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The Internet Thinks I Like Justin Bieber

26 Mar

This is a rant about the internet.

So I, like most people, mostly enjoy the internet.  Obviously, I have an internet presence.  The internet, thanks to this blog, knows all about my period and that time I wiped my ass with my left hand in a small little bathroom in Lima.  One day, I swear, I am going to go to a job interview and they are going to tell me that I was never actually considered for the position but they wanted to see the face of the idiot who consistently shares stories about her own stupidity, as if anyone even fucking cares anyway.  Yup, they are going to laugh me out of the office and give me a roll of toilet paper as a sort of  going away present.  This has gotten entirely off track.

The internet.  So this is sort of how I feel about the internet.  Okay, so, I really like to go grocery shopping.  I find grocery stores to be highly organized, which I enjoy.  I also like to think about the hierarchy of product placement and about how the ways that companies get stores to place their food directly impacts the buying habits of American shoppers.  It’s cool to think about but also sort of depressing because it’s like, goddamnit we are so susceptible to bullshit.  Anyway, the grocery store has long been one of my favorite places to go.  Don’t believe me?  Ask my mom.  She’ll tell you.  And you would think that, since I love grocery stores and because I am an American, that the bigger the grocery store the better!  You would be wrong.  When I come upon an extra large grocery store I am initially really excited about it.  All the aisles, the products, the people watching, the unnecessary diversity of cereals and ice creams.  But I find those really big grocery stores to be incredibly overwhelming.  It’s like, I walk in, stroll through a few aisles, then experience sensory overload, forget what I needed to buy (even if I have thought in advance and made a list!) and flee through the automatic doors.  It’s just too much.  That is sort of how I feel about the internet.  I have my few pages that I frequent, and then I’m like,

God, the internet is so boring.  There is nothing to do here!

so I try and find some new places and all of a sudden I have like 25 tabs open concerning all these things that I didn’t know existed that all of a sudden I just have to know about.  And inevitably some percentage of those things are evil.  Like, I was reading about this woman who faked her own pregnancy and somehow ended up on the webpage of one of those people who thinks homosexuality can be cured through prayer.  I would have left the room screaming if I wasn’t in my own damn bedroom and the only place to go in my current outfit was the kitchen from where I would have to eventually return.  I closed the tab.  It’s like, the internet is a long hallway with all these doors and you literally never know what is going to be behind the door when you open it.  It might be a really pleasant looking door, with pictures of Dan Rydell on the front, but then you open it and BAM it’s like Rush Limbaugh’s fan group’s headquarters.  Or something.  But the thing about the internet is that for as much as you don’t know about it, it knows everything about you.  Or so it thinks.

This is actually what I set out to write about before I went all crazy with grocery store analogies and Rush Limbaugh fan groups.

Okay, so, the internet tracks the things that you do on so that it can plaster whatever page you are visiting with an ad about Made Well jeans because sometimes, when you are feeling a little sad and like your wardrobe sucks, you peruse the Made Well webpage and look at clothing you can’t afford.  Which, as you can imagine, only makes you feel sadder and more like your wardrobe sucks.  But then it’s like, you can’t even choose when you want to do that because it is everywhere.  Want to research the Genocide Convention for an article you are writing? Made Well jeans.  Want to look up the Quechuan word for avocado (it’s palta, FYI)?  Made Well jeans.  Want to watch the highest scoring beam routine at the Jesolo gymnastics meet?  You guessed it, Made Well jeans.  You get the picture.  So meanwhile, as you are being absolutely inundated with advertisements for luxury clothing items, Twitter can’t seem to come up with hashtags that actually relate to things you would be interested in reading about.  It has this trending thing, whereby it theoretically takes information about the people you are following combined with your location and then suggests a whole bunch of hashtags that might be of interest to you.  So, I follow a whole bunch of feminists and a few of my good friends (most of whom are feminists) and Twitter suggests #2YearsofBoyfriend which is a hashtag about Justin Bieber’s song that I have never even heard before (I had to look it up to see what the hell the hashtag even meant).  It also suggested #GetWellJimKelly and #CrappySnacks.  I just don’t know.

And then there is LinkedIn.  Now this is really weird.  So I used to work at Restaurant Gordon Ramsay in midtown.  The restaurant was located in the lobby of The London hotel.  The hotel had this doorman named Collin who was really nice who I used to always talk to. Collin and I never interacted on the internet.  I never put on my LinkedIn profile that I worked at Gordon Ramsay (I don’t think I even had a LinkedIn profile back then) and yet, the other day it suggested that I connect with Collin even though we had absolutely no shared connections!  How did it know?!  How can it connect me to some random doorman with whom I have had absolutely no electronic communication and yet elsewhere on the internet it thinks I give a damn about Justin Bieber?!  I literally do not understand.  I do not understand and I also find myself pretty damn terrified.

I just don’t know, you guys.  The internet.  It like knows everything and nothing at once.  Sometimes I think maybe I should just like exit the internet and go live in a cave somewhere (or just my bedroom only this time with no online access).  Then maybe I could go meet my friend out at a bar without this guy threatening to laugh in my face.

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Don’t You Wish You Were Cool Like Us?

22 Mar

I know that a while back I wrote a blog post about how much I love my friends.  Maybe some of you think that one post on such a topic would be enough but I disagree.  My friends are just really super awesome.  By the end of this post you are (a) going to think me and my friends are all incredibly weird and you’ll thank your lucky stars that you only read about our antics on the interweb, (b) you will want to come hang out with us all the time because we’re funny (c) you will oscillate between those two things, which is normal, but eventually will you come to the dark side AKA the side where you are friends with us or (d) you will be totally grossed out and never read my blog again.  Anyway, here is why my friends are awesome:

So yesterday I spent the day sort of rewriting an article for a magazine I occasionally contribute to.  (You can read my past article here!  It’s about consent!)  I had to rewrite it because my editor was, shall we say, displeased that the direction my article took was only (in my estimation) 70% related to the proposal I had sent her back in January.  Apparently when you write for other people you can’t just write about what you’re interested in at that exact moment, you have to somehow get back to what you were interested in months prior.  Live and learn, right?  Anyway, so I had to do some fine-tuning so that the article I wrote better reflected the approved topic.  I spent the better part of the morning/early afternoon working on that and then I decided to take a stroll to visit my friend Heather at work.  She is nice and fun and you should all love her.  Also, she is apparently gifted in the art of cleaning eyeglasses.  I digress.  On my walk to visit Heather I texted one of my friends to see how her second week of work at her new job went and I received the following reply:

“Things are getting busier and making more sense…. (smiley face)… best part of farting in my own office is that I can open my own window.”

I replied that having my own window that I could open at my leisure, but especially after farting, was my new goal in life.  Not in so many words but she got the point because she, like, gets me.  Anyway, no more than a half hour later, and out of nowhere, I received a g-chat from a different friend that led to the following conversation:

Friend: can you remind me tomorrow that I ate beets today?
Me: Yes.
Friend: Thank you! (You understand.)
Me: I had beets on Wednesday night and set myself a phone alarm for Thursday morning.

If you don’t understand why that last conversation was funny then you don’t pay even nearly enough attention to your bowel movements which, in my personal opinion, is ill-advised.  Also, you clearly don’t talk to your friends enough about poop which is unfortunate.  I have this sort of friend-o-meter whereby I know that I am really, truly friends with someone when we can talk about poop together.  And not just like, me telling stories about my own poop but us having a real and honest exchange about it.  I have a lot of poop stories.  I think talking about the embarrassing bathroom things that happen really sort of demystifies the whole thing.  Let me tell you a story about what happened to me recently (you might never look at me the same again or touch my left hand, FYI).

So recently I was in Peru for a trip with one of my friends.  And we were at this cafe and I had to use the bathroom because I pretty much always have to use the bathroom. I inherited my dad’s stomach, something I am not in the least bit thankful for.  Anyway, I went up into the little art/book/miscellany store above the cafe to use the bathroom and realized, too late as it turned out, that there was no toilet paper.  Not only was there no toilet paper, but there also were no paper towels.  Catastrophe!  So I did what any well-traveled individual would do:  I wiped my ass with my left hand.  So there I was, wet and clean butt, wet and unclean hand, pants down, standing in this teeny tiny little bathroom above a cafe on a random street in Lima.  What to do now?  Obviously, I had to wash my hands but here was the little trick: I somehow had to dry my ass without using any paper products because there weren’t any.  Luckily, I had managed to keep my right hand both clean AND dry and there was the leftover cardboard tube from the paper towels sitting to the right of the sink.  Oh, happy day.  So I, by turning the tube inside-out, managed to semi-dry my ass with that and my dry right hand (more absorbent than you might suspect!) and then use my right elbow to turn the water on as hot as it could go to wash my hands about 12 million times.  I then went downstairs, looked at my friend and said:

“You might want to bring napkins up there when you go.  There was an…incident.” I think looked meaningfully at my left hand.

She understood immediately.  And that is why my friends are awesome.  (And also why journalists really need to not complain about the fact that they had to, GASP!, throw their toilet paper away in a garbage can next to the toilet instead of in the toilet while covering the Sochi Olympics.  I think probably they have done worse and that there were more pressing social issues surrounding those games than plumbing that can’t handle an influx of paper.  Just sayin’.)  Oh! And this one other thing.  Sometimes my dad tells jokes and my one friend does this with them.  Don’t you wish you were cool like us?

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Change is A’Comin

16 Mar

I have been doing quite a bit of thinking over the past few weeks.  My life has been in a certain amount of upheaval, in a good way I think.  It’s funny the way that we almost predict things before they happen.  I remember sitting with one of my best friends, a massively important part of my chosen family really, and saying to her that I felt like I was waking up day after day and not getting anywhere.  Like, I could go to sleep 30 and wake up 26, look around and things would look more or less the same.  I mean, obviously that’s not exactly the truth.  A lot has happened in the past 4 years.  I have met a lot of people, gotten my Master’s degree, started this blog, gotten into a serious relationship.  But in many ways I felt as though I had been running in place.  People would ask me what was new and I felt I could just shrug my shoulders and, to me, that felt like a pretty accurate representation of what had been happening since whenever it was that we last spoke.  But then I went ahead and I burned the whole thing down.

A few weeks ago I was thinking back to what a bad ass I was in high school.  I was so fucking principled and like, I just didn’t give a fuck.  I mean, not that I would hurt people without thinking twice about it, but I always sort of felt like when I was right I was right and authority could suck it.  I didn’t speak my mind for the sake of it, because I thought it was fun or something.  I would say something when I thought, for whatever reason, that it needed saying.  Like the time I got kicked out of homeroom for refusing to stand and recite the pledge of allegiance because I didn’t understand why I should be forced to acknowledge the existence of a god I didn’t know I believed in.  Or the time I got my chemistry teacher fired for reading our grades out loud in class and throwing a chair, not all on the same day.  Or the time I marched myself into the principal’s office, slammed down my AP scores and chastised him for having the nerve to disallow students from challenging themselves because he was afraid of how anything less than a 5 on those AP tests would effect our school’s ranking on some bullshit list of the best public schools in the country.  Seriously, what’s education if your educators tell you you’re too stupid to try something that might be hard?  I mean, these were all sort of silly little things I got all upset about for whatever reason but I got upset and then I said something.  Over the years though I have become slightly more pragmatic, thinking about the long term effects of saying something versus the importance of standing up for something you believe in.  Although that might be a good thing some times, it made me lose sight of myself a little and now, at 30, I want a little piece of my 16-year-old self back.

At some point over the past however many years I decided that my own feelings about things were sort of irrelevant, as long as other people felt good.  I would sort of tie myself in knots in an ill-fated effort to make sure everyone around me felt happy and supported.  The thing about it though is that you simply cannot make everyone happy all the time and if you try, well then you are just a fool.  There are people that will just keep taking and never return the favor.  There are red flags that shoot up in certain relationships that just cannot be ignored forever because those people will turn their backs on you when you finally need something in return.  And then there are those people, some of whom have been there all along and some who come out of nowhere, that step up to fill in the gaps.  I don’t know, people are surprising.

So here is what I have realized.  Putting everyone before yourself is stupid because it leaves you completely hallowed out and incapable of asking for anything in return.  I think that keeping this blog has really been an exercise in reteaching myself that lesson.  I sit at my computer and write about my experiences in the most accurate way possible.  I try and be kind, unless of course I am recounting some story about someone being an asshole in which case kindness is really an afterthought. Honestly, I believe when people are cruel they should be held accountable.  Anyway, then I publish it and let people read it on their own.  I like to think that my going through life, trying to be as decent a person as I can be is enough information for people to understand that my motives in writing are never to be mean or hurtful.  The reality that I need to remind myself of is that just as I bring my own experiences to the table when I write what I do, other people bring their own experiences when they read it.  I cannot expect people to interpret my words the way I want them to.  When I put my words out there, it is entirely out of my hands.  People are going to take from it what they take from it and I have to be okay with that.  Sometimes people are going to feel hurt, even if I do everything in my power to keep that from happening.  It is, unfortunately, inevitable. And so I have to stop beating myself up about it and just realize I cannot be in control of how people see me and think of me.  All I can do is go through life trying to be as good as I can without compromising myself in the process.

So here’s what I am going to do.  I am going to go back to the version of me that didn’t get anxious about people being upset with me all the time.  I’m going to stand up for myself in my relationships more than I have over the past few years.  I am not going to just sit idly by while my life just sort of happens.  If something isn’t working for me, I am going to change it.  And all the while I will try and write about it here.  So, wish me luck and hopefully you’ll all still like me.  If not?  Well, I don’t know.  I guess we will cross that bridge when and if we come to it.

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Something About Me

16 Feb

You guys?  I like the opera.  It’s true!  I have gone to the opera twice in the last year or so and I liked it both times!  If I had told my 15-year-old self, or even my 25-year-old self, this bit of information both of those selves, and all the selves in between, probably would have laughed and said something along the lines of

“Why in the world would you want to sit in a room and listen to people yodel for 4 hours?”

Here’s the thing.  Opera singers, as it turns out, do not yodel.  To be fair, I don’t think I ever thought they actually yodeled, I think it was just my way of being a dismissive asshole.  Kids, you know?  (Also maybe 25-year-olds?)

Anyway so last night my friend Dee took me to see Rusalka at The Metropolitan Opera and it was really great.  Here are some facts:

–> Rusalka, by Antonin Dvorak,* is one of the most successful Czech operas.

–> The story-line was written by the poet Jaroslav Kvapil based on fairy tales by Karel Jaromir Erben and Bozena Nemcova.

–> As if we didn’t all know this already, fairy tales are deeply disturbing.

–>A ‘Rusalka,’ in Slavic mythology, is a water sprite who most often lives in a lake or a river.

As one might assume, the character Rusalka in Rusalka is a water nymph and a lot of the staging takes place in and around a neat little lake thing.  Set designers are really unbelievable.  I think maybe I will be a set designer in my next life.  The basic story is that Rusalka, stuck in the depths of the lake, falls in love with a human and goes to the witch Jezibaba to be turned into a human so that she can experience the love of her prince.  Jezibaba says that in return Rusalka must give up her voice.  Obviously I was having flashbacks to The Little Mermaid through the entire opera which kind of made me feel like a bad person and also very deeply American.  (I know it was written by Hans Christian Anderson [a Dutchman!] but all I can think of is Walt Disney.)  I kept imagining Jezibaba with 8 arms.  Sadly, or happily maybe, she only had two and that did not change at any point during the performance.  There was scandal!  There was cheating!  There was heartbreak!  There was serious repetition of the words ‘alas’ and ‘woe.’  I’m not going to give away the particularities of the ending just in case you want to see it, but if you want a clue just imagine what would have happened had The Little Mermaid taken an incredibly tragic turn and someone died.  It really had to happen that way because, as far as I can tell, a good opera has a very drawn-out death scene.  It’s not an opera unless someone lies crumpled on the ground, vocal cords exhausted, when the final curtain falls.

Unlike The Little Mermaid, Rusalka was 4 hours long with two intermissions.  Dee and I got “seats” in the Family Circle which basically meant we were relegated to standing at the tippy top of the theater leaning on carpeted platforms that had the little translation screens embedded in them.  (Note to anyone who decides to go see it: be careful that you don’t hit the button to the right of the screen with your elbow and spend the first 10 minutes of the performance trying to decipher the songs sung in Russian using German subtitles.  There are English subtitles.  I went through this so you don’t have to.)  You might think “ugh, how awful!  What a waste of money!”  Well, you would be wrong!  It is true, we couldn’t make out facial expressions or the details of the sets or costumes, but what we could do was hear the voices which, in opera, do not use any sort of amplification other than what is provided by the architecture of the theater itself.  We were standing SO HIGH and yet we could hear the performers’ voices over all the hundreds of people and seats and over all the instruments in the pit. And let me tell you there were a lot of instruments in there.  To think about it is really awe inspiring.

As a feminist there were parts of the story that I found problematic.  In modern parlance I would say that there was quite a bit of slut shaming throughout.  But the thing was written in the late 1890s so I really have to forgive it that.  It is interesting, though, to really think about how long the history of gender inequality is and how deeply our cultural understanding of the role of men and women really runs.  It makes people’s preconceived notions much more understandable, even though they are based in antiquated ideas and therefore should be challenged.  That particular problem aside, I thought the opera was lovely.  And I was impressed by the diversity of the crowd.  And I was very thankful that, at an institution as incredible and beautiful as The Met, I was able to go out for a magical and affordable night with one of my best girlfriends.  Let’s hope that great art always finds a way to be affordable for as many people as possible, even if it means 4 hours of standing.

So, yea, if you’re in New York, give the opera a whirl.  You won’t be disappointed.  Even if you find it’s not your thing, just bask in the incredible possibility of human talent and hard work.  It’ll take your breath away.

*I don’t know how to make all the appropriate accents and pronunciation marks over his name.  I am not good at technology.  Sorry, Dvorak.

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Rules for Life

22 Jan

The other day I looked in the mirror and discovered that I have a weird red, scaly, dry patch just above my right eye.  It doesn’t hurt or itch or anything, it just looks a little weird.  Also, two days ago I accidentally scratched it and it was terrible.  I don’t really know what it is but I am pretty much convinced that it is going to take over my entire face, slowly at first and then more aggressively as it builds confidence.  I will go to sleep Rebekah and wake up the next morning in a new form:  LizardRebekah.  I was informed by my friend Beth that if I in fact turn into a lizard my cats will cease to recognize me and will probably eat me because cats eat lizards.  She knows this because she lives in Arizona.

Okay, okay, okay, so maybe I am overreacting.  But seriously, where did this thing come from?  I woke up one day and there it was!  So I did what I always do when something creepy happens, I broke one of my “Rules for Life.” There are, up until this point, only three Rules for Life although a new one can be added at any time.  I have actually been working on a rule concerning the consumption of airplane food (it should never be eaten!) but I haven’t managed to get the wording exactly how I want.  Anyway, the existing Rules are as follows:

1.  No fighting in the car or other places from which you cannot make a speedy escape.
2.  The nose is an out hole.  The only exception is for the use of Neti Pots and Nasonex.
3.  Never diagnose yourself using the internet because you pretty much always get diagnosed with some form of cancer.

Obviously, I broke the third Rule for Life.  I always, always, always break that rule.  It’s like, I simply can’t help myself.  One time* I ate beets and was convinced the next morning that the fact that my shit was a weird color was due to the fact that I was obviously dying from some sort of stomach cancer.  The internet agreed.  I wasn’t, obviously, but I really scared myself.  I was about halfway through dialing my parents’ house to tell them about my life-ending illness when I remembered dinner.  Come to think of it, I should probably make a rule about setting some sort of reminder following the consumption of beets.

Anyway, so I broke the rule and I started looking through WebMd and it doesn’t say anything about a dry skin patch slowly taking over my entire face, maybe even body, and morphing me into a lizard.  It mentions psoriasis which is scary but that doesn’t come on the face. It mostly impacts elbows and knees and hands and stuff.  Also, eczema.  Same thing.  So I have come to the conclusion that either I have a new, fatal skin disease that has never before been diagnosed or else it is just a dry skin patch caused by exposure to the elements.  I will put lotion on it and see what happens.  In the mean time, my cats will be locked in the closet.**

*I am being really generous saying this happened one time.  I think that this panic happens about 50% of the time that I eat beets.  Embarrassing, but true.

** I am totally kidding about that.  I love my cats, even if they do want to eat me.

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That Time I Looked like Groucho Marx.

15 Jan

When I was in grade school I got this assignment to write an essay about a word.  Just one single word that each of us were able to pick.  I picked the word “hate.”  I picked the word hate because I used it all the time in all sorts of different occasions.  To describe my feelings about steak and asparagus, about this kid in my class who told me I had a mustache (thanks for years of insecurity, asshole), about the three weeks in school when we had to line dance in gym class.  My grandma, Bama to us, always said to me, “Bekahboo, hate is a very strong word.  Just say that you dislike line dancing in gym class very strongly.”  I tried it.  It lacked a certain, how you say, panache.*  So being a stubborn jerk sort of since birth, I decided I would write about hate and prove Bama wrong.

In the process of writing the paper, I realized that Bama was right.  Damnit.  In order to hate someone, like really actually hate them, you have to dehumanize them.  It’s what I always come back to whenever I read about the horrible things people do to other people.  In order to treat someone terribly and feel no remorse, you have to hate them.  You have to think of them as somehow less valuable, less human.  It is an emotion I never want to really, truly feel.  I never want to get to a point in my life where I dislike someone so intensely that I am able to cause them extreme pain, be it physical or emotional.  I don’t ever want my heart to go there.  But I think that for me, coming to an understanding about the word hate has been helpful, especially considering that I got both my undergraduate and graduate degrees in international affairs.  I spent a lot of my time, and still do actually, reading about how people are shitheads.  The only way for me to grapple with some of the truly awful things people are capable of was to put it in the context of that long ago written paper.  It doesn’t make my stomach not turn, or make me not want to throw my computer against the wall, but it offers up a starting point and I guess that is something.

So the whole point of this was not to give you a rundown of my fifth grade assignment (or whenever it was), although to be fair I would love to read that paper now.  (Hey, mom, do you think it is in one of those cardboard boxes of things from my yoot?)  Maybe if I find it I will even type it out on my blog somewhere for all of our amusement.  I will even leave in all spelling errors and grammar issues.  I think it could be fun.  I really hope that somewhere in the paper I talk about the kid who told me I had a mustache.  I am actually still mad at him about that despite the fact that I haven’t seen him since my high school graduation, lo these many years ago.  I hold a grudge.  Learned that from Bama, also.  Kids can be really mean, you know?  The mustache thing is actually a funny story.  So there I was, with a ridiculously thick head full of hair (as I still have today), and no idea that I looked like a young, female Groucho Marx.  And this jerk came up to me and was all

“Rebekah has a mustache, Rebekah has a mustache!”

And so I said,

“Whatever, idiot, only boys have mustaches!”

And I ran to the bathroom and looked in the mirror and *gasp!* there is was!  I spent the rest of the day walking around the school trying in vain to cover my face from my mouth to my nose.  Obviously, I looked foolish.  I didn’t want to talk to my mom about it because she had red hair and clearly knew nothing from mustaches so I went to the source:  the Frank side of the family.  We all have dark hair and, I would venture to guess, we all have a little ‘stache going on.  Except maybe for my sister.  I feel like my sister does not have a mustache.  Anyway, so I went and I talked to Bama and my Aunt Mindy about it and they told me to bleach it.  Of course, they didn’t realize how explicit they had to be, or how good I have always been at pretending like I know what someone is talking about, because I thought that I had to take Clorox to my face and that sounded like a terrible idea. I wasn’t a stupid kid.  There was no way in hell I was putting that shit anywhere near my mouth.  So instead I suffered through another few years of looking like Groucho until at the pharmacy I discovered Sally Hansen bleach.  So that’s what they meant. I bought some and for the next few years instead of having a dark mustache, I had one that was blondeish-orangeish that really showed up in the sun.  So, that was pretty fun.

Anyway, I wax it myself now.  Sometimes.  At this point in my life I don’t really give a shit about it.  It’s hair.  It isn’t going to like, jump off my face and gouge someone’s eye out or anything (although that would be an amazing super-hero power).  And actually, I don’t think it’s even all that bad.  There is this old lady on my street with a SERIOUS mustache and I gotta tell ya, I think she is sort of amazing for just not giving a shit.  I like to imagine that if I was as great as her when I was in grade school I’d look at that kid and be all,

“Yea, well you don’t have a mustache.  Prepubescent wuss.”

And then I would secretly have a complex but at least he would have one also.  Until he went through puberty and started growing facial hair and then found me in the hallway and rubbed his creepy little boy mustache in my face.  Not literally, of course.  I guess by that point I would have already discovered the bleach, AKA facial hair highlighter.  And I’m sure he would have found something else to pick on me about.  I feel like he used to pick on me a lot. Not often, but he would just kind of materialize out of nowhere and say something mean that would stick with me and then he would disappear again. Like the time it was hot in school and I was wearing a long-sleeved grey shirt and I had some sweat in my armpits and he came over and was like “you have sweaty arm pits!”   And I was like “so?” because that was all I could think of and then he laughed in my face and then for years I was afraid of wearing long-sleeved shirts.  Whatever, my body is very efficient at cooling itself.  Fuck you.

Well, this blog post went in a surprising direction.  I’m not actually sure how to tie this whole thing together because not only do I not hate the guy who used to poke fun at me growing up, I don’t really even dislike him very strongly.  I’m just a little mad at him.  He was just an asshole kid who, odds are, grew up to be a very nice adult.  I wonder if the internet knows.  Rabbit hole, here I come.

*Did you know that in Canada they use the word panache to describe antlers?  Or as a synonym for antlers?  Or something?  I love writing.  Always learn such interesting and largely useless things about words.  Oftentimes that you have been using them wrong.  Kind of like my use of panache.

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My Final Post

31 Dec

In 2013!  I got you there, didn’t I?  You thought this was my last post ever.  PSYCH!  Ha.  Okay.  Moving on.  Seeing as how this is the very last day in 2013, I thought maybe I would try to squeeze in one last blog post.  So, here it goes.

On my way to work yesterday, and having recently turned 30, I was thinking about all the things my also recently-turned-30 friends have been posting about being 30.  Like, how to know you’re 30.  Why your 30s are better than your 20s.  And things to stop saying in your 30s.  Sorry I didn’t link them all but after skimming through half a dozen such lists my eyes glazed over and I sort of just wanted to melt into a metallic puddle sort of like Alex Mack did on that show.  Come to think of it, I often fantasize about melting into a metallic puddle and sneaking out of, and into, places but that’s a story for another day.  So here are a few things. First of all, and maybe it’s because I wasn’t an avid social media user when I turned 20, I don’t ever remember there being lists about the things one should and should not do and say and think when maturing from teen to after teen.  Second of all, shut up.  I don’t know who made these people the authorities on the ways people should behave when they reach a certain age but I would like to see some credentials.  I would then like to take those supposed credentials, rip them up, throw them on the ground, and jump on them sort of like the bubble wrap my friend Carie and I discovered on a street corner a few years back.  There we were, two adults, one in her 30s, jumping up and down like lunatics on a giant sheet of bubble wrap, giggling and generally causing a scene.  We were, as some may say, acting “totes cray” and it was fantastic.  In fact, I wouldn’t mind jumping on a sheet of bubble wrap right about now.  Anyway, back to the list.  I agree with my friend Peter who, on a Facebook post mere hours after I was initially thinking about writing this post (get out of my HEAD, Peter!) said the following (much better than I ever could, mind you):

“There’s an article on Huffington Post about things you should not be saying once you’re over the age of 30. And I just thought, who is this punk to tell people what they should say and shouldn’t say? There are all these ways that people tell each other that they’re not good enough, that they’re unknowingly foolish and our minds get filled up with these corrections. Don’t write about this subject. This is how you ought to be. Don’t do this, don’t wear that hat, quit posting this, it’s too long, it’s too political…so for this New Year, my first resolution and wish for all of us is that we banish these little voices that seek to gain power or status over the “foolish masses” by shaming us for innocuous habits.”

Granted, there are things that people say that I don’t like.  It has nothing to do with age or anything, I just think these things are cliche, sound stupid, or make basically no sense.  But you know what?  I personally just don’t say them.* Anyway, I don’t know.  I am 30 and I sometimes say stupid things.  I also still have stuffed animals on my bed, do not own an iron, have no professional clothing, and sometimes I even eat junk food in the middle of the night (apparently all no-nos according to the internet).  I think I am still doing okay.  I also think that I shouldn’t just wake up one morning and be like “oh, I have turned this entirely arbitrary age and now I have to start behaving like An Adult.”  Whatever.  I like behaving like me.  So, I have compiled a list of things that people should stop doing altogether, no matter the age (this is in no particular order):

1. Stop making lists telling people what they should and should not do.

Oh, well, I guess according to my own list the list should just stop there.  That was a close one.  I just totally almost made a complete fool of myself.  But seriously.  I love The Internet just as much as the next person who enjoys cat videos, but I am oftentimes shocked by the things that go viral.  So that list, which obviously originated on Huffpost Women because shaming women is like a national pastime, must have been posted by like a dozen of my Facebook friends.  And I just kind of think that maybe there are other things that people should refrain from saying in casual conversation at all ages.  You know, things that hurt other people.  Things like saying something is “gay” or “retarded.”  Making jokes about rape.  Calling someone a whore or a fatass or a faggot.  Using racial epithets.  I don’t know, words like “adorbs” seem comparatively harmless.

So, anyway, that is all from me in 2013.  Thank you everyone for reading.  It was a banner year!  And I think next year will be even bannerier!  I’m looking forward to it.  Good things are coming down the pipeline for me.  And maybe for you.  Who knows.  In summation, this coming year I hope to write more, be nicer to people who are nice to me and meaner to people who aren’t, and check my email more often.  Try sending me an email sometime in mid-2014 and see what happens.  Hopefully something.

*Okay, fine, there was a recent time when I posted on a friend’s page my annoyance with the phrase “says nobody ever” but I didn’t write a post about it.  And I also don’t judge people for saying it.  I just think it is dumb, not funny and overused. But keep right on saying it if it strikes your fancy!

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Robo Callers can Robo Suck It

27 Dec

What follows is a rant.  For those of you that like my funny ones better and not my ranty ones (ahem Dad, I am talking to you) then maybe you should just stop reading.  Although there is a possibility that this post will contain at least a small percentage of humor, meaning that there is the admittedly outside possibility for this to be the funniest blog post I have ever written and you would have missed it because you are biased against my rants (because you have been hearing them for the past three decades in loud volume).  I’m just saying, choose wisely.

So listen.  I know that I have written about this definitely once but maybe even two times.  I believe it is important enough to warrant some repetition.  These goddamn spam callers are making me crazy!  Seriously.  I have been on the National Do Not Call Registry for so many years and yet I still receive these calls at least two times a week.  This is how it goes.  I get a call from a number I do not recognize.  I immediately get rage-filled.  Depending on my mood I either let the call go and research it on the internet to discover that it is some company trying to lower my interest rate or I answer the call and play the following game:  try to get the individual on the other end of the line to identify the name of their company before they hang up on me.  This game is really not that fun for the following two reasons:  (1) I always, I mean always, lose; and (2) the result is that I get even more rage-filled.  It’s as if I am a super hero and spam calls to my cell phone are my kryptonite.  I might be in complete control of my temper and my reaction to things and then my phone rings with some random 616 number and BAM any modicom of restraint I had flies right out the window.

So at work the other day I was talking to my one customer about my disdain for spam callers.  This came up because my dislike for spam callers is matched by my dislike for people who sell things on the television that are obviously pieces of crap but they market them towards people who are elderly, unwell, or stupid.  I think that is really mean-spirited.  So when my grandpa was all hopped-up on end-of-life pain medication he was watching TV and found this advertisement for newly minted nickels.  So my grandpa, bless his heart, spent something like $1000 on $500 worth of nickels because the commercial told him they would appreciate in value.  They were fucking nickels.  A nickel is worth five cents.  It does not matter how nice of a box you put them in or how shiny they are they are worth five cents from now until the end of time.  The only thing that changes about the value of a nickel is that it becomes less valuable because of inflation.  In his better days my grandpa knew that because he was good at things and also smart but when you’re sick and on medication and watching late-night television because you can’t sleep your judgement tends to go out the window.  And these people are there like little vultures, circling around just waiting to feast on you.  Seriously, fuck those people.  They make me so mad.

So anyway, I was talking to one of my customers about this and he said to me something that people say to me all the time because I have opinions and express them often and animatedly:

Why don’t you tell me how you really feel?

I hate that.  It’s like, I just told you.  That IS how I really feel and if you wouldn’t have made that “joke” I would have run out of steam and moved on to something else.  But now we both have to suffer because I am going to continue to get myself all worked up about spam calls and the value of nickels and you have to listen to it while you drink the vodka and orange juice I’m pretty sure you’re now regretting having ordered.

Anyway, in mid-rant this customer, who has obviously become accustomed to my antics or else is very skilled at blocking me out until there appears to be a break in the rant at which time he can sneak in a comment, said something about feeling badly for the people that work for the cold calling companies.  He pointed out what a terrible job it is and you know what?  He had a point.  In all the time I spent being mad at people who call me and tell me they can lower my interest rate it never occurred to me that I should be angry not at the person calling, but at the person who owns the company because, really, there aren’t that many jobs out there and maybe having a job, albeit an inherently dishonest one, is better than nothing?  I mean, who knows, maybe the grandpa of the woman who called me a few weeks ago also bought nickels at a wildly inflated price.  Or, maybe the woman was a robot.

And, actually, you should go read that article I just linked because it explains EXACTLY why these calls piss me off so much.  They piss me off because if you try to talk to a real person after dealing with a robot and ask them questions about the robot, themselves, or the company then they hang up on you.  It’s like, you called me so why are you being a dick?  No one will give you any actual information because the whole thing is a fucked-up scam.  And then when you finally do manage to get information* and then publish that information online, all of the phone numbers associated with the “company” go to busy signals when you call and the company’s website comes down off the internet.  The whole thing makes me see red.

In the next edition of things that make me crazy, I will write an open letter to both Chase Bank and Discover about the psychological damage their constant credit card come ons have caused me.  Stay turned.

*Apparently calling and telling them that you work for Time yields better results than telling them that you are the editor-in-chief and main (read: only) contributor at FranklyRebekah.com.

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After this Post I will Let Happy Overshadow Sad

10 Oct

For all time going forward, yesterday, October 9, 2013, will be known (in my mind at least) as the day I met one of my closest friend’s new son, Theo.  But for the purpose of this blog post, in this moment, and as a way for me to allow my head to move beyond a very disturbing event, yesterday was the day I saw a guy get hit by a bus.

Okay.  I didn’t actually see him get struck, luckily.  I was walking down Ditmas Avenue at about 5pm when I heard a loud noise.  I looked to my right and saw a bus, stopped somewhat crooked in its lane as if it were just pulling away from the curb or had just completed a turn, a slowly building crowd, and a lump on the ground.  It took me a second to realize that the lump was a man lying in a heap in front of the MTA bus, the B103 I think, that had just struck him. I called 911, hoping the person who answered my call would thank me and tell me the accident had already been reported.  Instead, she asked for my exact location – Flatbush, in between Ditmas and Newkirk – and told me to stay on the line, she was going to connect me to a different person.  I held for what seemed like an eternity, though it was probably closer to one minute, until another woman answered the phone and again asked me for my location.  I reported it and then she peppered me with questions:  Is he moving?  Can you see him breathing?  Is he awake?  Are his eyes open?

The accident had occurred close to Newkirk, and I was nearer Ditmas.  I was hoping to be able to report the incident from afar, never getting close enough to see the damage that a bus can cause a human being.  Unfortunately, I was out of luck.  I ran down the block towards the incident, looking for any sign of movement.  Initially I had thought I saw the man move, but I quickly realized that the movement I thought I saw was likely not made through his own power, but was instead the result of him being struck by a huge piece of machinery.  By the time I got close enough to see the growing blood stain on the concrete, there was no movement to detect.  He was facing away from me so I couldn’t tell whether or not his eyes were open.  Although he was lying on his left side, his face appeared to be almost entirely in contact with the asphalt.  I reported to the dispatcher what another bystander had told me:  he was not moving but he was alive.  I also told her about the state of the bus:  the windshield had a spiderweb-like crack that had spread to cover, in various densities, almost the entire expanse of glass.  She told me she had assigned a job number, that help was on the way.  She took my number and I said I would stay there as long as it took first responders to arrive.

As I waited, I did all I could to not look at the man lying in the road.  I have no medical background; calling for help was really the only thing I could do.  I surveyed the growing crowd.  There were people standing in front of their businesses, looking.  And then there were people standing around the man, not touching him, taking his photograph.  There were all these people with their cell phones out and yet I was the first person to call for help.

I remember learning about the Kitty Genovese case from from the 1960s which became the most commonly used example of the bystander effect.  The idea is that oftentimes people don’t call for help because they assume someone else has already done it.  The more people present, the more likely people believe it is that someone else has already stepped up.  I suppose I have the benefit of having learned about Kitty Genovese.  I have sat in classrooms and wondered to myself whether or not I would do something if I encountered someone in need of help.  And to be honest, there was a moment in my mind where, upon noticing the mounting crowd, I assumed someone else had already called 911.  I assumed they were already notified and that another call would simply be an annoyance.  But then I thought well, what if no one called? Could I live with myself if I left the scene and it turned out, although I likely would never know, that the man laid there for more time than necessary?  So I called and I’m glad I did.

I waited until the first fire truck arrived and I rushed off, trying to get out of there before they either lifted the man onto the stretcher or declared him dead.  I thought I had already seen enough and I was concerned about what the injured side of his body might reveal to me.  I was of no use at that point, and the last thing I wanted to be was yet another person standing there, watching, as a man experienced the worst moment of his life.  So I fled, eyes burning as I finally came to terms with what had just happened.

So that’s it. And now that the experience is out there in the world, I can remember yesterday as a happy day.  I can now stop searching for information regarding the fate of the man I saw and I can stop wondering why in the world anyone would want a photograph or video of someone lying on the street, possibly dead, after being struck by a bus.

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Sick Brain

3 Oct

So this past Monday I came down with a cold.  It started as exhaustion, turned into a massive earache, and ended with crazy sinus pressure and a stuffed nose.  This illness is not the result of a change in weather.  It is not due to the germs that have been running rampant through my bar and beyond for the past few weeks.  And it certainly has nothing to do with the fact that, even though I was aware of said germs and the crazy weather, I drank a little too much after working really hard at the Atlantic Antic.  No, it is not because of any of those things.  I blame my sickness entirely on the government shut down.

Now that we have gotten that out of the way, I would like to talk to you all a little about the past few days.  The first thing I did on Tuesday upon waking up with a nose that was so full of snot that it felt like it weighed about 50 pounds was to make myself a big cup of coffee.  Obviously that is the smart thing to do.  So, I went into the kitchen, scooped out a ridiculous amount of ground coffee, and filled my pot up with the correct amount of water for the million cups of coffee that I planned on drinking.  I then pressed the button to turn it on and went to take a shower.  After the shower, I walked back into the kitchen to pour myself a cup when I noticed that my coffee was clear.  It was so clear that it looked just like water.  How could that be?  After a close and in depth investigation I realized that, due to the government shutdown, I neglected to pour the water into the coffee machine and therefore only succeeded in creating mildly warm water.  But the government doesn’t control me or my coffee intake so I quickly remedied the situation.  I then proceeded to drink All Of The Coffee and gave myself a stomach ache.  I blamed my stomach ache on the government shutdown

The rest of my week was spent trying to understand how in the world the government was shut down.  When I think about the jobs of our elected officials, and I think about writing a list of their responsibilities, the first thing I would write would be to keep the government running.  But hey, what do I know.

That last paragraph was actually inaccurate.  Well, not the whole thing.  I do think that if I were to write our lawmakers a list of responsibilities the number one item on the list would be to keep the government running, but I did not spend the rest of the week thinking about why the government shut down.  I spent the rest of the week intermittently feeling sorry for myself for being sick (while cursing my lady bits because obviously my period started in the middle of the cold — thanks, government) and watching episode after episode of The Good Wife because it is so good and I am literally obsessed with Dan Rydell.  Dan Rydell is not a real person, you say?  (By the way, for this I also blame the government shutdown.)  Well then, fine, I am obsessed with Josh Charles who played Dan Rydell in Sports Night and now plays Will Gardner in The Good Wife, who I also love because he is really just Dan Rydell pretending to be a lawyer.  I love Dan Rydell, I mean Will Gardner, I mean Josh Charles so much that I had the following text conversation with my friend Kendra just yesterday:

Me: I’ve been watching a marathon of The Good Wife for the last two days.
Kendra:  My mom is obsessed.
Me: You have to watch it. I’m in love with the guy who plays Will Gardner.  Literally obsessed.
Kendra:  He’s a hottie.
Me: Right? I almost cried when I saw he was recently married.  I thought I had a shot.
Kendra:  Ha.  You never know.  People get pushed in front of a bus every day 😉

And that is one of the many reasons why I love Kendra.  I do not blame Kendra for the government shut down.

Another thing that I have been doing during my self-prescribed quarantine has been to start making videotapes of myself hanging out with my kittys in the room.  My boyfriend tells me that I should make a YouTube channel and that probably my videos would go viral.  So I put one of my videos on YouTube last night and then subsequently lost it because I am terrible at the internet (which, surprise surprise, I blame on the government shut down even though my lack of internet abilities predated it).  But then I had this great idea!  I looked on my phone where I had tried to link the video for one of my friends to see, something I failed at because I had inadvertently made it private which mostly wasn’t inadvertent at all and was more an attempt to shield myself from embarrassment because in this video I sort of look like an alien.  So before you watch the video I need to make some things clear:  (a) I know that I look like an alien; (b) I am just as bad at technology as this video makes it appear; (c) If you watch this video and are like “Rebekah, what are you talking about you don’t look like an alien at all that is what you actually look like” then please don’t tell me because if you do I will either cry or respond with the following thing:  how the hell did you let me go through life looking like an alien without ever telling me?  That’s like letting someone go to a job interview with a huge herb in her front tooth because you are too embarrassed about the ensuing conversation to save her from embarrassment.  If I do, in fact, look like an alien in real life I am aware there is nothing I can do about it but it would be nice at least to know.  Then I would at least know why Dan Rydell chose to marry Sophie Flack instead of me.  Also I would have another thing to blame on the government shutdown.

Anyway, without further adieu, my video.

So, that’s it.  For a recap of my week thus far.

1. I have successfully made it through the entire first season of The Good Wife.

2. I have made three videos, only one of which I have managed to upload onto YouTube because I tried to create a channel but now I can’t find it so I made another channel and my video isn’t on that channel but I don’t know how to upload it to the correct channel using my phone.  None of this would ever have happened if it weren’t for the government shutdown.

3. I have blamed a few things not mentioned here on the government shut down but not nearly enough things so please excuse me while I get back to work.

4.  I have spent an awkward amount of time watching this government shut down-inspired PandaCam and feeling sad that I am not the person who thought of it and also not friends with the person (people?) who thought of it.  Thanks a lot, government shutdown.

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