made our way to your house of ghouls, stopping for some liquid bravery en route.

Before I knew it we were waiting on line to enter. As if the screams coming from inside the building weren’t enough to ratchet up the anxiety level, there were some scary people milling about outside, working the line. There was the woman dressed up sort of like a demented Big Bird, the guy on stilts in something that looked like a zombie costume with a tiny little zombie head on its shoulder and gross-looking gauze dangling all over the place, and a lady in a bustier with dollar bills attached to her body, walking around with a stapler trying to entice us to staple dollars to her skin with real staples. I think maybe that requires repeating. She wanted us to use a real staple gun with actual, real metal staples to puncture her skin. There was blood. It was horrible. I hope she got a tetanus shot. There were two guys ahead of us in line who were amused by my fear and I think maybe thought I was flirting with them a little? I don’t know. It was weird. I mean, they couldn’t know this but I would never flirt with someone in line for a haunted house. How could I think about anything other than maintaining a certain level of calmness in the face of sure doom? I mean, I am a multitasker by trade but that is too much. Even for me.

And then, we got into the House. Everything was dark. And loud. There were laser lights. There was this weird robotic thing that was remote-controlled that would lean into you and blow gross, scary air on you as you walked by. Everyone knew I was afraid. Maybe it was the sweat. Maybe it was the eyes darting frantically to and fro. Or perhaps it was the fact that I was holding onto Jessy’s backpack for dear life, audibly weighing the option of walking through the entire house with my eyes closed like I did at those catacombs in Lima. As we began our adventure, they all came straight for me. The rooms were all decorated with gruesome scenes of torture chambers, demented clowns, circuses gone wrong. And then there were people, always people, impeding your progress with their bodies, getting onto your personal space, breathing on you, whispering not-so-sweet somethings into your ears. We darted around them. I felt like we were in a post apocalyptic version of Frogger. One of the dudes leaned into me and said

I am going to follow you home. I will find out where you live. I will rip you apart.

And this is where it all went from fun to maybe not-so-fun. Just so you know, owner of Blood Manor, this is something that we out in the world call triggering. As someone who has had a weird-o do regular drive-bys of my house when I was in high school, who was followed home here in Brooklyn and who was stalked to a hotel in a mountain town in Guatemala, the fear causing me to lose all access to the Spanish-speaking part of my brain, this was not received as emptily as it had been intended. My stomach dropped. My brain swirled. And then we encountered the angry gorilla man. We entered his lair and he herded us into the corner of the room. We looked around – every single door had an exit sign on it. Which way do we go?! How do we get out?! There were people walking towards us from every direction, looking lost. I couldn’t tell whether they were visitors like us or zombies, walking undeterred towards their next victims. I looked around and said, in a semi-panic,

Where do we go? Which way do we go?!

At that moment I sort of felt like maybe we would be in the house forever. And I didn’t know whether or not we could trust the demented gorilla man. Would he send us in the right direction? Would he tell us to go through a door only to lead us back into the room with the clowns, or worse, the one that looked like a root canal gone wrong?! But he didn’t do either of those things. He hissed

You’re fucking the whole thing up!

And called security. We almost got kicked out of the haunted house. Seriously. Jessy and I almost got ejected by a huge dude in black pants and a black, Blood Manor polo for being afraid of a dude in a weird gorilla suit. I felt like I had left Blood Manor and walked straight into Crazy Town. I looked at the security guard in utter disbelief and simply said,

We’re lost. All the doors have exits on them. And it’s dark. How are we supposed to know where to go?

He pointed at one of the three “exits” which led us into a room we had been through before. We walked around, the shine taken off, the fear evaporated. I looked around the room and rather than seeing gruesome scenes I saw poorly designed sets for underfunded plays. And instead of jumping from monsters and the orchestrators of torture chambers, I saw actors in face paint and gauze, simply trying to pay their rent. They got in our faces, we stared back at them dead-pan. There was no more fear, no more fun. We just wanted out. The gorilla man was a total buzz kill.

We emerged from the house pissed off, trying to figure out what we had done to be nearly ejected. Did we make it through the house too quickly, fucking up the flow? Did we make a wrong turn? Or did we just encounter a ghoul at the end of a long, arduous night, his patience on zero after dealing with scores of assholes, who took his anger out on the wrong people? Lord knows as bartenders we have been on the other side of that equation more than once.

It was a weird ending to what was a fun, albeit anxiety inducing, night. It made me think a lot about perception, about what we bring to the table when we enter an interaction, about what it must have been like for the people acting in the house. My ears were ringing from the loud noises for the rest of the night and into the next day and my eyes took a bit to adjust to normal lighting after spending the better part of 1/2 hour being visually assaulted by flashing bulbs and lasers. I can’t imagine it is a comfortable work environment. Or maybe the guy was just an asshole, not well-suited for his role as an undead gorilla. Either way I sort of feel like you ripped us off, Blood Manor. We will not be back next year. Maybe you should look to hire a new gorilla. Oh, and lose the triggering threats.

Rebekah

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Donald Trump is kind of our fault

5 Oct

I have actually written about Donald Trump on this blog not once, but twice. The first time was right after he tweeted that Kate Middleton shouldn’t be sunbathing in the nude and that she only had herself to blame” for the photos that spread like wildfire on the internet. What he forget to mention, of course, was the fact that she and Prince William were at some super secluded chalet somewhere in the woods and some asshole paparazzi with a crazy telephoto lens took her photograph from so far away that she would have appeared more like a spot in the distance to the unaided eye rather than someone flaunting her nudity for the world to see. That’s basically the same thing as if a Peeping Tom who took a woman’s photo while she was in the shower through her curtains using some sort of crazy perv camera and then saying that maybe if that woman had purchased curtains that were impenetrable by x-ray beams then she wouldn’t have had her photo taken and so basically it was her fault. Not the dude who bought the camera. No, of course not. But the woman who did not protect herself from every potential breach of privacy regardless the likelihood. I also would like to say for the record that women, and men for that matter, should be able to sunbathe nude with the reasonable expectation that no one photographs them and then distributes said photographs to “news” organizations. Also, to take it one step further, and I know this is going to sound crazy, but if these organizations would stop being dicks and refuse to purchase nonconsensual nude photos then maybe assholes like the photographer in this story wouldn’t purchase cameras with telephoto lenses, or whatever they are called, to steal images of people. A girl can dream.

The second post I wrote was 2 days later on the same topic only this time Trump made it worse.  He was able to make it worse because Fox “News” invited him onto “Fox and Friends” to elaborate on his tweet because obviously 140 characters worth of misogyny was not nearly enough. He made sure to tell people that obviously he liked Kate Middleton (which I am sure made her feel oodles better because anyone who is anyone wants Donald Trump to think favorably of them) but went on to say that exposing yourself when famous is just asking for trouble because if someone stands to make money off of your nudity then of course that’s precisely what they should do. Not, you know, be a decent human being. And then to make matters worse he commented on how someone had posted a picture of Prince Harry’s dick online and rather than be consistent and be like “well it’s his own fault for exposing himself” he said that Harry’s security detail fucked up. Photos of a naked female? The woman’s fault. Photos of a naked man? His security detail.

So anyway, when I wrote about Donald Trump the other two times it was like, ugh, why won’t this clown shut the fuck up?! And now? A few years later? Dude is leading in the presidential polls! Where are we living? Opposite land?! And it’s like, I really don’t want to give him any more credibility by taking him seriously enough to even write about him (even though not many people read this blog but whatever) but I am just so dumbfounded. Like, for real. This shit is bonkers.

So I just got back from traveling through Vietnam, Laos and Thailand with my friend Carrie and during our trip numerous people, finding out that I am American, asked me what the deal was with Donald Trump. And I mean, how do you even answer a question like that? Because what IS the deal? So far what he has done is insult practically everyone, make a mockery of our political system and reawaken all the rabidly racist, sexist, antisemitic groups in this country all while taking absolutely zero responsibility for the impacts of his words. I mean, seriously, the person leading the polls is someone who refers to himself as The Donald. THE DONALD! WHAT IS THAT?! It’s like, fuck! We have this guy who is all on about his money and whatever and he has filed for bankruptcy like 100 times. And he makes duck face always. And his hair is stupid. And he is still angry about something (entirely accurate) that Rosie O’Donnell said in 2006. I mean, imagine this dude as president. Actually, maybe don’t because I just did and it made me really sad. Also, angry.

I just don’t understand how this dude has said and done all the fucked up shit that he has said and done and he is still relevant. Actually relevant! He released both Lindsey Graham and Jorge Ramos’ private cell phone numbers; he said John McCain is not a war hero; he made lame ass comments about Megyn Kelly’s period; and, just, his hair. And while I am on about his hair, I am just going to copy/paste this quote from Vanity Fair here:

“In this 2002 photograph, Trump has changed his hair color to ‘Burnt-Cheetos Auburn.’ As well, the conventional hairsprays and salon products of years past appear to have given way to rubber cement and snot.”

I don’t know. I know that for a time, and maybe even still right now, some people thought this whole thing was funny. But it wasn’t funny, it isn’t funny, and it won’t even be funny when a few years in the future we look back and say, “hey, remember that time that poor excuse for a human being ran for president and actually led the polls for kind of a while?” Cuz the way I see it, this is just emblematic of the fact that our country is very sick. Very, very sick. I mean, look at what is happening. We have people shooting up schools, churches, parking lots and movie theaters damned near every day. We can’t pass meaningful gun control policy after a bunch of kindergardeners were murdered and a racist fuck opened fire in a church during worship. We have a somewhat sizeable portion of the population that still believes, despite the presence of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that our president was not born here. We have a bunch of overpaid white dudes trying to defund a woman’s health organization because they want to legislate what happens inside of our bodies and they simultaneously want government to mind its own business. We have some asshole raising the price on AIDS medication because his personal enrichment matters more than the lives of millions of people worldwide. I could continue but it’s just too damn early and shit is too damn fucked up.

Shit is bad. People keep saying that we will reach some sort of breaking point but I just don’t even know. We refuse to deal with the institutionalized problems within our country that keep the status quo. And we refuse to acknowledge that the American Dream is becoming less and less real and trying to “Make America Great Again,” as fucking Donald Trump says, is going to do absolute shit if all we care about is money and keeping the disempowered where they are. Donald Trump’s ascension, and his staying power, is significantly less surprising when we take the state of our country into account and realize that our population is kept intentionally ignorant about the reality of our political situation and that the lives of anyone other than the rich and famous are simply unimportant. It is all a game of being the coolest kid on the block and, unfortunately, some dude who regularly launches ad hominem attacks from his Twitter account is in the lead. This isn’t funny. It’s fucked.

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Goodbye Forever, Box

30 Aug

At some point during the life span of this blog I wrote about how the state of my room (AKA a mess assessment….amessment? Yes? No?) was a clear reflection of how things in my life were going. And, actually, perhaps more to the point it was, is, a reflection of how things in my head are going. I don’t mean that in any big way, really. I am a relatively even keeled person. I would say that on a happy-to-sad spectrum I generally reside closer to the former than the latter, with some forays into sadness and a vacation home in anger and disbelief. I would categorize myself as my friend Ashlie described herself, a loud introvert. I had never really heard that term before but the second it came out of Ashlie’s mouth I thought to myself,

yes, that’s me.

Anyway, my room. Ask anyone who knows me well and they will tell you: my room is always a little bit of a disaster. In college a pile of clothes would migrate from my bed to my desk chair and back again depending on which of those things I needed at the moment. As I’ve gotten older I’ve been better about putting my clothes away (although truth be told a bag of clean laundry sits outside the door of my bedroom because I haven’t felt like dealing with it) but still the clutter remains. Shoes litter the floor, piles of New Yorker magazines reside on my desk and coffee table, unopened mail with personal data lies unopened, awaiting an afternoon of shredding. For years my awesome ex-boyfriend kept my mess, and my mood, in check but since he moved away about a year and a half ago things have gotten progressively messier. Both in my head and in my room. I stopped doing the things I have always done by sheer force of will, desire and habit: writing and running. I started keeping to myself more, seeing friends less, allowing my room to become an embarrassing disaster. The worst of it all was The Box.

You see a few years ago me and my roommates, boyfriend included!, moved from the second floor to the third. My landlord was redoing the apartments and the girls upstairs had moved out so we took over the newly renovated space. We all sort of haphazardly packed up our things and carried them up the single flight of stairs to restart our lives in a slightly better version of the place we had been living in for years. At the end of the packing process, I threw a bunch of odds and ends into a big box, figuring I would unpack it and put the things away. That was years ago. The box has remained packed, if you can even call it that, since 2012. Every time I went to deal with it I would be overcome with anxiety. Where does all of this stuff go? What do I do with it? How do I organize it? I would inevitably throw everything back in the box and head out for a run in an attempt to refocus and have another go when I got back. I never had another go. The Box stayed. And then, last week, I had enough. I came into my room with the intention of going through the box, organizing things, putting things in rightful places, feeling accomplished and like having The Box take up this huge swathe of space in my room, and my brain, for the past forever actually had some purpose. Like it wasn’t all for naught. I stood in front of The Box, looked inside, and simply said

Fuck it. Fuck you, Box. I hate you.

I got the garbage can and simply threw everything away.* I threw away the old articles from grad school. The weird candle holders I never used. The picture frames I bought at Bed&Bath in 2002 (saved the photos, though). The broken jewelry. The notebooks. All of that shit that has been causing me anxiety for all this time just gone. I took the garbage out, went back to my room, changed into running clothes and went out for the first run I have wanted to go on for as long as I can remember. And I started thinking about my next blog and my next marathon.

It’s been a long and sad road this past year and a half. And it’s crazy how you don’t even realize you’re on it until one day, you just make a turn and all of a sudden the fog sort of lifts. One day you just go into your room and you tackle some seemingly small project that is somehow the physical manifestation of all of the shit that has beaten you down over the past 19 months and you look outside and the sun is shining and rather than forcing yourself to go out there you want to do it. It’s a crazy thing and I don’t know what did it but whatever it is, fuck am I grateful because this shit — the sadness, the anxiety, the overwhelming feeling that I have been letting everyone down, myself more than anyone else — was getting tired. And was starting to make me feel like I had made some turn away from my old bright self into someone far more muted, someone about ready to burst into tears without reason or warning at any moment. I thought I was the only one who noticed but apparently I was wrong.

A few weeks ago, after visiting my parents for the night, I received the following text message from my father:

Hi, glad you came out yesterday. I missed you. I have to say I am a little worried about you. Seeing you made it easier. I hope you can use this trip as a reassessment period to come back and just be happier. Anything I can do to help let me know. I love you.

And so to my dad and everyone else: I am back. The Box is gone. And now I am going to go out into the world because I want to. And see my friends who I love. And get ready for an awesome fucking adventure through Thailand, Vietnam and Cambodia. And then, who knows. But I think it will probably be great.

*To be fair I recycled some of it but I felt like that took away some of the drama.

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The Great Realization

25 Aug

This past Friday night following a shift at work I arrived home to find blood on my desk. Obviously I freaked out because it was a clear indication that something was wrong with one of my cats. I immediately, and correctly as it turned out, figured it was Grete. She had been acting a little bit weird the past few weeks. She’s always been kind of a brat – waking me up in the morning by head butting me in a desperate attempt to get under the covers and knead me with her dagger-like claws and pissing on the floor right in front of the door to my bedroom if I didn’t feed her the second she started her dinnertime siren call – but she had never been overly vindictive. That is until a month or two ago when she decided to pee on my bed. That is the ultimate sign of feline displeasure. I will be the first to admit that there have been times when I have been remiss in my duties as a kitty mom. At that time, though, I’d been on top of it. So, what the fuck? I figured maybe something was wrong so I decided to take the two of them into the vet for their annual check-up (they get better health care than I do) and just see if maybe, just maybe, there was something beyond general cat-assiness that caused the problem. The vet seemed to think everything was okay. Great. I had an asshole on my hands.

Fast forward to the past week when I started noticing little dribbles of pee around the room. I started to feel like I was playing a game of whack-a-mole. You know, every time I would mop and then spot-clean the floor another dribble would appear. I started to get concerned. And then there was the blood. Clearly that was the last straw. Had to make an emergency appointment. So on Saturday morning at about 10, after sleeping barely at all following what amounted to a 16-hour bar shift between two places, I called the vet and made an appointment. And then I had to get Grete into her carrier. Have you ever tried putting a cat into a carrier? It is no easy task. It’s like they grow extra legs at every possible angle and use all those legs, and the claws that come with them, to forcibly keep themselves from being lowered into the chamber of doom. And then once you finally get them in there the yowling starts.

MEEEEOOOWWWWWW!!!!!!!! RRRAAAAAAWWWWWWWWWWRRRRRRRRR!!!!!!!

It’s horrifying. It’s the sound that I imagine a whale would make if it was experiencing a slow and painful death. It would actually be funny if it didn’t make you ears bleed. (Okay, nevermind, it’s funny.) Anyway, I walked my screaming cat half a block down to the vet (bless you, convenience!) and checked her in at the desk. I then put her carrier down on one of the chairs in the waiting room and tried to distance myself. By this point she decided that yowling wasn’t working and thought that perhaps making sounds in a desperate attempt to evoke pity from me would be a more effective technique.

Roooooooooooooooo…… roooooooooooooooooo.

She has it down. At this point I noticed another lady in the room who was alternatively looking at me judgmentally (she had her carrier on her lap and was whispering through the grates to her noticeably silent cat) and then glancing at the carrier that housed Grete with a great deal of pity and concern. Obviously I must be a terrible cat mom since I was standing 5 feet away, giggling to myself. I looked at the lady and said

“She is very dramatic.”

At this point the lady realized I had a heart afterall and asked me what was wrong with my cat.

Lady: Just a check-up?
Me: No, an emergency appointment. (I realized right after I said it that this probably did not make her feel better about my relaxed stance.)
Lady: Oh! Bless her heart!
Me: I think she’s okay. I mean, she’s eating and drinking the normal amount. Has energy. There was just a little blood this morning so I think maybe she has a UTI or something like that.
Lady: Bless her.

At this point, two younger women came in with their cat which they set down on a chair in between where they both were sitting. They took turns clicking lovingly at her. Then one of them looked over at my carrier where Grete was now alternating noises.

MEEEEEEOOOOOWWWWW!!!! Roooooooo………..

I looked at them and I said

“She’s fine. I swear. Just dramatic. Tough to be a kitty, you know.”

Then, this.

Young Lady: Oh, she sounds just like Maddie! This is Maddie. (She gestured at the carrier.) Her name is Madison, actually, but we call her Maddie for short. Oh your cat is just beautiful. A tabby?
Me: Um…yea?
Young Lady: So cute. (Addressing who I assumed was her partner) Doesn’t she sound just like Maddie? I keep hearing her and thinking Maddie is throwing her meow! But she isn’t! It is a completely different cat!

At this point Grete and I got called into the office. I quickly smiled around the room, accepted the well wishes and the “bless hers,” walked into the exam room and explained to the vet tech what had been going on in my house the past few weeks. A few minutes later the vet came in, asked some more questions, did some feel tests and said it was likely a UTI, as I had suspected. We left the office $150 poorer and with a prescription for Clavamox. After dropping my still yowling and slightly traumatized kitty at home, I went to run some errands. During the errands I got to thinking about my experience in the vet office and I had a realization: I am not a cat lady.

Okay, so as a back story, when I adopted my cats over 4 years ago (I have two of them), my mother and I had a very serious (okay only sort of serious) conversation about what it takes to turn into a cat lady. At what number of cats is this an inevitability? We came to the conclusion that you could have up to three cats but once you found yourself at four and up you were basically screwed. I told my mom, at this point in all seriousness, to cut me off at three. We made it sort of a rule: over three, definite cat lady; under three, not so much. We did not, however, discuss the incidence of cat lady-ness at under three cats. It never really came up. I trusted in the fact that I was not a cat lady because I had under three cats, but perhaps there is more to it. Can one, without having an absurd number of felines, actually be a cat lady? I have a lot of thinking to do.

PS Grete is fine. Antibiotics are really something.

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Trauma is a Bitch

1 Jun

I feel as though I have been harping on this. As if it has occupied some unreasonable amount of space in my brain and my body. As if I have to apologize for referencing it, for talking about it, for allowing it to impact the way I do my job and live my life. I would say this is the last time I will bring it up here but I cannot say that for certain because I don’t know when, and if, it might come back to haunt my mind again. Trauma, as it turns out, is a strange and unpredictable thing. It winds its way into and throughout your body, it occupies the smallest crevices in your brain. It shows its face at the strangest times and leaves you standing on the street, silent tears streaming down your face, breathing through your racing heart, wondering why all the jokes you make about it can’t just force it to live in the past where it belongs. It makes you doubt your strength and your ability to will yourself to just move forward and leave that experience in the dust, a small annotation in a long life.

A few weeks ago I was informed by my coworker that the guy who physically assaulted me at work had come into the bar. Entirely unrelatedly, and by no intention of my own, I had spoken with him previously, and extremely briefly, over the phone. He told me he hoped we could move forward and become friends. I chuckled and told him not to be crazy, to take care of himself. I got off the phone and I felt good, in control, strong. I worked a shift behind the very bar where the incident occurred and then the next day I wrote him a letter. I knew he wasn’t going to read it, although I would be pleased if he did. It was just a means for me to tell him what I wanted him to know and to take back a little bit of my own power. The goal was to feel a little less helpless and it seemed like it worked. But then the news. I don’t know exactly how to put into words the feeling I got when I was told he had been in the bar the previous week. My hand immediately shot just above my left eye where there is still a pebble-sized calcification just below the skin that I find myself touching when I get nervous or uncomfortable. I looked at my friend in disbelief. My stomach dropped through the floor. I started sweating. I got the chills. So much for power and control. So much for thinking that a guy with a sizeable rap sheet who would throw a glass at the face of a girl who is half his size and two-thirds his age has even an ounce of self-control, has the capability of making reasonable decisions, gives a shit about his own future and his freedom. Joke’s on me, I guess. Seeing the best in a person is simply not possible when there is nothing good there. But beyond that I realized that I had been operating under the incorrect assumption that I was safe and that I was trusting the word of a man who I honestly believe to be a monster. He told his family he would stay away from the bar and me. He didn’t. And according to security he has tried to come into the bar when I’ve been there. Apparently booze tastes better when you get it from a place where you are unwelcome.

And then there was last night. I met up with a good friend of mine to just, I don’t know, catch-up, unload, destress. We went to our local spot which was oddly busy and, just as we decided to go somewhere better suited to our mood I heard it:  violent flesh-on-flesh contact. I grabbed my friend’s arm and just kept saying “oh god, oh god, oh god” until he headed into the mass of people trying to get the man who had struck the bartender out of the room. All of a sudden they were moving towards me. An angry, loud, testosterone-full group of people forcing the guy through the bar and out onto the street. I wedged myself between the bar and a stranger sitting on a barstool. A stranger whose sweatshirt hood I grabbed as I had visions of myself somehow being slammed into the bar or taking an errant elbow to the face. It wasn’t about me, had nothing to do with me, was likely not going to effect me and yet I couldn’t see how something like this couldn’t somehow drag me in. When I knew the coast was clear I fled through the door and leaned against the building, I concentrated on my breathing and willed my heart to just slow the fuck down. I felt weak and powerless. But even more acutely I felt like a self-indulgent asshole as I stood there having a panic attack over someone else’s experience and my proximity to it. Crazy, right?

I guess it’s just a weird thing to realize that sometimes being well-adjusted, self-reflective and emotionally even-keeled is simply not enough. And it’s infuriating to me to acknowledge that another person, a person who I actually don’t even really know and am afraid I might not recognize, has the ability to throw me into a complete and total tailspin in an entirely different neighborhood and in completely different circumstances without even doing anything. His actions didn’t change his psychology but they certainly altered mine. And then it gets me thinking about the trauma that other people deal with on the day-to-day. In the grand scheme of things, what I experienced was small potatoes. People live through wars, through violent attacks of all kinds, through fires, through abuse, through horrific accidents. I imagine those experiences creep up on them, too. Sometimes even randomly, on a Sunday night, in their own backyard. But that’s life, I guess. All we can hope to do is keep pushing forward, realize our feelings and emotions are important and worthwhile, take care of ourselves as best we can and when we can’t, reach out to others to take the pressure off. That’s what friends and family are for and I am eternally grateful for mine.

Here’s to hoping that this is the last post about this bullshit.

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Today in News: Aaron Hernandez, Period Pics and Deforestation

31 Mar

I am trying to get back into my old habit of perusing the news in the morning with my coffee. Lately, I have just not been doing that. I used to pride myself in how up-to-date I was on the goings ons of the world but over the last year or so I have really fallen off. It’s depressing, actually. Maybe my mind has been too preoccupied with all the nonsense that has been happening over the past year and change. Or maybe I am just over-tired from my back-and-forth schedule. Or maybe I have just become intellectually lazy. (I really hope that last one isn’t the case because that would suck.) So, in an effort to combat what has been happening I decided that I would do a little bit of internet surfing. This is the result.

1. Aaron Hernandez

So I read this article in the Times about what is going on in the Aaron Hernandez case. You all might remember Hernandez. Former tight end for the New England Patriots who was accused of killing the semi-professional football player Odin Lloyd back in June, 2013. At the time it seemed like an open-and-shut case but apparently now it isn’t. The prosecution has called something like 100 witnesses to the stand, including Hernandez’s fiance Shayanna Jenkins. The night of the murder, Hernandez called Jenkins from jail to ask her to give some money to this guy Ernest Wallace who was eventually also charged with murder. She apparently drove to Rhode Island, met Wallace, pulled out the maximum allowed $500 from her bank account and gave it to him. She never asked questions. So yea, that’s weird. I mean, I would like to think that if I was dating someone and he called me and he was all,

“Hey, babe, drive to another state, pull out a lot of money from your bank account and hand it to this other dude”

I might be like,

“Hey, babe, why don’t you go fuck yourself I’m busy.”

But then again, to me $500 seems like a lot of money but maybe to the fiance of a pro-football player who had just signed a $40 million contract extension, $500 was like chump change. And maybe she has a really nice car that is fun to drive. I don’t have a car and I also don’t have a lot of money so maybe if I had a boyfriend and he called me from jail (?!) and was all,

“Hey, babe, walk to 9th street and give that guy Joe $20 for me”

I’d be like

“Yea, sure, it’s the least I can do since I you are in jail and all, you dumbass.”

All I’m saying is that it’s all relative, really. Maybe Jenkins regularly took inter-state road trips to deliver money to people. Maybe this was all in a day’s work, you know? Then there’s this other thing which is that Hernandez also asked Jenkins to take a box from their house and dispose of it and told her not to look inside. Or maybe he didn’t tell her not to but she didn’t look inside anyway. Either way she is claiming that she didn’t look inside and people are very suspicious of this. But here’s what I am thinking. So my mom always taught us that privacy is really important. So important, in fact, that when junk mail addressed to me gets delivered to my parent’s house, as it does on occasion, my mother will call me and ask if it is okay that she opens the mail so she can appropriately recycle all the different pieces. You could leave your diary open in front of me and I would never read it. So if someone told me to dispose of a box and told me not to look inside, I wouldn’t look inside. And even if they didn’t tell me not to look inside I wouldn’t look inside. None of my business, you know? But maybe Shayanna Jenkins’ mom doesn’t call her to ask her permission before opening her mail. Maybe Shayanna Jenkins would read your diary if you left it open on your kitchen counter and she happened upon it. I don’t know Shayanna Jenkins so I can’t say. But people are very suspicious because she disposed of this box after Hernandez was accused of murder and she still didn’t open it and I’m thinking, not only would I not open it because of privacy, but I also wouldn’t open it because of plausible deniability. I wouldn’t want to know what was in that fucking box. There could be a finger! Or a penis! (It was a small box.) And also, Jenkins had asked Hernandez whether he had killed Lloyd which to the prosecution makes the likelihood that she didn’t look in the box even smaller but to me it makes total sense. Let’s say, hypothetically, that I was dating a dude who was accused of killing someone and I had asked him whether he did it because I actually thought this was a possible scenario. If that dude who I thought was capable of killing someone told me not to look in a box, there is no fucking way I would look in that box. No thank you. I’m not stupid and, it seems to me, neither is Shayanna Jenkins.

2. Instagram Hates Menstruation!

I have to admit that I also hate menstruation. Shit fucking sucks. I mean, I know that it’s natural and necessary and all that jazz but man is it inconvenient! Every single month I get so sad knowing that for at least one night I will have to wake up once, maybe even twice, to change my tampon or risk waking up to a huge mess in the morning. But, whatever, it happens. And guess who it happens to? A lot of people. People that you know, even.

What does this have to do with Instagram? (My current favorite form of social media because I get to post photos of all the people’s drinks that I have dropped Peeps into at work for my own amusement, #YouveBeenPeeped, if you’re curious.) According to an article on Feministing, Instagram banned a photo that spoken word artist Rupi Kaur posted of herself with a period leak because it violated the app’s community guidelines. Kaur posted the following response to her Tumblr (a form of social media that I think is probably neat and would appreciate my “YouveBeenPeeped” series but just hasn’t made it into my normal rotation):

thank you @instagram for providing me with the exact response my work was created to critique. you deleted a photo of a woman who is fully covered and menstruating stating that it goes against community guidelines when your guidelines outline that it is nothing but acceptable. the girl is fully clothed. the photo is mine. it is not attacking a certain group. nor is it spam. and because it does not break those guidelines i will repost it again. i will not apologize for not feeding the ego and pride of misogynist society that will have my body in an underwear but not be okay with a small leak. when your pages are filled with countless photos/accounts where women (so many who are underage) are objectified…

So here is the interesting thing about this issue for me. I think that Raur should be able to post this photo of herself and I applaud her for doing so. It is important to normalize menstruation. It is a part of life and of growing up and of the continuation of our species and all that shit. But in knowing this, and being supportive of her actions towards this end, I don’t know that I would be able to post a photo of myself with a period stain. I will talk about it. I will write about it. But would I post photographic evidence? Probably not. Is it because that isn’t what I use my Instagram account for? Or is it because I don’t want to offend the people that follow me, despite the fact that there is absolutely nothing offensive about it?

I’ve been trying to do some self-reflection recently. You know, put into practice the things that I believe. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the way that I, despite knowing better, act in a way that supports the misogynist society that I hate so much. All those societal norms that sink into my head from years of being steeped in them and the ways that I reinforce them through my own behavior. Anyway, something to think about. And no, don’t worry, I won’t be posting a photograph of my bloody underwear any time soon…or ever. Just peeps, cats and road trips.

3. The World is Going to Hell, One Deforested Acre at a Time

According to The Guardian, “Brazil and Indonesia spent over 100 times more in subsidies to industries that cause deforestation than they received in international conservation aid to prevent it.”

Ugh.

According to Will McFarland, one of the author’s of the report by the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) that published the findings,

“By making the cost of producing these commodities cheaper, subsidies increase their profitability and make them more desirable to investors. That in turn artificially inflates their growth, and threatens the rainforests further. With subsides running at over 100 times that of forest aid, we should be urgently trying to reform this system.”

I mean, I don’t know what you guys all took from biology class but for me it was something along the lines of [trees > not trees]. (Science was never my strong suit.) But in all seriousness, what the fuck is wrong with people? Why are we, as a species, so damn short-sighted? And this is certainly not me blaming Brazil and Indonesia. These subsidies are in large part an effort to continue to support massive over-consumption in the North. I know that things have been hard, economically, for a lot of people especially since the recent financial collapse. A lot of people are drowning in all kinds of debt, most notable for my cohorts student loans that are insanely, and I would even argue criminally, high. But we really have to stop putting a price on the irreplaceable. All of these crazy weather events that a lot of people are talking about are absolutely related to deforestation. And there just has to come a point when we realize that things just can’t be as inexpensive as we would like, and that buying things cheaply does actually come at a cost and just because that cost hasn’t always been monetized doesn’t mean that it doesn’t matter. As it turns out, money isn’t the only thing that’s important. We can’t put a price on everything and things that don’t have a price are not necessarily less valuable.

It makes me think about messes. Like, let’s say you hypothetically decide to pour some beans into a cup and then you stupidly leave the cup on your kitchen counter and go for a run and then you come back and your cat has decided it would be REALLY FUN to see what happens if he knocks the cup off the counter and onto the floor. In short, the answer is beans everywhere. So now because you were hypothetically short-sighted, you have to spend like 20 minutes cleaning up the beans, knowing full well that you will be discovering errant beans for the next 6 months. That’s like trees. It takes moments to be a short-sighted asshole and cut trees down, but decades for new trees to come and replace them. And trees are way more important than beans. I mean, beans are delicious but they do not help us breath. (I know that was a piss-poor comparison but I really wanted to complain about my cat.)

Anyway, that’s all I got. But in case you just skimmed over portions of this because you were like what the fuck is she talking about here is a brief summary:

1. Aaron Hernandez probably did kill Odin Lloyd but it’s not actually that surprising that Hernandez’s fiance Shayanna Jenkins followed orders without questioning them;

2. We should be able to post period pics if we want to but also I need to do some self-reflection about my own role in the continued dominance of misogyny within our culture;

3. If we don’t all want to die from massive weather-related events we should probably stop subsidizing large-scale deforestation. Also, recycle.

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I’m Sorry!

7 Jan

You guys, I have been the absolute worst at this blog recently. The fucking worst. And for that I apologize. I actually don’t think that I have gone this long without posting on this site since I caught my stride like 2 years ago. But fear not for I have returned. And also I am full of excuses for my recent absence which I will now fill you in on.

I have started a new writing project! Yay! So here is the deal. As many of you avid readers know, I had a shit year in 2014. Oh it was the pits. But now it is 2015 and everything is different. And by everything I actually mean my mindset. Now if something bad happens I won’t just attach it to all the other bad things that happened to happen within the same 365 days. The bad things will just exist on their own, as independent events that sort of blow but don’t have any huge meaning or impact on my happiness or sanity. Or so I hope, anyway. And, to be entirely honest, it is going rather well. I feel upbeat! And part of this, I think, is due to my project!

So since I am an adult, I have many years of experience in being me. And one of the things that these years of experience have taught me is that I need a project. I need something to focus on, something that has an end goal, something that is forward moving. Because if I don’t have something like that, then I focus on what is right in front of me and what is right in front of me is bartending. Well, not literally at this moment. At this moment my cat, Grete, is right in front of me and making typing this blog extremely difficult but you know what I mean. So here’s the thing about bartending. I actually kind of like it. But the only way I can like it is if I don’t care too much about it. I want to do my job well, make money for myself and the bar, but I also want to leave work at work. I want to lock the gates, go home and go to sleep and not really worry too much about it until I am back at it again. But in order for me to be able to do that, I have to have something else going on, something that I am in control of. I mean, I am in control, to some extent, of the bar when I am working (or so one would hope) but I am not in control. I don’t make the rules, I just enforce them. I make money on the front-end when I am working, not on the back-end because I invested. I am replaceable. All of these things are key. And so to make the way that I earn my money sustainable and palatable, and to make me a better, more zen-like bartender, I have to have something in my life that is using up my need to be spearheading something that, in some ways, matters to me personally in my journey of being a Rebekah. And so, without further adieu, I bring you my new blog,

ChafingIsReal.com

So here is the deal. Over the course of 2015, I, along with some 10,000 other people worldwide, will be running 2,015 miles. That is the equivalent of something like 77 marathons. It’s a lot of miles. And I will be writing about it every single day whether I run or not. I am hoping to keep it Rebekah-style, meaning full of funny things, snark and maybe a little anger at the inevitable street harassment I experience along the way. I am also hoping to see bunnies. There will be a little bit of cheese, of course, but I really don’t want this to be one of those silly fitness blogs that is all full of “fitspiration” and lame quotes and me saying things like “working out is so great and everyone should do it all the time!” Because honestly, sometimes working out sucks. Sometimes I hate running. I ALWAYS hate lifting weights. But I am going to do it anyway and gripe about it on the internet. So check me out over there. It might take up a lot of my time, but this blog is not going anywhere. It will be reserved for stories of me getting shit on, feminist rants and letters to random people who wrong me. Also maybe some new bartending tales, if I work up the courage.

Alright, guys, happy new year and welcome to 2015! I think it’s going to be a hell of a year.

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My Bathroom is Being Painted and, Unrelatedly, Some People are Assholes

20 Dec

So it’s Saturday morning and I woke up at 7:30am — you read that correctly — to let Armando in to paint the bathroom walls. Here is the entirely uninteresting story of what led us to this point:

Sometime last week (Wednesday I think?) when it was something like 50 degrees outside I decided to have some adventures. Other people might call the things I did “errands” but I really like to take the path more exciting. Anyway, I went and bought 2lbs of coffee for the house — 1lb ground, the other whole bean because that seemed smart until I realized that I don’t have a coffee grinder — almonds for almond butter, dates for snacking, and then a bunch of more or less necessary household things from Trader Joe’s. Before I left the house to commence adventuring, there was a buzz at the door which, to be entirely honest, is always a terrible way for me to start the day regardless of the time because the buzzer always scares the shit out of me. I am not someone who likes unexpected, or even semi-expected, loud noises. When people come to the house I tell them to call me rather than ring the buzzer and when they ring the buzzer anyway I get mad at them. Legit angry. Usually by the time they make it up to the third floor I have talked myself back into behaving like a reasonable human being but it is always a little hairy. Anyway, so the buzzer went off

BUZZZZ!

and I jumped about three feet in the air. Once I recovered enough I talked into the thing to see who was there. Exterminators! But no one told me they were coming! Cue ill fantasy about scary robbers, murderers or rapists masquerading as exterminators trying to scam their way into my house in order to rob, murder, or rape. I called my landlord. They were, in fact, exterminators. They came in and drilled some holes in the ceiling because there were termites maybe and apparently drilling holes in the ceiling helps with that? I don’t know. I am certain there must have been more to it. In the process of drilling the holes I pointed out all the mold that was happening in the bathroom in an effort to explain to these guys who really did not give a shit that we were actually quite clean and that what appeared to be dirt was actually mold that we couldn’t get rid of and also that the chipping paint on the ceiling was the unfortunate consequence of my old roommate and best friend attempting to kill the mold by painting over it in green paint. The funny thing about it was that she was trying to repaint the whole bathroom green but used some of the paint on the ceiling to try and suffocate the mold (?) and then ran out of paint and so we had three walls painted green, one wall painted mold, and one ceiling that had green under white paint but the mold was using its powers to push through the white paint and it was all flakey and fucked up and the green was peeking out from under there like some sort of disease. It was something to behold. So when my landlord, Nelson (who is awesome, by the way) was there with the exterminators he noticed all the mold and called me the next day to let me know that Armando would be coming over on Saturday morning at 9am to repaint the bathroom. Hooray!

I got really excited. I had been planning on repainting the bathroom myself in a nice shade of lavender but just hadn’t gotten around to it. Here it was! My chance! I could just go out and buy the lavender paint and then Armando could use it to paint over the unsightly white mold resistant paint he was going to use to try and handle our mold problem. But then Nelson dashed all my dreams by telling me the mold paint only comes in white and that if I, or Armando more realistically, were to paint another color on top of it then it would no longer have mold fighting powers. (He didn’t actually say “mold fighting powers” but I am fairly certain he was thinking it.) I think he might be lying to me about that but whatever. I bet Google would know. Or one of you readers who also happens to be an expert in all manner of paint and/or mold. (Hint, hint.)

So now Armando is in the bathroom repainting it and I am sitting at the kitchen table writing about it when what I had originally planned on doing was telling you about this quote I just read that pissed me off but for whatever reason I decided to explain to you all why it is that I woke up at 7:30am on a Saturday when I have to bartend tonight until all hours. It’s all because this sequence of events:

mold —> weird paint job —> diseased looking ceiling —> exterminators maybe or maybe not shaming my landlord into noticing how nasty the bathrooms looked —> new paint! —> awake 😦

Anyway, Armando is painting the walls as I type and all our bathroom things are in bags in the living room and I read the following quote in the New Yorker article about Samantha Power which was said by a “senior Administration official” (run-on sentence POWER!):

“It’s easy in some ways to dismiss someone like Samantha Power. Oh, she cares about the marginal, vulnerable, and oppressed! But what she’s managed to do is link the marginal, vulnerable, and oppressed to core national-security interests of the United States.”

Holy mother fucking shit, you guys. So this obviously sent me into a rage and not because I am naive and don’t think that people in government think this way. It sent me into a rage because this is obviously a widely enough held opinion that someone, albeit anonymously, felt good saying it to a reporter. This person looked someone else in the face and actually talked about how easy it is to dismiss someone for caring about the “marginal, vulnerable, and oppressed.” And what that says to me is not only that he dismisses those who care about the marginal, vulnerable, and oppressed but they he clearly takes it one step farther and dismisses the marginal, vulnerable, and oppressed themselves. And this is how we get to the point that we’re at right now. This is how we get to the point where…

…people only care about the hundreds of missing African school girls for as long as they are moved by the hash tag…

…we only talk about Ebola for as long as it impacts us here in the United States…

…we have police officers killing unarmed black men and we cannot seem to get indictments ever, ever, ever…

…it takes the release of a video of a woman getting knocked unconscious in an elevator months after it actually happened for us to have a real, although too short and unnuanced, conversation about domestic violence…

…we have an intelligence agency that tortures detainees so severely that, before beginning the torture regimen actually sought assurances that a detainee would “remain in isolation and incommunicado for the remainder of his life” (from the Senate Select Intelligence Committee report on the CIA’s interrogation-and-detention program).

It’s like, fuck. These are people in our government, people who have things to do with foreign affairs and international engagement, who simply look through the people who they think don’t count because they think that no one hears them. And maybe a lot of people don’t hear them because the system is fucked but that doesn’t mean that we should simply dismiss them and be like “well, we know this is jacked buuuuut no one really cares because those people have no political clout or money so we will just go over here and focus on something else that likely makes the situation worse.” They look through them and dehumanize them and then they are surprised when some of those people get angry and seek revenge. I know I have talked about this before at some point or another but the fact that pretty much every single decision made by our government is economically motivated makes me sick. You want to know something? We made up money. Made it up! We made up economics pretty much all together. You know what we didn’t make up, though? People. Didn’t invent those! And yet we constantly value this thing that we created over the actual lives of real people that we share the world with. And then on top of that people in power, and lots of people not in power also, completely dismiss those among us who give a shit about the people no one else sees as “bleeding hearts” and “liberals” and “humanitarians” and whatever else.

So a few weeks ago I went to one of the protests here in New York. It started at like 5:30pm and continued on into the night and one of the guys who got stopped by the protests yelled out his car window “GET A JOB!” and it’s like, dude, it’s like 7 in the evening. Most of us have jobs. Most of us pay taxes. We just want our taxes to go towards everyone equally and we want accountability in the power structure and acknowledgement if a highly racist system and for everyone to be seen so I am sorry if you are feeling inconvenienced by the tens of thousands of people who felt compelled to take to the streets but you know what? You have managed to not see a good percentage of the world’s population for your entire goddamn life so one night of being stuck in a protest-caused traffic jam is really not that big of a fucking deal in the grand scheme. Maybe it will even cause you to see people for once. Or, if you are that goddamn daft, then just turn up your radio because you can’t simply wish away the marginalized, the vulnerable and the oppressed. It does reach a critical mass at some point and right now information is free and available and people are angry. Your money and your job and your penis and your white skin doesn’t make you better. It just makes your voice necessarily heard. But hopefully all that will be changing and you might just get stuck in a lot more (proverbial) stand still traffic jams. Welcome to life for the rest of the world, asshole.

And now my bathroom is blindingly white. Happy Saturday, all.

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Photography, Random Run-ins, and Cousin Cookie

6 Nov

Back in 2003, I, along with 22 other intrepid students, went on a year long expedition around the world, learning about politics, economics, ecology, feminism, and all sorts of other things. More than anything, though, I would say that we learned how to be proper human beings. We learned what it meant to go into other people’s countries, other peoples homes, and understand that we were guests there. We had to learn to suspend our own cultural norms in an effort to try and fit, as best we could, into our new and extremely different surroundings. This proved easier in some situations – Cambridge, England, for example, where our biggest concern was remembering that in England the word “pants” is actually synonymous to the American “underwear” – than in, say, Zanzibar, Tanzania, where in incredibly hot temperatures we kept our heads, shoulders and knees covered in an attempt to be respectful towards the majority Muslim population there.* I’m sure that as a group of 22 American, and one super awesome Bulgarian, students traveling through England, Tanzania, India, New Zealand and Mexico we unintentionally offended some people but the point is that we tried. We asked questions of our hosts and attempted to understand local norms and customs as best we could so as to represent ourselves, and our countries, to the best of our abilities. Overall I think we did a pretty good job.

One of the things that we learned about, and something that I have kept with me ever since, involved photography. We were taught that in certain cultures, people believe that when their photograph is taken, a piece of their soul is taken with it. Whether or not we believe this to be the case, it is important to respect the beliefs of those around you and so we were taught to always, always ask permission before photographing anyone. Consent is key. It might mean that sometimes you don’t quite get the photo that you hoped, but who the hell cares, really. There is something sort of fucked up about taking photographs of people without asking them first, especially when we are surrounded by those who have lived incredibly different lives than us. To me, it reeks of voyeurism. I know that when I have been traveling and have caught people taking photographs of me I have felt somewhat dehumanized. These people don’t know me, don’t know my name, where I am from, what I am about, and yet they want to capture this image of me and what? Show their friends? It’s this idea that an image of me could be in someone else’s home and I could have no idea that always makes me think twice about snapping a photo of someone I don’t know, someone who didn’t consent to it. The idea that a part of our soul is taken every time that flash goes off starts hitting a little closer to home.

Let’s maybe take this down a notch in seriousness, largely because I haven’t had enough coffee yet and this is making my brain hurt. So in New York City you come to find that the longer you live here, the smaller and smaller this town becomes. Partially that is because as we live here longer, our personal map of the city changes. There are certain parts of the city that we know nothing about  – for me it’s just about everything above 34th street and most of North Brooklyn – and then other parts where we can practically dictate the store fronts in order. The city just becomes smaller and the more we circulate within the territory of our truncated maps, the more people we end up seeing until the point when you go to the grocery store and run into about 12 people on the way home, all the while Toffuti Cuties are melting in your environmentally conscious shopping bag. In your own neighborhood, and especially when you are a neighborhood bartender, this is pretty normal. But it is always super fun and exciting when you run into people randomly in other parts of the city that you rarely frequent. Like that time I ran into some girls I went to high school with on the 6 platform in Manhattan, or the time my mom came to visit and we saw her massage therapist, who works in New Jersey, on University Place. I mean, really, what are the odds?! And every time this happens I think to myself

“Self, mere seconds in either direction, one different decision, one missed or caught light, and I never would have run into that person.”

And then I start thinking about all the people that I probably just barely miss. And then I think about how if my life were a sitcom, which I sometimes like to think it is, the audience would be like

“No! Turn on that street! That guy that you made out with in college is walking this way and it might be a love connection!!!”

And then would come the sad, prerecorded

“Awwwwwww….”

when I proceeded on course and missed what could have been the love of my life. Or some other bullshit. Anyway, back to photographs. So on a similar theme, have you ever thought about how many times you might be in other people’s photos? Like, just walking along and you get in the background of some group picture or something? Now, this is something I think about a lot, like, how weird would it be to go to someone’s house and look at an awesome family photograph on their mantel and then see yourself casually walking through the background? Mind blown, right? I mean, you could be on someone’s mantel right now! And not even know it! And they might notice you one day and be like,

“Huh, I wonder where that person was going on this day that is forever remembered as the day that Cousin Cookie drank too many pickle back shots and hasn’t been able to look at cucumbers the same way since.”

I don’t know, it’s just a thing I think about it. There was a This American Life on it a few years back but I was thinking about this long before I heard that episode. It just made me realize that other people think about it too and maybe, just maybe, some of you, dear readers, also think about it.

So this post totally just went on a really weird adventure from the ethics of photography to random run-ins and Cousin Cookie. Funny thing is that I was going to write about this weird thing that happened at work the other day and see what you guys all thought about it but now I have already written over a thousand words so it doesn’t seem the best time to ask you to read much more. So, that’s a post for next time. I guess just remember this: ask permission to take other people’s photos otherwise you might end up on the mantel of some family in the midwest that gives each other nicknames based off their favorite snack foods.

* I know that’s not that difficult but I haven’t had enough coffee yet so it’s all I could think of. Also, there were some people on vacation there wearing short shorts and tube tops and it was really, really inappropriate. Like, wildly.

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My #1 Fan is BACK

31 Aug

That’s right, folks.  After a months-long hiatus during which I gave my #1 Fan basically no thought whatsoever he has returned with a vengeance!  This past Thursday morning I awoke to a new comment on my blog.  Since it came at 1:53am from a person who called himself “Anti-Fail” I figured it was just spam.  I figured wrong.  I looked at the comment and discovered that, from the email address rebekahfranklifefail@yahoo.com, I had been sent the following message of support and love:

Instead of worrying about events happening halfway around the country and world, perhaps you should worry about how you came to be a 30-something year old bartender living on $2 an hour. That in and of itself is a greater travesty than ISIS or Michael Brown. Perhaps the only greater travesty is pretending that going to the New School equates to having a real actual degree. It’s like bragging about graduating from the University of Phoenix. Hahaha. Keep writing your whiny Feminazi hairy armpit gibberish. How it amuses us so.

Now, and forever…

Your Superiors

Just a little back story for those not in the know.  This message came from one of my old customers at a bar I worked at for years.  He would come into the bar 3-5 times a week and get totally hammered and act like a dick.  He called me a cunt a few times.  Some female customers complained to me about the way he aggressively hit on them.  Oh, and he asked one of my coworkers out while his fiancee was sitting like 2 stools down and, when my coworker called him out, he lied about being engaged.  And he one time snuck a bottle of vodka into the bar.  I could continue, but it’s too depressing.  This is a stand-up dude who loves and respects women.  Obviously we got along famously and I was always so happy when I heard his voice from halfway down the block while I approached work.

For those among you who might want to email this person back with some opinions of your own, don’t bother because he undoubtedly deactivated the email account immediately after sending it.  But don’t worry, we play the long game at FranklyRebekah.  As my friend just said, “I am the Scorpio here so my revenge thinking goes to total life destruction even if it takes a long time.”  Everyone loves to have a little vengeful imagination adventure, right?  So if anyone wants to plot revenge and use my #1 Fan as the target, even just for your own amusement, feel free.  He’s shareable.

Anyway, to just sort of hammer this home to you guys a little bit, the last comment I received from this person was 6 months ago.  Six.  Which means that for the past six months this wonderful man has been silently stewing, awaiting the perfect time to appear and call me a loser.  And the perfect time, it seems, was when I wrote a post about a young, unarmed black man being shot and killed by a police officer in Ferguson, his body then left in the street for 4 hours, which sparked a (much needed) nation-wide conversation about race in America.  Oh, and in that same post I discussed an innocent man being beheaded by ISIS.  It seems a little crazy to me that the amount of money that I make per hour should matter so much to someone who, it seems, hates me.  I mean, if anyone should care a lot about that it should be me, right?  But as it turns out, money is not particularly important to me.  Also, as it turns out, the minimum wage for tipped workers in New York state is actually $8 an hour, with bars and restaurants obligated to make up the difference if our tips don’t amount to that much.  In (legal) theory anyway.  Which I would think this person would know considering, you know, he’s a lawyer.

And as for my armpits?  I shave them.  My legs, on the other hand, are sort of touch and go.  I have sensitive skin so I’m a waxer and sometimes I just don’t feel like going all the way up to midtown.  So, I mean, if you are going to criticize my feminism you could at least be accurate and call it my “whiny Feminazi hairy leg gibberish,” ya know?  Although I do take pause at your use of the word “gibberish,” but I’ll leave it.  No need to split hairs (no pun intended).

And as for the stuff about The New School?  You’re welcome to think it sucks.  That’s fine.  It’s not like I established it or something.  But truth be told I actually learned a lot of stuff and was taught by one of the people responsible for the creation of the Human Development Index which is sort of a big deal.  Also, I made some really good friends who are awesome and supportive and also write a lot of “whiny Feminazi hairy ______ gibberish” so at least I found my people.  And, one other thing, I would imagine that the University of Phoenix is a perfectly fine school and the people that graduate from there learned things and are proud of themselves and go on to do awesome things in life, be that bartending or working in finance or becoming a nurse or whatever.  Poo-pooing someone elses education is some elitist bullshit.

So, in summation, I am actually left wondering how this person came to be a 40-something year old man who spends time at almost 2 in the morning on a Wednesday making up email addresses and sending ridiculous comments to people’s blogs.  But, you know, people make choices.  I made my choice to write and bartend and he made his choice to be a cyber bully.

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