The Difficulties of Buying a Travel Guide

30 Dec

I am going to Puerto Rico with my super awesome friend Dee this coming Sunday straight from work. Which means my flight is at 5:30am. I would just like to comment on the fact that I always book flights stupid early and I always, always, ALWAYS regret doing it. One of the times I did this I ended up sleeping on a marble slab in the Cancun Airport and the only way I managed to get the small amount of sleep in that I did was because I did not, at that point, know that the Cancun Airport is infested with cockroaches the size of New York City rats. Seriously they are fucking huge. If I had known they were there everything would have been different. And I mean everything.

Anyway, in anticipation of my trip I walked up to the bookstore to buy a Lonely Planet guide for Puerto Rico. I know, I know, we totally have phones for that but I still like to hold on to those days before smart phones and WiFi when I had to rely on guide books and really poorly drawn and labeled maps. I suck at maps and would always end up hopelessly lost but then something super fun and awesome would happen and it would be worth it. So I still buy the books. I don’t care that they are overpriced and non-returnable. All of that aside I found myself standing in the travel section at the book store and had the following questions:

Where do I even look for Puerto Rico? Will it be in the international or domestic travel section?!

Puerto Rico is not a state but it is an unincorporated US territory. Puerto Ricans are not able to vote in US elections but they do pay federal taxes to the United States government. So in my mind Puerto Rico is pretty much the same thing as Washington DC only with more beaches and less lawyers and Washington DC is definitely in the domestic section. So I looked in the domestic section. (This is actually how this all went down, by the way.)

In case you haven’t visited it recently, the travel section at the bookstore is very confusing. For me, anyway. In grade school, using the magic of music, I learned all about organizing library books (and, by extension, books in the bookstore) and how there are different rules for different types of books. We sang songs. We marched around. Here is an excerpt from the song about nonfiction books:

Nonfiction books
Are books that are so true!
They’re on the shelves in number or…
Number oooooor-derrrrrrr

And here is the one about biographies:

Biography!
It’s a real story!
About real people!
Woo!

We never had a song about travel guides though. I’ve had to learn this one on my own. So the way that they do travel guides, I have found, sort of depends on what bookstore you go to. Mostly it depends on how much people care about keeping it organized. The travel section is always getting all sorts of fucked up. I blame the wanderers who spend time leafing through the books. So in the domestic section the books are organized alphabetically by state, and then under the state the big cities are also organized alphabetically. So if you are looking for New Orleans you would look under L for Louisiana and not under N for New Orleans. Sometimes. Sometimes things are also organized by region. I don’t know, it’s weird and confusing. The international section is generally easier, as long as you stay away from Europe. The Europe section is all fucked up also because a lot of Americans go to Europe and so there are all kinds of country groupings, and regional groupings, and books about specific areas within certain small countries (France and Italy have a lot of little mini-books for more specific travel). Other areas of the world that seem less relevant to the majority of American travelers are not nearly so broken up and so are easier to find in the alphabatized world of travel books. So, for example,  it’s hard to buy a book called ALL OF EUROPE but you can get a book called ALL OF SOUTHEAST ASIA AND ALSO A FEW OTHER PLACES. It is located under A. For ALL OF.

As it turns out Puerto Rico was in the international section. The travel section was all like

Fuck you Puerto Rico you are not a real state.

But the thing that was crazy about it was that right near Puerto Rico, in the same international section, were all the books on Hawaii. Now that threw me for a little bit of a loop because last time I checked Hawaii was, in fact, a state with a star on the flag and everything. Also voting rights. So then I thought to myself,

Self, maybe the staff at Barnes and Noble only considers the contiguous United States to be domestic.

I mean, that is absolutely incorrect but I suppose I could see a small amount of logic in there? Maybe? So I looked around in the international section for Alaska. Alaska is not part of the contiguous United States. Alaska was also not in the international section. It was domestic. There goes that theory. So then I figured perhaps they only considered the continental United States, which is the lower 48 plus Alaska, to be domestic. Still inaccurate, by the way, but whatever. Which also brings me to wonder about why we call the contiguous United States the lower 48 when Hawaii is also lower, geographically, than Alaska. It should actually be the lower 49, if we are being specific. But perhaps that labeling came about before August 21, 1959 when Hawaii officially became a state and we just never stopped saying it.

So then I thought maybe the staff of Barnes and Noble just decided that the United States is not a country that brings to mind islands and so anything that is an island — Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Guam — is obviously not part of the actual country and therefore should be located in the international travel section. And besides, Hawaii is not in the Americas but instead in Oceania which sounds like somewhere you would need a passport to visit. Also it doesn’t follow daylight savings time although neither do parts of Indiana and Indiana is squarely located in the domestic section…I mean, it would be…I think…if there was a travel guide written about it.  Maybe it’s the volcano that does it? Or the fact that Hawaii has two official languages: English and Hawaiian.

Hold on a second!

Puerto Rico also has two official languages! English and Spanish! Or, more accurately, Spanish and English.

And then it dawned on me! Obviously the person who organizes the travel section is a linguist and made the domestic/international call based entirely on whether or not a place has more than one official language! Or, on the shittier end, maybe the person is not a linguist and is, in fact, one of those fucked up “English-only” people who doesn’t believe anyone should officially speak anything other than English in the United States, or its territories, and therefore places that do not abide by that rule must be relegated to the international section with the rest of the fascists and their subpar, fascist languages. (Have you noticed that closed-minded people are always throwing accusations of fascism around? I have.)

I think I might write a letter.

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This Just In: Girls Only Write About Shopping

26 Dec

“What are you reading?”

It was 2am on a Friday night. Christmas, it so happens, and I had managed to get out of work incredibly early. Apparently a dance party wasn’t on many people’s agendas for the evening. Especially considering we were without DJ.

“Nothing. Just some brain popcorn.”

That’s a phrase I picked up from an ex-boyfriend of mine and it perfectly defines what I was reading. It’s a totally unchallenging mental vacation. Nothing to write home about. Nothing to organize a book club around. Something perfect for a late night when you’re too wired to sleep but too tired to think critically.

“Brain popcorn, huh? Well who’s it by?”

I am always sort of confused about what it is about a girl at a bar immersed in a book that screams please talk to me but whatever. I will just file that under Mysteries of the Universe.

“It’s really nothing. A Stephanie Plum novel.”

This was not my attempt to be coy or to disparage my reading choice. This was me trying to respectfully hint that I did not come to this bar to talk to anyone other than the person working behind it who is a friend of mine. He was busy so I was using my book <first> as a way to occupy myself until he could grab a few minutes to catch up and <second> as a way to communicate that I was not looking to make friends. Clearly the second part of that was not coming across.

“Oh, well, can I read a paragraph of it? Just whatever page you’re on. Just let me read one paragraph so I can get an idea of what it’s like.”

I practiced some deep breathing exercises and pushed my book towards him, avoiding looking over at him as I did it. I am very practiced at coming across politely disinterested and moderately dismissive. It’s a professional necessity. He picked the book up and went about reading. About a minute later he handed the book back with a chuckle.

“Funny. I just read a paragraph of a book written by a woman and it’s all about shopping. So classic!”

More deep breathing exercises. Someone else’s shift on Christmas is not the time for a feminist take down.

“Well, actually, Stephanie Plum is the character in the book and right now she is taking a man grocery shopping because his apartment got firebombed and he doesn’t have a car. And that is an absurd thing for you to have said. Let me guess…you’re single?”

He turned towards me and cocked his head to the side like a confused puppy. I wasn’t sure whether it was in response to the part about the apartment being firebombed or my incredible ability to accurately guess the state of his love life after only having sat next to him at a bar for 10 minutes. He turned back to his friend, I turned back to Stephanie. A few short moments of blessed reading time followed.

“What’s your favorite quote from literature?”

I sighed. I knew this line. Clearly this dude had some quote memorized that he figured would impress upon me his intelligence and vast knowledge of literature, both classic and obscure. I thought about him, sitting alone in his bedroom with flashcards, memorizing quote after quote to foist upon unsuspecting victims at cocktail parties, job interviews and bars on Christmas at 2am. I should have looked down at my book and recited the following lines:

The door flew open and Carol stood in the doorway, holding a bag of Cheez Doodles. Her hair was smudged with orange doodle dust and stood out from her scalp like an explosion had gone off inside her head. Her mascara was smudged, her lipstick eaten off, replaced with orange doodle stain. She was dressed in a nightgown, sneakers, and a warm-up jacket. Doodle crumbs stuck to the jacket and sparkled in the morning sunlight.

That probably would have handled the problem. Instead I politely declined to answer his question at which point he rattled off a few lines from something or other. To be honest with you I wasn’t paying any attention. I was mostly focusing on keeping my left eyebrow in place and my eyes from turning steely.

“That’s from Moby Dick by Herman Melville. Have you heard of it? You probably haven’t read it. It’s really long.”

At this point I lost control of my eyebrow and shifted focus to holding my temper. I decided the best course of action was to just say nothing at all. Maybe he would get the hint and stop talking. No such luck.

“I took this English class in college with this professor who was a feminist” — he spat this last word — “and she made us read all this stuff. And she talked about how women never got their due and were sometimes overlooked or completely forgotten just for being female. Well, I raised my hand and explained to her how Herman Melville wasn’t appreciated in his time, either. She couldn’t argue with fact. He didn’t make any money off of his book or get any notice or anything. I mean, come on.”

I sat there imagining this dude as a student in the back of class, carefully and demeaningly explaining to his university professor all about this unknown and underappreciated author Herman Melville. And then I thought about how, because every now and again white men aren’t celebrated for their contributions to society during their lifetime, clearly that means that any claim that other groups are systematically omitted from history is absurd and can be debunked. Nothing like one example to disprove racism and sexism, you know?

“Wow. That must have really changed everything for her.”

Sarcasm. It’s totally my thing. I love it.

“Pretty much, yea.”

Except for when people completely miss it. I shook my head in disbelief. Clearly a lost cause. I went back to reading my lady book that was clearly  all about shopping, entertaining my simple lady brain with pretty, sparkly images of credit cards and shoes. Whales? What are those? He went back to making thinly veiled sexist commentary about the world in general, quoting outdated, offensive stand-up skits from the late 80s. Sometimes I just don’t have it in me. Sometimes I just want to be a girl at a bar, reading a book, without feeling the need to educate every neanderthal I come in contact with about the patriarchy. The stupidity is just too much sometimes. It’s exhausting.

 

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On Running While Female

19 Dec

I wrote this post for my running blog, chafingisreal.com, but thought it was a good crossover. And no one reads that blog, anyway. (But you should! I mean, if you feel like it.)

This morning I was met with the following post made in a running group I am a member of on Facebook (I shortened it slightly, italicized it and added the bolding for emphasis):

I’ve always been told to be careful while running alone but I never thought that anyone would actually want to target me as long as I remained in motion running. It sounds naïve… I credit growing up in the city with being street-smart and experienced in dealing with strangers. Yesterday however, was different. I found myself flagging down a police car outside PP and crying about an incident that happened on my run. I had started my run at dusk around ~4:45 and planned on running my usual route… I was about 200 meters from my turn-around point… when I spotted a group of about 6-7 guys “jogging” together on the road in the opposite direction. I thought they must be from nearby HS track team… I continued running. WE continued running, running in opposite directions. A few seconds later I heard rustling in the leaves behind me and I quickly turned around to find two of the guys sneaking up behind me…the two guys had made it about 15ft from me when I realized they were there and the rest were about 10 meters behind those guys, spread out in an envelope-like fashion as if they were about to encircle me. I took my headphones off and locked eyes with the guy in front of me carefully backing out toward the road slowly and he goes “Miss do you have the time?” pointing to his wrist. I nodded side-to-side not sure what I was trying to indicate but I was just too terrified at the time to speak…I proceeded to back away towards the road when the guy replied “No, you don’t have the time?” This time he pointed to the phone on my armband and the group proceeded to narrow in. That is when I started to run… a few hundred meters had never felt so far and I’d never felt so threatened and hopeless. I wondered what would have happened if I was farther from an entrance or if I was listening to music rather than a podcast with pauses in it…I’m terrified of running in the park now.

And now I sit here at my computer, a little heart broken and a little afraid. But more than either of those things, as I sit here in the safety of my own home, I am extremely fucking angry. So permit me a rant, will you?

Listen, I get it. I am a woman. I have friends who are concerned about me running alone in the dark. To appease them, I tend to choose a crappy run on city streets, donning my reflective running gear so that the hundreds of cars that will accompany me on my journey know I am there. I breath in the exhaust fumes rather than the clean(er) air of the park; listen to the honks of cars, trucks and buses rather than the night sounds of the lake. But I shouldn’t have to. None of us should. That it feels like a safer bet to run in traffic than to run in a park is absurd. We are less afraid of being hit by a car than we are of being physically, emotionally, or sexually assaulted by a man, or a group of men. These fears aren’t just mere relics of our high school sex ed classes where we as women were taught to fear strangers rather than men that we know, to always travel in groups, to take precautions to protect ourselves from attack. These fears are real because there is actually a group of young men marauding around the park in the evenings, preying on solo female women, changing them forever.

Because believe me, this sort of scare changes you.

The fear creeps in and it never really goes away. Flashbacks seemingly come out of nowhere. You find yourself second guessing things you say, things you do, places you go. You find yourself looking over your shoulder. You find yourself changing what you think people are capable of, what they are capable of doing to you, how far they will go.

And you know what? I am fucking sick of victims always having to be responsible for our own safety. I am pissed off at the fact that many people, reading about her experience, will immediately ask themselves why she was wearing headphones at night, why she was running alone, why she didn’t take better care when the real question should be why didn’t those men simply not try to attack her? I am pissed off that we live in a society in which 6 or 7 young men thought it was a reasonable idea to scare someone half to death, and for what? A cell phone? So now she walks around the world being afraid and they just go ahead and try to do it again to someone else, like it’s nothing. Because we are so weak, so vulnerable, and no matter how many precautions we take we still don’t take enough. Because we have it coming. Because we owe something to men. Because it is our job to protect ourselves, to take self-defense classes, to run with pepper spray, to make sure we have buddies to walk us home or cab drivers who wait outside to make sure we get into the house okay. It is our job to stay sober at parties and guard our drinks, or to protect our friends who don’t do either. It is our job to ask men, over and over again, to put on a goddamn condom. And when we don’t do these things, people wonder what we were thinking.

We were simply thinking that we are human beings in a world full of human beings. Dreaming that we are on equal footing.

So, yea, clearly the reality is that running alone at night is not safe. But it is just so god damn fucked up that it isn’t. And honestly, I am sick of taking precautions on top of precautions. I am sick of it all being on us. And I am sick of that still not being enough. I am sick of that split second of doubt after something happens to me because I am female where I run through everything I did and wonder what I did wrong. What I did to deserve being spit on, being yelled at, being assaulted. I am sick of feeling that what makes life so dangerous and difficult for me and all other women is something we had no say in.

But it is.

And it shouldn’t be.

But I guess I will go back to running on the streets, to not wearing headphones, to not making eye contact after dusk, to not smiling at strangers, to traveling in groups, to not getting drunk, to always being alert, to being careful about what I wear, what I say, where I go and when. Sounds fun, right? I guess we all ought to just continue to be afraid so that men, and of course this does not apply to all of them, can continue taking what they believe they are entitled to, be it our bodies or our belongings or the safety of our fucking exercise regimes. And then, after they do that, we can combine the fear and anger that we feel upon being threatened or assaulted and combine that with the blame hoisted upon us for our own experience. Because having the experience, living through and with the experience, isn’t enough. We also are expected to apologize for it.

And to the woman who had this experience, I am so, so sorry you went through that and that you will continue to go through it for some time. I am so glad that you managed to escape without physical harm. And I hope that one day soon you feel safe running again.

Happy, and safe, miles, friends.

Another Day, Another Mass Shooting

3 Dec

The other day I was telling this kid about a dream that I have. The dream is to have access to a room with an exposed brick wall, a safety suit (including, but not limited to, safety goggles and heavy duty boots) and shelves full of different types of glass. Nothing too pretty. Bottles, mainly. Oh, and a cleaning crew on call that I would pay very handsomely.* The idea is that when I get really, really angry I can go to this room, put on my safety suit and throw glass forcefully against the wall. I imagine this would be very therapeutic. And then I would call the cleaning crew to clean up. Now, even in my dreams I am aware of the expense of having such a room, and so when I am not using the room (which would be often I hope) I would rent it out to other people. I think I would have to charge them a flat fee for the space itself but also a certain amount of money for each glass broken. Otherwise some asshole with a real rage problem could go in there, run his hand along a shelf and just knock all the glass to the floor, shattering it! And some more conscientious rage-a-holic would throw one or two glasses only more thoughtfully and end up paying the same amount. That would not be fair. And besides, it would not be a good business model to piss off people who get angry enough to hurl things against a wall and watch them shatter. I know. I am one. Anyway I told him this story and instead of getting the giggles that I anticipated (come on, it’s absurd!) I got the following question:

You get angry enough that you want to throw glass against the wall?

I was quiet for a second because, yea, I totally do.  But also,

Yea. You don’t? Do you read the news?

And that brings us here. To today. The day after yet another massacre in the United States, this time at the Inland Regional Center, a state-run facility for individuals with developmental disabilities. Many of us might, with disgust, realize that this is the second such massacre this week, the first one being in Colorado at a Planned Parenthood clinic. That, however, is incorrect. According to the New York Times, on average there is more than one mass shooting every single day.

On average there is more than one mass shooting every day in America.

So far this year, 462 people have died and 1,314 people have been wounded in attacks like the two that were publicized this week alone, attacks that oftentimes take place on streets and in public gathering places and universities. If we look at the number of deaths used by congressional researchers to categorize these events – 4 or more dead – the number of mass shootings does go down. But of course, the killing in Colorado would be left out of that measure because Robert Dear only managed to murder three people. Even without those shootings with less fatalities, the numbers are still harrowing. According to two databases that track all shootings with 4 or more fatalities — shootingtracker.com and gunviolencearchive.org, both unofficial — there have been 354 such shootings in 220 cities in 47 different states since January. According to the Times article,

“In November, six people were killed, five of them shot to death at a campsite in East Texas; 17 were wounded in a shootout as a crowd watched the filming of a music video in New Orleans; and four died, including twin five-month-olds, in an episode of domestic violence in Jacksonville, Fla. So far this week, five people were wounded Sunday morning in a shooting in Kankakee, Ill., and a shooting Wednesday, before the San Bernardino attack, left one woman dead and three men wounded in Savannah, Ga.”

Get ready for it though: it actually gets worse. According to Ted Alcorn who is the research director for Everytown for Gun Safety, a non-profit that advocates for gun control, we have a much bigger problem. It is, he acknowledges, a horrible tragedy that 14 people were killed in one day in California,

“But likely 88 other people died today from gun violence in the United States.”

Alcorn’s organization has studied shootings occurring between 2009 and mid-2015 that left four or more people dead and found certain patterns.

“In only 11 percent of cases did medical, school or legal authorities note signs of mental illness in the gunmen before the attack… Domestic violence figured strongly: In 57 percent of the cases, the victims included a current or former intimate partner or family member of the attacker. Half of all victims were women. More than two-thirds of the shootings took place in private residences; about 28 percent occurred in public spaces… More than 60 percent of the attackers were not prohibited from possessing guns because of prior felonies or other reasons.”

Looking at that information, this whole thing got a hell of a lot scarier. These mass shootings that are covered extensively by the news, are fucking horrifying and exhausting. But that isn’t even the half of it. If we treated domestic violence with the same disbelief that we react with every time there is one of these seemingly random shootings on a street corner somewhere — no, scratch that, if we acknowledged domestic violence as a huge problem at all — it would probably be hard to even leave the house. Just like date rape and intimate partner rape is not treated with the same seriousness as stranger rape, murder at the hands of an intimate partner or family member is not categorized as a public health crisis, or a violence problem, or as symptomatic of the patriarchy but as a private issue. That the victims are mostly women only makes that case stronger. But that’s not the point. A shooting is a shooting is a shooting, a murder is a murder is a murder. Which brings us to something interesting. Something we should perhaps remind those around us, mostly conservative, who pitch a fit every time we think about increasing gun control measures.

Your hero, the man you herald as the Conservative of all Conservatives, was a supporter of gun control. That’s right. The one and only Ronald Reagan, in an op-ed for the New York Times in 1991, said,

“Every year, an average of 9,200 Americans are murdered by handguns. This level of violence must be stopped.”

This, of course, was because Ronald Reagan, along with his press secretary Jim Brady, Washington police officer Thomas Delahanty and Secret Service agent Tim McCarthy, was the victim of a shooting. Reagan was convinced that this event — a mentally unstable young man opening fire with a .22 calibre that he obtained at a pawn shop — never would have happened had the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act (AKA the Brady Bill), named for Jim Brady, been law back in 1981 when the shooting occurred. The Brady Bill, signed into law by Bill Clinton on November 30, 1993, mandated federal background checks on gun purchasers in the United States and imposed a 5-day waiting period on purchases until the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) was started in 1998.

Obviously, the Brady Bill and NICS falls extremely short of actually limiting access of fire arms to people just in general. The proof, unfortunately, is in the pudding. And it doesn’t help that the National Rifle Association is run by money grubbing nutjobs who somehow manage to convince people they are fighting for the Second Amendment when in reality they are a lobby run by extremists who block safety measures in order to continue to line their own pockets with all the blood money that rockets in their direction. (It is worth noting, by the way, that the NRA was not always so fucking insane. It supported the first major federal gun law back in 1934 and backed the 1968 Gun Control Act. Oh, how far they’ve fallen.) But like, the fuck? When does it end? When do we take the power back? When do we say enough is enough? And when did Ronald Reagan seem like the only reasonable Republican out there?

So, yea, I am mad enough I could throw shit. Often. The question is: why aren’t you? And what the fuck are we going to do about it?

*This word is spelled so weird! It goes from hansom to handsomely! Two extra letters. Both silent!

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BLAH BLAH BLAH PORN BLAH BLAH BLAH

1 Dec

Technology is really not my thing. I am fairly certain there is a monster living in my computer and so I have the little lens thing that allows you to video chat with people covered over by a small bit of a post-it note. Also, it seems as though I am almost constantly running into problems. Not your normal, run-of-the-mill problems, either. Like, if I have an issue and I call Apple to have them help me resolve it, they generally will be like,

“Wow, that is really weird. I have never seen anything like this. Okay let’s try this thing which works approximately 99% of the time”

and I’m like

“Yea, okay, but it probably won’t work. I am the 1% and not like the rich kind of 1% but the kind of 1% who has really fucked up luck”

and then sure enough we will try the thing and it will fail. Last time I had computer problems I was the 1% six different times. It’s kind of amazing, actually. If getting shat on by birds and other animals that live in trees (squirrels, lizards) wasn’t already my superhero power then I think being technology’s kryptonite would definitely be it. Or maybe I have two superhero powers. Does anyone know if that is allowed? Let me know, please.

Anyway, for this installment of “Every Piece of Technology Rebekah Touches Turns to Shit,” let us travel back in time to this past Sunday, approximately 4:30 pm. So there I was, sitting in my room, trying to motivate myself to go for a run. I had plans to meet up with a friend at around 6 which left me just enough time for a 4-miler and a shower, if I got a move on. Before the run, though, I decided I just had to go into the website for New York Sports Club and figure out what time the spin class the next day was so I could sign up and get myself to exercise before my bartending shift at 11 the next morning. So I went onto Google and looked up New York Sports Club, clicked on the link and

DANGER!

All of a sudden my computer said that I was on some sort of an insecure site or something and all of my financial information might be compromised. Oh no! So I clicked what I interpreted as the “run away” option which led me to some other site where this pop-up appeared and my computer started beeping at me. Oh my god it was making the most horrible sounds. BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP! I didn’t know what to do. Obviously, I was having an ill fantasy about how at that very moment all of my information was being broadcast into the universe and the little money that I have saved up was just going to go <POOF!> and some asshole living in like Boise or some shit was going to finally buy that gaming system he always wanted. I noticed, through all the beeping, that there was a phone number to call to have someone make sure my computer was secure. I know, I know, you all are probably now leaning towards your computer screen, hand over your mouth, yelling

“You fool! Don’t call the number! The beeping was the hook, but the number is the scam!”

Well, fuck you. It’s really hard to think logically when your computer sounds like it might explode at any moment and you’re thinking all your hard work is only going to go towards buying some kid you’ve never met a new dirt bike! It’s very stressful! So, yea, I called the fucking number. And a dude answered. And he said something about some company or other only I couldn’t really hear him over all the goddamn beeping but I was afraid to close the window because I thought that maybe closing the window was the scam. It was all very stressful. But I decided to see what the guy had to say.

Me: I’m sorry, can I close this window? Is my computer going to explode?
Dude: No ma’am it will not explode. You can close the window.
Me: Okay cool. (Closing window. Silence. No explosions.) Okay so now who am I speaking with? What company is this?
Dude: You called me, ma’am. You are speaking to a representative from Apple.
Me: Yea, I know I called you but I only called you because this number appeared on my screen and I panicked.
Dude: Ma’am, just go to this website.

So I go to the website. Now before we go any further, just let me remind you that I have had many, many problems with my computer. I have had to call Apple Support at least a million times and even though I try to be super polite and friendly when my number pops up I imagine all the representatives are like

No! It’s the girl with the fucked up luck!

And they pass my call around like a hot potato. I bring this up because I am very familiar with what a phone call to Apple entails – automated options menu, long hold times, terrible music. In all my experience with Apple never once has some random dude just answered the phone. Now that the beeping had stopped I was able to actually assess the situation. I definitely had a funny feeling. But whatever, I went to the website. It was a screen sharing thing. So again, I have shared my screen with many an Apple employee and this is not the software they used. So,

Me: Um…what company do you work for?
Dude: Apple, ma’am.
Me: Yea, but this website does not have any connection to Apple whatsoever.
Dude: We contract out to other companies, ma’am. (He loved calling me ma’am. I hated it.)

And this was the moment where it all came together. Apple doesn’t contract shit out to other companies. Apple is an asshole! I told the dude on the phone maybe he should try working for a reputable company rather than a scam operation. He kept telling me that I called him. I couldn’t argue with his logic. I could, however, call him a liar, a thief and a scoundrel which, by the way, I did (I had been trying to find a situation in which to use the word scoundrel for like a week). I hung up the phone forcefully (well, as forcefully as you can press the end call button on a Samsung Galaxy which, admittedly, is not very forcefully at all) and I called actual Apple. I was greeted by the familiar automated options menu, the longer-than-average wait times and the terrible hold music. Aaaah, safety. And then I talked to some dude from Kansas. I told him, in rather colorful language, about the horrible beeping, the phone call, the dude who kept calling me ma’am, making me feel old and stupid. He told me the phone call was being recorded and if I could please stop swearing so much. Kansans. So sensitive. And then he helped me make sure my computer hadn’t been compromised! In the meantime, however, something really awkward happened.

Okay, so in order to make sure that I hadn’t gotten any of that evil malware (dun dun DUUUUN!) we had to go clear my history in all the browsers. So I have this guy — he told me to call him D because he said his name is hard to pronounce but I saw it written there and it didn’t look that hard to me but whatever, I had already insulted him by assaulting his ears with my potty mouth — and he is sharing my screen. I have my normal little cursor and D has this little red arrow and he keeps moving it around the screen, pointing to things. It’s really cute, the arrow. At this moment I am thinking to myself, wow, it’s a really good thing I don’t watch totally fucked up porn on my computer because that would be incredibly awkward. Like, imagine if I was into some weird shit involving barnyard animals and he would be all like

“Yea, I think there is some malware attached to this video of someone fucking a cow in the barn”

and I’d have to be like

“I guess that makes sense. Okaythankyougoodbye.”

and then I would hide under my covers for the rest of time. There was nothing like that on there because I do not watch porn involving barnyard animals. Or other kinds of animals, for that matter. Or, if we’re being completely honest, porn at all because I am so nervous about accidentally watching malware porn and having to talk to someone on the phone while we both pretend to not be seeing what is right in front of our faces. I really like my life and would prefer not to spend the rest of it hiding in my room from some dude I talked to on the phone one time who I will never ever see or speak to again and who has undoubtedly seen much worse. Also, as a feminist, I have some issues with a lot of mainstream pornography but that’s a story for another day. Moving on. We go into my history and there it is,

“BLAH BLAH BLAH PORN BLAH BLAH BLAH”

And at that moment I realize that I had just been reading an article about how Stoya had accused her ex-boyfriend James Deen of rape. Both of these people work in the adult film industry and this was especially surprising and problematic because James Deen has always been heralded by feminist media as one of the good guys. And Stoya is kind of awesome. She writes articles about the adult film industry that I think are incredibly helpful in adding nuance and complexity into our understanding of sex work. Obviously the titles of the articles about Stoya’s accusations aren’t things like

“Adult film actress Stoya accuses her ex-boyfriend James Deen of rape”

or

“Famous woman accuses famous man of rape and we all wait for more accusations to follow because they pretty much always do”

or

“Intimate partner rape is a real thing and we need to talk about it.”

No. The title is

“BLAH BLAH BLAH PORN BLAH BLAH BLAH!!!!!”

And so I am sitting in my room on the phone with some dude named D who doesn’t like when people swear staring at this rather incriminating-seeming list of porn-related searches in my history. I turn bright red and look towards my bed, debating the merits of just putting the phone down and accepting my future. Instead I decide to try and explain it to him. So I’m like

“Yea, so I was on this ‘feminist’ website that actually is horrible and I never read it any more only I decided to read it today and they had a link to a story about this film star Stoya and this is sort of a big deal because people are always on about James Deen and I was thinking, like, of course the dude we all think is a good dude is actually a rapist. That just figures. And so I had to go read more about it because I was curious and now you’re some dude I don’t know and it looks like I have all this fucked up shit on my computer and this is my worst nightmare!”

To which D was like

“Rebekah, I really need you to stop cursing.”

And then I felt two levels of shame. I had the much-feared, and in this case misplaced, porn shame (which we shouldn’t feel because whatever who cares) but then also the potty mouth shame. It was awful. I cleared the history in silence. And then I made a few bad jokes. And then D announced that my computer was just fine and I had nothing to worry about at all and I thanked him for his help and we had a laugh about our conversation and then I hung up and stared at the wall. And then in an effort to feel productive I called New York Sports Club to sign up for my class and to tell them that their website had been compromised and it had sent me on this crazy adventure but that they shouldn’t worry, I was not going to be hiding under my covers. Instead, I was going to attend spin class in the morning. Silence on the other end. I had said too much.

So that’s the end. The whole debacle took so long that I didn’t end up going for a run. I did tell my friend about the whole fiasco and he said that explaining everything probably made me sound more guilty and I should have just left well enough alone. And whatever, the dude on the phone probably wasn’t reading my search history anyway. I called bullshit. I would read the shit out of someone’s search history. You’d have to be a saint not to. Or else not be curious at all. And where’s the fun in that?

 

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…for I guard one seed…

22 Nov

Have you ever been walking down the street in New York City, or anywhere really, and run into people you know, completely unexpectantly? Of course you have. I mean, who hasn’t? I remember one time I was in Portland, Oregon visiting my awesome friend Meredith (I miss you so much, girl! KICK!) and we were walking down the street and there, sitting at a little cafe, were my friends Kristi and Brendan (I also miss you two, obvs), having dinner. Two of the four of us did not live in Portland. Two of the four of us were, in fact, residents of different East Coast cities which made this chance encounter even more special and random. And then I began thinking, as I always do when this occurs, what are the odds?  What are the odds that I would be visiting a new city for the first and only time, a city where I thought I knew one person, to find myself face to face with two people I traveled the world with? And then came the inevitable follow-up, the far more interesting mind adventure of how many times have I been so close to seeing someone, to only get caught up at a light and miss them by mere seconds? When this happens I like to imagine myself in a television show with a pre-recorded audience. There I am walking down the street and an Important Person in my Life is also walking down the street. Or maybe The Person is walking down a perpendicular street. Anyway, the music builds but then I decide to turn and look into a window and The Person walks by, both of us completely unaware of the presence of the other. And then you hear it, that familiar sound from shows like Full House,

“awwwwwwwwwww.”

A communal exhale of disappointment. Maybe we will encounter one another in a later episode.

In case you were wondering where this all was going, have no fear. This was a sloppy introduction to what happened the other day. (And do not fret, the sloppiness will continue.) I was spending a few days up in the Poconos at my Aunt Mindy and Aunt Joanne’s house. It is my happy place. As a little background, after my junior year abroad (where I met Kristi and Brendan, in fact) I returned to the US and suffered a crazy bout of culture shock and got really depressed and could not relate to people at all. It sucked so hard. It seemed to me the best thing to do was to run away (I am a beacon of health!) and so I ran to Mindy and Joanne’s and spent the summer with them, going on long walks, taking a Spanish class and generally readjusting to what it meant for me to go back to living in the United States. Their home is this warm place surrounded by beauty where I feel safe being, well, me because there are no two better people in the world for me to be me around than Mindy and Joanne. So since then, whenever they’ve been free and I have been able to string a few days together I head on out there.

So this past Monday, with an open Tuesday and Wednesday stretching before me, I hopped in my car, Jose, and made the beautiful trek past the Gas-O-Rama, the Chatterbox Drive-in, Olde Lafayette Village and all the other landmarks I have been passing for years and years. I arrived at their house at the end of a quiet, unpaved road and we just hung out and enjoyed each other’s company. And we built a bonfire for the purpose of forest management (AKA our entertainment). In order to build and light the bonfire, however, we had to move our cars because nothing takes the shine off a bonfire quite like accidentally blowing a car up. And this, my friends, is where it all comes together. I turned the key in the ignition and the radio started up. It was the local NPR station that I had been listening to on my journey west the day before. I began listening to the woman speaking on the radio and I realized, right then and there, that it was an activist whose work I have been reading, enjoying, and sometimes criticizing for the better part of 15 years. It was Vandana Shiva. She was, of course, talking about access to seeds, an issue that I have been interested in since my first trip to India in late 2003, (where I met Kristi and Brendan, it all comes full circle!!) and one that she is incredibly vocal about. At the end of her talk, which it turned out was a speech given during graduation at Colorado College, she recited the following poem, written by an anonymous Palestinian poet:

The Seed Keeper

Burn our land
burn our dreams
pour acid onto our songs
cover with saw dust
the blood of our massacred people
muffle with your technology
the screams of all that is free,
wild and indigenous.
Destroy.

Destroy
our grass and soil
raze to the ground
every farm and every village
our ancestors had built
every tree, every home
every book, every law
and all the equity and harmony.

Flatten with your bombs
every valley; erase with your edicts
our past
our literature, our metaphor
Denude the forests
and the earth
till no insect,
no bird
no word
can find a place to hide.
Do that and more.
I do not fear your tyranny
I do not despair ever
for I guard one seed
a little live seed
That I shall safeguard
and plant again.

I listened to the poem and then I just sat there and I got the strangest feeling. The only way I know how to describe it is that it was almost as if I came rushing back to myself and I wanted to grab onto that moment and hold it as tightly as I could. It was as if my mind was somehow reawakened. I have been interested in access to seeds for an incredibly long time. It is, in many ways, a cross roads of a lot of topics that intrigue me: women’s rights, agriculture, access to food and water, the privatization of things that have historically been understood as the commons, culture, equality, the environment, intellectual property. I started thinking back to all the reading I have done over the years, the conversations I have had, the dark roads my mind has gone down as I have imagined all the implications of the ownership of genetic materials. I remember reading, over and over again, the Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) and being so mad I could cry. I did cry a few times, actually. As it all rushed back in and I started imagining all the ways I could get involved, write, share, change things, I thought to myself, man, maybe I should do something. Honestly, and sadly, that was the first time I felt that in a while.

And then, of course, I was back on my television show. Only this time NPR was playing in the background, and there was the climactic build-up and then I decided, at that very moment, to get into the car and to hear that hauntingly beautiful poem read by Vandana Shiva and the audience cheered (only they did it quietly because the producers didn’t want them to ruin the moment). If I hadn’t gotten in Jose right at that second, if I hadn’t been visiting my aunts, if we hadn’t decided to try not to blow up our cars while burning old Amazon boxes and dried up sticks and leaves I never would have heard the poem. This never would have happened. The universe was speaking. So  I don’t know what I will do, ultimately, but I will start by educating myself again and I will stop trying to convince myself, as I do almost every day, that who I am and what I am doing is enough. Because for me, it isn’t. And so I am going to guard this seed and plant again. And hopefully this time it’ll finally take.

Tip #15 on Being a Good Bar Customer

21 Nov

Hello friends and happy Saturday to you! And here we are, back to some helpful tips from your friendly* neighborhood bartender on how not to make me and my fellow bartenders hate you. Feeling a little rusty in bar etiquette? Well, feel free to freshen up with some past tips. Tip #1, tip #2, tip #3, tip #4, tip #5, tip#6, tip #7, tip#8, tip #9, tip #10, tip #11, tip #12, tip #13 and tip #14. And don’t forget about this non tip which is one of my favorites. Alright. Let’s go.

Where to begin? I guess by saying that if you look at this story in a certain way, it can maybe be a little bit sad. But don’t look at it that way, okay? Because there is so much sadness happening in the world and sometimes it’s nice to just forget about it for a minute. And, of course, to feel fortunate that we have the luxury to do so. So last night at about 8:45, give or take, an older woman walked into my bar and ordered a double gin and tonic. She was very clearly a woman suffering from a very long fight with alcoholism. I could see it in her face. I had a moment where I thought maybe I shouldn’t serve her, but she wasn’t misbehaving at that point and I had to remind myself once again that it is not my job to save people from themselves as long as they aren’t an immediate danger to themselves or others. It’s something I have to remind myself of time and time again and, honestly, I never feel less shitty about it. Moving on. I made the drink and she reached into her wallet and handed me a credit card. I said to her, as I say to everyone who tries to pay by card at this particular bar,

“I just need to see an ID with your card.”

I am routinely met by four different reactions when I request ID:

  1. People simply don’t give a fuck and hand me the ID (love them)
  2. People are happy because
    1. they think I doubt they are of legal age to drink and in their heads they begin celebrating their chosen skin care technique; clearly it’s been working!
    2. they realize I am verifying that they are the rightful owner of the credit card they are presenting and are pleased that we are taking precautions to safe guard their identity
  3. People feel inconvenienced or miffed for some reason and reach into their wallets to pay cash, which is actually better for me
  4. People are mad because they were IDed at the door and pulling out the ID again is really hard even though it usually lives in their wallets, right near where the credit card lives

This lady fell squarely into category four. First she got irritated and said that she had been drinking in the other bar (there are two bars at this particular spot) and that she hadn’t been IDed which I called bullshit on. And, upon speaking with my coworker, I found out he had cut her off which was why she came to me. Second, she tried the old “I don’t have my ID” routine which quickly fell apart when her ID made itself clearly visible when she opened her wallet. Third, she got mad and called me stupid. That’s right, folks. After taking the time to explain to her that it is bar policy that I cannot run a card unless I check ID she decided the most expedient way to get the drink she wanted was to call the person in control of said drink stupid. Bad move.

This is actually a two-part tip. The first part of the tip is don’t call your bartender stupid. I mean, let’s be honest. Calling people stupid is rude and also we’re all adults with imaginations here. We can totally come up with something better. Calling someone stupid is so recess.

So I did what anyone would do and told her that she couldn’t have the drink. She started shoving her ID and credit card at me and saying

You want ID? Here’s ID!

To which I responded,

Yea, that’s great, but actually that’s no longer the issue. You called me stupid. You could present me your birth certificate and social security card and I still wouldn’t give you this drink. Have a nice night.

I walked away and dealt with the other customers at my bar at which point she left and went back into the other bar. Then I got security and told him to escort the woman out because seriously, who needs to be called stupid at the beginning of their night, or at any part of their night really? No one, that’s who. I then watched from behind the bar as she puffed up her 5’4″ frame and kicked a few chairs as she walked next to the security guard, Gino, who’s about 3 times her size and like 50 times nicer. I could tell that she was yelling some nonsense at him and I imagined it had everything to do with me and how stupid I am. I couldn’t wait to find out what it was. As soon as the coast was clear and my customers were sufficiently beveraged, I hustled to the front gate to get the lowdown. Apparently she was very upset that I had kicked her out and said that she has connections to the mob and that she was going to have those connections come back to the bar and blow it up and that, and this is a direct quote,

“when this bar blows up it will all be because of that girl in the little bar! It will be her fault!”

I said to Gino that if the bar blows up they can put that on my tomb stone. RIP Rebekah. It was all her fault.

So here’s the second part of the tip. Don’t threaten to have your mob connections, real or imagined, blow up the bar. Especially not now, when people are on high alert about things being blown up. It’s totally fucked up. Admittedly, it’s more creative than calling someone stupid, but puts you at risk of being reported to the police for making a threat of violence. And all because you didn’t want to show ID.

So yea, just show your ID. Keep your feelings about my intelligence to yourself and don’t threaten to blow up my place of employment.

The end.

*Friendliness is in the eye of the beholder. Just remember that.

 

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The Real Life Sherman McCoy

17 Nov

Have you ever read Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities? It’s one of my favorites. One of the three main characters, Sherman McCoy, is a stock broker in 1980s New York, a self-proclaimed “Master of the Universe.” Without giving too much of the book away in case any of you want to read it, McCoy, heading back from the airport to his Park Avenue apartment, makes a wrong turn and ends up in the Bronx. When his car is approached by a few young black men McCoy makes the assumption that they are going to try and rob him and his mistress and takes off, hitting one of the men in the process. He flees the scene, not knowing whether or not “the skinny one,” as he is referred to, survives.

At this point I could, obviously, take this post in myriad different directions. I could point out the racism and classism, make a comparison between the New York of the late 1980s and the one that I live in today. I could note how much has changed or, more accurately, how much has not. I could go on about how the in-your-face biases that existed then have, in many ways, been replaced by something slightly more hidden but certainly more dangerous. I could talk about all the people who believe, because they live in some alternate universe of privilege and ignorance, that we are living in some sort of a post-racial society. Those people, of course, are all white. But I won’t. Instead I am going to tell you a story.

The other day at work these two middle aged women came into the bar, sat down and ordered some drinks. They asked me my name, which always makes me a little nervous — that request tends to lead to more annoyance than anything else — and settled in to chat and laugh and enjoy the afternoon. After about an hour and a half, give or take, during which time some guy who was clearly on pills tried to bolt on his bill, one of the women left. The remaining one told me that they were sisters and that they were up in New York from Philadelphia. As she spoke a heart-breaking story emerged. Her sister’s son, her nephew, had just moved up to New York in June and was working in film, living in Bed Stuy, commuting by bike. About three weeks earlier, on his way home, he had been struck by a car and then, while he was on the ground, he was struck by a second car and dragged down the block. Both cars left the scene. A by-stander called 911. I immediately asked about his head, his spine, she assured me they were both, miraculously, fine. She and the doctors attributed his survival to his sheer size: 6’2″ and solidly built. But he still wasn’t out of the woods. The accident broke his arm clear through, fractured every one of his ribs which in turn punctured his lungs. His spleen ruptured and the skin where he was dragged down the asphalt, well, I am sure you can imagine. Gone. This poor kid. He had been here for 4 months.

So I thought back to Sherman McCoy. I remember when I read that book I simply couldn’t get past the not knowing. I couldn’t understand how a person could continue with his life with the knowledge that he may have killed someone and, even worse, that if he hadn’t fled the scene he could potentially have done something to help. Accidents happen but how do you leave? It’s not really an accident anymore, is it? It morphs into a choice.

When she finished telling me the story she asked,

“How did they sleep that night?”

And all I could say, in some attempt at comfort, was

“I hope they never sleep again.”

I meant it. I hope their days are consumed by looking at the news, searching the internet wildly for any information about an accident that occurred on a specific night, in a specific place, clearing their search history as they go for fear that their secret will be discovered. I hope they find nothing. They should continue to wonder. I don’t hope that anything in kind happens to them but I do hope that they have souls because, if they do, then this will eat them alive. As it should. Sean — his name is Sean — will be okay. His Aunt convinced me of this and it seems better to believe it than not. But those assholes? I hope they suffer for the rest of their lives. There is no way they could have mistaken Sean for anything other than he was, is: a human being. And yet not one but two different drivers decided to protect their own asses rather than stop and help. It was an accident. But now it is a choice. And it makes me feel a little sadder about the world I live in.

 

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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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A dude told me not to trust the Jews. Funny thing is, I am one.

28 Oct

Working behind the bar is a weird thing. Sometimes it feels as though going through an average day it work is like walking through a moral minefield. At any moment something might happen, someone might say something, that violates my own personal set of morals and I am left trying to figure out where the line is, trying to figure out when I should step in and say something and when I should just shrug my shoulders and walk away. Or, perhaps better yet, whether the smartest approach of all is simply to pretend like I heard nothing and simply carry along, seemingly unphased, while on the inside my mind is running through all the fucked-up implications of whatever it was that I just witnessed and whether or not my silence makes me complicit in a person’s horribleness. It is positively exhausting.

So I have this customer and generally he is okay. Well, more to the point, I thought he was okay. He has very odd tastes in alcoholic beverages but I won’t judge him for that…much. Other than that he mostly keeps to himself and as long as I keep his glass full he is happy and easy. Well, he was happy and easy until he found out I’m Irish (on my mom’s side) and decided he liked me. Not like liked me, like in middle school when you like people, but just liked me as a person, a bartender and, I guess, an Irish(wo)man. Anyway, so then he started telling me things which, in hindsight, I wish he hadn’t.

Note to self: put skin-toned tape over celtic knot on back; continue to not answer the question “where are you from?” with anything other than “Jersey.”

Okay, so here is a thing to know about me, just as an aside. And this might come as a surprise to some of you but I really dislike it when people use words like “gay” and “retarded” pejoratively. I even wrote a blog about it once. Here, read it. The thing is that it is incredibly important to realize the power of language, and to understand that using words that only further marginalize already marginalized groups does actually have an impact on our lived experience. Like, personally, and n on a lighter note, I need to stop calling people “pussies” unless I want to kind of turn the whole thing on its head and rather than using the word to mean that someone is weak or a coward, I could potentially use it to mean that something is strong and amazing! Like a vagina! I mean, I don’t think I could realistically start a one-woman revolution to redefine the meaning of the word pussy in the English language, so I should just retire it (as I have been trying to do) so that the effect of my using it isn’t to make the comparison, which is ever-so-common, between something that is characteristically feminine and something that is weak. You get me? So, yea, pussy has got to go unless I want to be a shitty feminist. And the words “retarded” and “gay” have to go unless you want to be a shitty person.

The reason I mentioned all of that is that I think language matters and I really don’t like when people say anything disparaging about groups of people in my presence and this guy has a habit of making rather off-color comments but in such a way that there is some room to believe that maybe I am reading into them. He doesn’t use things pejoratively, but he will mention someone and then look at me with a sort of side glance and be like

“you know what I mean?”

And it’s like,

“I think so? But I can’t really tell and if you mean what I think you maybe mean then I think you are an asshole and I do not agree with you at all in fact will you just stop talking to me or better yet, just leave?”

And so I am left in this weird sort of middle area where I want to call him out but then if I do call him out he could backtrack and be like you totally misinterpreted that and then I look like the asshole. He’s wiley. I think he was testing the waters. My basic approach was to just appear as uncomfortable as possible and walk away in the hopes that if he did mean what I thought he probably meant that he would realize I was not going to agree with him and we could go back to our previous relationship: he says very little and I make him drinks. That was hoping too much.

The other day he came in and was feeling a little bit chatty and asked me what my drink of choice is.

Me: Powers on the rocks.
Him: (after screwing his face up to demonstrate that he thinks Powers tastes like gut rot) Oh. How did you get on that?

I would like to add in here that I will tell people that I am Irish by descent if it comes up, but I don’t feel particularly attached to the country. I’m sure it’s a really awesome place but I haven’t ever visited there, I know very little about it, I don’t look Irish at all and it didn’t really play a very prominent role in my upbringing. I have the celtic knot on my back not because it represents my heritage, but because when my Grandma, Mima, went to Ireland for the first time in her life she brought me back a necklace with a simple celtic knot on it that I wore for 10 years until it broke so I got it tattooed on there. It doesn’t represent Ireland, it represents Mima. But this is an Irish guy and he asked if I was also Irish after seeing the knot and rather than go into a whole thing I just said yes, because I am.

Me: Well, I was dating this guy and he always drank Jameson on the rocks and I really liked whisky but I didn’t want to be that couple that drinks the same drink so I started on Powers and just never stopped. Funny thing is last time he sat at my bar he ordered a Powers from me. I felt like the winner.
Him: He’s an Irishman!
Me: Chinese Jamaican, actually.
Him: Jeez, where did you find one of those? What a crazy combination.
Me: (Ignoring the “one of those” comments) well, before him I dated a guy who was Jewish and Cuban! So that’s fun.
Him: A Jew? Oh no. Never trust the Jews.

I feel as though it is important, at this point, to address the fact that I am Jewish. That’s right. An Irish-Russian Jew. Bat Mitzvahed and everything. And at this point there was no way to pretend like he wasn’t being a total bigot. So I jumped in.

Me: Oh? Well that’s funny because you seem to trust me plenty.
Him: (Confusion turns to panic) But you’re Irish!
Me: Yup. Also, Jewish. Crazy, right?
Him: Well, the Irish just cancels the Jewish out.

At this point I was seething. In my brain I was saying,

OH MY GOD WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT YOU BIGOTED PIECE OF SHIT!

But in reality I cocked my head to the side and said, more or less,

It doesn’t work like that. And just so you know, we’re everywhere. Hiding in plain sight.

It was one of those things that I was hoping would sort of scare him, you know, since we are so untrustworthy and all. I mean, I even touched his glass! I handled his money! I might have been swindling him and he would never even know it because he thought that I was a trustworthy Irish person rather than a lying, stealing, cheating Jew!

Anyway, it was crazy. He felt like an asshole and tipped me really well. He didn’t apologize though, or take it back. And I bet every time he sees me now he is always trying to see the (not so visible) Irish in me and ignore the (blatantly obvious) Jewish characteristics. So now I am left feeling like maybe I should have called him out on the earlier, sneakier things rather than wait for him to prove himself to be an actual bigot who was bigoted against me, you know? And, just as another aside, I said to someone recently that whenever someone, or a group of someones, is generally bigoted, they always also hate the Jews. People are always hating the Jews. All through history and shit. And this person was all “nah, people don’t hate the Jews anymore. Not after Hitler and all that” and I was like “um…hello?” And now I wish I could remember who that person was and I would tell them all about this dude and be like,

QED mother fucker. Q. E. D.

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