What I’ve Learned So Far in 2014

6 Jan

I know, I know, 2014 is only 6 days old.  But, whatever, I’m like a sponge.  A sponge of learning.  And since I have found these new tidbits of information so titillating, I figured I would share them all with you.  Isn’t that great?  I think so.

1.  As many of you know, or have read, I have an intense dislike for companies that call me with fake credit offerings and the like.  Over the past few months, I have significantly altered my approach to these calls.  Instead of reporting said companies to the National Do Not Call Registry because it is fucking useless, I have simply been blocking the numbers from my phone!  Every time I get a bullshit call <BAM!>, blocked.  Of course in my case I don’t often receive calls from the same number more than once but still, it is so empowering.  I really feel like I show them, you know?  Anyway, that’s not what I learned.  Here’s what I learned.  I received a call the other day from a restricted number which I answered because my landlord calls me from a restricted number and I like him, he’s nice.  But it wasn’t my landlord at all.  It was a company asking to lower my interest rate.  So, obviously, I got mad and I was feeling sassy so I pressed a number to talk to a person to give them a piece of my mind.  After I had finished telling the dude on the other end what he could do with his lowered interest rates I hung up the phone, feeling good and strong and righteous.  Then I went online to see if other people had received calls from this same dubiously named company, “Card Member Services.”  In my search I found a very useful bit of information:  whenever I press the button to talk to someone to tell them that I think they work for a morally bankrupt operation, their computer algorithm thing thinks that I am a sucker and am actually interested in the “service” the company provides (AKA having them steal my money) and puts my number up towards the top of the calling list.  Then I get more calls!  I am my own worst enemy!  So this is what I learned: do not talk to a representative no matter how sassy you are feeling because, in the end, the joke is on you.

2.  I am not good at email.  This is something I have known for years.  In fact, for the past five years in a row my one and only New Years resolution has been to be better about email.  Every other year I have failed.  Considering it is now the 6th of the month (and year!) and I just checked my email for the first time, I am not feeling much more confident in my potential for success.  See here’s the thing:  my email is mostly junk.  I go in there and delete like a million things and then I have 4 or 5 actual emails that I want to respond to but by that point I’m so frustrated with the junk that I don’t respond to the actual emails.  The result of this is that emails go unanswered and then those people emailing me get frustrated and stop emailing, and then all I have is junk.  Just a bunch of stupid things from Yelp and Madewell and The Center for Food Safety.  So you know what I learned?  Unsubscribing is Life!  I just went on an unsubscribing-fest and it was AMAZING.  Goodbye Yelp! Goodbye Madewell! Goodbye Center for Food Safety!

3.  It’s really cold outside because of something to do with the arctic circle.  It’s so cold, in fact, that tomorrow we will supposedly experience a high of 13 degrees.  For those of you who are a little slow like me, that means that the warmest it will be tomorrow is 13 degrees.  That also means that at times it will be colder than 13 degrees.  Colder than 13 degrees.  I learned that tomorrow is going to be terrible but you know what is worse than tomorrow in Brooklyn?  Today in Minnesota.  The governor of Minnesota closed all the schools in the entire state due to cold weather for the first time since 1997.  So this lesson is two fold.  The first fold is that even though tomorrow is going to be insanely cold at least I can go outside without my face getting frostbitten within 2 minutes.  The second fold is that I never want to live in Minnesota.

4.  Last night I had a really hard time sleeping.  I felt sleepy when I got into bed but then I was wide awake.  I was just lying there, surrounded by cats, unable to move because despite the fact that each of my two cats only weighs 10 pounds they manage to take up all of the space.  I really believe that if I had a bed that was the size of the entire universe, my cats would still sleep in such a way that would leave me curled up uncomfortably in a ball.  Part of the reason I was having trouble sleeping was because I kept having itches. There was the itch on the bottom of my foot.  One under my left arm.  Another one in my hair.  I became convinced that I had bedbugs.  Then I thought, what if the ants escaped!  (They didn’t.)  Then all of a sudden, out of nowhere, I had the following thought: it would be terrible to be pregnant.  Not that for other people it is terrible.  For other people I think it is great!  I really do.  I love when my friends have kids.  But honestly, whenever one of my friends tells me they are pregnant (which is happening more and more often these days), after I am very happy and excited for them, I think to myself “better her than me.”  So here is the other thing I learned:  I probably should never have children.

5.  The other day I went to a bar to have a glass of wine and read my magazine before I went home, ate vegetarian chile and spent too much time watching shitty television.  There I was, minding my own business, reading about eating horses (???) when I caught the guy two chairs down staring at me.  I decided to pretend like I didn’t see him and went back to reading.  Unsuccessful.  The inevitable happened: he talked to me.

Guy:  Um, excuse me Miss?  I would like to buy you a drink.
Me: Oh, thank you but I actually think I am just going to have the one.  But if I change my mind you’ll be the first to know.
Guy:  (At this point I noticed some slight slurring)  Are you sure?  Because I was going to leave and then come back but only if I can buy you a drink.
Me:  No, I think I’m good.  I’m going to go home and eat dinner.
Guy, staring:  You have just the most beautiful hair.
Me:  Oh, thanks.
Guy:  It looks just like my mother’s.
Me: ……..

My philosophy, by the way, is to never accept a drink from someone at the bar because, aside from the fact that I am seeing someone,  you are then obligated to talk to them.  I mean, despite his obvious mommy-issues I am sure this guy was perfectly nice but no thank you.  Another thing that I learned: avoiding eye-contact with guys at bars is not always effective in combating off-putting pick-up lines.

So I guess that is it.  I guess those are the things that I learned so far in 2014.  Stay tuned because I am sure there will be equally interesting lessons to follow.  And now I will stop procrastinating writing this article that I am supposed to write by rambling on my blog and start procrastinating the article by making the Super Bowl pool thing for my job.  Okay, wait, here is another one.

6.  I love to procrastinate and I am really good at it.

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Individualism and Abortion and Gun Rights, oh my!

4 Jan

Did you guys read this article in the New York Times from yesterday (January 3, 2014)?  It’s about abortion restrictions.  It’s basically like an abortion restriction round-up from the last two years AKA all the articles that made me and my friends REALLY mad (plus Wendy Davis!)* smashed up together into a two-page summary.  So, yea, if you need to be reminded of all the shitty things that happened in terms of women’s access to abortions, then read the article.  I mean, I know there is nothing I like better than reading about that shit first thing on a Saturday morning.  Anyway, I just have a few little things to say about it.

Just to get this one thing out of the way: it makes me so fucking angry.  I wish there was a way for me to record myself saying those words because there is an intonation that I think is incredibly important to really getting the message across.  You must seethe when you say it.

As one does, I have been thinking quite a lot about individualism.  I think this country has gone absolute bat-shit crazy about individualism.  God forbid you mention the idea of relying on others and you’re a communitarian, or, as some would say, a socialist (although the two words actually mean different things).  Personally, I wear the badge of communitarianism happily and proudly.  I like it because it doesn’t completely dismiss the importance of the individual, but it says that traits held by individuals are largely formed by the community that surrounds them.  So like, I wouldn’t be me if I hadn’t grown up where I grew up and around the people whom I grew up around.  I think this is a belief that is held by most people if you ask them (as long as you stay far from words like ‘socialist’ and ‘collectivist’).  When you step up to the policy and governmental level, however, getting anywhere close to the idea of communitarianism is hugely problematic.  Remember the whole “you didn’t build that” fiasco with Obama and Romney during the 2012 campaign?  I think that Obama’s sentiment, that the business built by someone is reliant upon the foundation laid before them, is pretty much communitarianism.  It isn’t dismissing the importance of the individual’s contribution to society.  Instead, it emphasizes the fact that the opportunity to build the business wouldn’t have presented itself had the infrastructure — be that physical, political, or cultural — not been previously created.  We are all connected to what came before us and what comes after.  Basically, we don’t all start from scratch.  If we did we would just be running around and around on a defective hamster wheel, getting nowhere and seriously in need of WD-40.

This is all connected, I promise.  Just bear with me.  So we have, on the national stage, this ridiculous idea of the individual that is connected to the American Dream which, if you ask me, no longer really exists.  That unquestioned devotion to the boot-strappers mentality is part of the poison that has leached throughout our entire national conscience.  It’s like a fantasy to think that we live in a society in which someone can come and make something out of nothing.  And you know what?  Sometimes the fantasy is borne out.  But that story is becoming more and more rare.  Economic mobility in the United States is less likely than it was in previous generations.  According to a chart created by Miles Corak, professor of economics at the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs in Ottawa, among “developed” nations, the United States has the highest level of inequality and one of the lowest earnings elasticity (or the lowest intergenerational mobility).  And yet we still cling to this idea of individual opportunity, that we all have a chance to better our lot, without paying any attention to the role played by opportunity.  Our parent’s wealth, our geographic location, the color of our skin, the levels of education attained by those before us, our debt loads.  These things all matter.  We do not each exist in some weird vacuum, unaffected by what came before and yet capable of achieving our wildest dreams if only we work hard for them.  Other things, things beyond our control, matter also.

So, now here we go.  Now this is where it all starts coming together.  We have this idea that we love, as a nation, of individualism and opportunity, except for when it comes to social issues and then we think, or at least some of us think, that what happens inside the body or home of our neighbors is our business.  Many of those same people who got mad at Obama for suggesting that infrastructure mattered to the success of the Republican candidate also think it is their moral responsibility to regulate what a woman decides to do with her own body, with her own pregnancy.  Many, though not all, of them are also the same people who cling crazily to their guns.  Not even literally, in some cases, but what the guns represent.  This idea of the rights of the individual and the need that each person has to protect him or herself from the government because the government, in all its lumbering bureaucracy, is coming for them.  Seriously, people, if we couldn’t manage gun control after Newtown, and if we couldn’t all laugh Wayne LaPierre off the stage for his suggestion that “the best way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun” AKA lets arm guards at all school to protect the kids (with no real attempt to explain who in the world would pay for it) then the guns are safe.  But that’s not even the point.  Here’s the point.

I see a serious disconnect, as many people do, between gun rights and abortion rights.  I know that maybe this is like comparing apples and oranges, but it seems to me that a lot of the states that are protecting their guns and limiting women’s access to abortions are, well, the same damn states.  So let’s take one second here.  I read this article in the New York Times a few months ago about this face-off in Dallas between a group of three women associated with the gun control group Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America having lunch and talking about stricter gun control and a large group of men and women, members of Open Carry Texas, standing outside the restaurant strapped with shotguns, hunting rifles, AR-15s and AK-47s.  The Open Carry people had no intention of hurting the women physically, what they did want to do was intimidate them.  Which they did because there were roughly 24 of them with long-guns strapped to their backs.  I don’t know anyone who would willingly, and without fear, walk out of a lunch meeting and then through a large, intimidating group like that.  Both groups, it can be argued, were exercising their various rights, but only one group had the ability to kill members of the other.  This is where individualism, I think, should be curtailed.  When your individual choice has the potentiality of impacting the individual choice of another person.  My ability to choose to have an abortion in no way impacts another person’s right to choose not to, but someone else’s decision to carry a gun could potentially end my life.

I know, I know, people are going to say that I am choosing to end the life of whatever is growing inside my body. Honestly, I am more concerned with myself, or with other women, than I am with a ball of cells.  Maybe that is heartless but it’s true.  I am more concerned with the life that is as opposed to the life that may be.  I guess all of this is to say that I am confused.  Why are your guns okay but my morals are not?  Why can you build an empire without any consideration of those who paved the way for you because you are an individual and therefore the only unit of import, and yet you can regulate what I do within my own womb?  Why are you as an individual more important than me?  And how does my decision to end a pregnancy impact your life in any way?  The answer:  it doesn’t.  You don’t get to have your cake and eat it too.  You want to argue individualism and rights?  Fine.  But be consistent.  Don’t be so arrogant as to think you know what is better for half the population.  And while I am at it, if you are going to try and regulate abortion access, why do it across class lines?  The result of the way the “right to life” people have approached this issue is to make access more difficult for those women living in rural areas, for those with full time jobs, for those with limited money and transportation opportunities.  Jennifer Dalven of the ACLU said, “Increasingly, access to abortion depends on where you live.  That’s what it was like pre-Roe.”  I would argue that it also depends on what you have, or don’t have.

Listen, if people are going to argue that the American Dream is still around, that we all have the ability to achieve whatever it is that we want, stop erecting roadblocks for women, and specifically for poor women, and more specifically for poor women of color.  Either that or just come out and say it:  you want a country in which only people that look like you can achieve the American Dream because, from where I sit, that is exactly where we’re headed.

*Did anyone else stay up really late during Davis’ filibuster in the Texas Senate?  Seriously, having live feeds of Senate buildings is genius.  Also, I cried.  Just in case you were wondering.  I was so impressed by her and her colleagues, so speechless by the tens of thousands of people watching and so excited to be Twitter communicating with other people who were watching it I really just couldn’t even stand it.  Who knew government could be so engaging?

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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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Tip #12 on Being a Good Bar Customer

19 Dec

And we’re back, folks!  It’s amazing.  Just when I think people can’t do anything else stupid, they do!  So here it is.  The latest tip.  And if you are feeling nostalgic for all the other tips, you can go ahead and read them here: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven.

Tip number 12 is: don’t bring your own alcohol into a bar.  I know, I know, I can’t believe I actually have to write this either but there you have it.  You are probably sitting at home, or at the office because most of you probably have like, a job that involves going to the same place and sitting in a chair 5 days a week (nothing wrong with that! Sort of jealous!) thinking to yourself, who goes into that bar, anyway?  A bunch of animals?  Well, in short, yes.  A bunch of animals.  Or, more like a bunch of reasonable people and a smattering of animals.  Anyway, this is a story about one such animal.

Yesterday, all in all, was sort of a rough day.  The guy who usually works Wednesday is off on paternity leave (where is that baby?!) so we have all been sort of filling in the gaps.  As a result, I worked yesterday.  Unbeknownst to me when I decided to cover the shift, one of my bosses had scheduled a holiday party for the early afternoon.  It wasn’t until yesterday when I arrived that I discovered that it was a party of 45 teachers.  And it wasn’t until it actually happened that I realized they would be playing trivia.  A trivia game during which it came to my attention that a good portion of the teachers involved in the game thought that a “green card” had something to do with the environment.  Suffice it to say that I was pretty much done with the day by the end of the trivia extravaganza but sadly I still had 4 hours left.  At that very moment, as if they had been sent by Satan himself, in walked a massive pain in my ass.  This guy is like torture for any bartender.  He refuses to part cards down, feeling entitled to having a tab run because he come in often, yet he always walks on his tabs.  Always.  So you end up having to chase him throughout the bar after each drink you serve him otherwise risk getting stiffed.  He orders the same drinks over and over yet never remembers the price.  He tips poorly and expects buybacks.  He chants.  He always, always chants.  And you have to constantly watch him lest he torture some unsuspecting female bar-goer with his close talking and inappropriate comments.  He is the pits. We don’t actually see him all that often because he is in a serious relationship but yesterday, following an office party, he decided to grace us (read: me) with their presence.  Oh, blessed day.

He only ordered one drink from me, a Bulleit Rye, and yet was continuously seen walking around the bar with a rocks glass full of some clear liquid.  I gave him the benefit of the doubt at first, thinking that perhaps there as a very very off chance that he was simply drinking water, but didn’t want his friends to think he was weak.  But then all his drunken tells started emerging:  the loud talking, the chanting, the close-talking, the thinking he is the best person and savior of everyone.  So I asked my friend/boss/coworker Sasha to investigate the situation.  She walked passed him and asked him what he was drinking to which he replied “water,” then subsequently slammed the rest of the glass (like 2 shots worth) and slapped it down on the bar.  So I, since sometimes I fancy myself a PI, sniffed the glass and, lo and behold, VODKA!  What a shocker.  I decided to confront the situation for the following three reasons: (1) I was PMSing, I had cramps, my boobs hurt and I was therefore in no mood; (2) if there were a store in the mall called “Build a Drunk” where you could build your worst idea of a drunken person, he would be one of the models I would build and since I wasn’t making any money off him I really did not want to deal with his volume and obnoxiousness; and (3) I have rules and he broke one of them, flagrantly.  So, obviously, I marched myself over to him, held the glass up near his nose and said,

“What does that smell like to you?”

He then told me it was his friend’s.  (This friend, by the way, was all but passed-out in the corner, having been over self-served at the office party they were all at before walking into my bar.) The conversation continued, him slurring and yelling, me talking in a normal, sober voice level:

Build-a-Drunk: Would I ever do that to you?
Me: Um…clearly.
Build-a-Drunk: How much money have I spent in this bar over the years and you are going to accuse me of bringing drinks in?  Why would I even do that?
Me:  I don’t know, why would you?

I then walked back behind the bar at which point he pulled out a HUGE wad of cash and attempted to by a drink, while simultaneously asking me when he had ever been a bad customer.  I started listing off examples, beginning with that time that he brought vodka into the bar and got shit-tanked.  Remember that?  Then there was the time he fell of his stool, and the other time he fell off his stool, the time he knocked over a whole bunch of drinks, the time he called me a bitch for telling him to back off a lady who had mouthed the word “help” to me, the time he apologized for calling me a bitch by actually blaming it on me while using his tendency to tower over women while explaining shit to them to corner me behind the bar. I have more, but I’ll stop.  Anyway, he called me a bitch again.  And gave me the stinkeye.  Twice.  But whatever, I just won’t serve him anymore since clearly he is quite adept at serving himself.  The only thing I feel sad about is that he has a daughter.  This man with ZERO respect for women raising a little girl.  I hope she spends more time at her mom’s house.

So wait, what was the point of this post?  Oh yea, don’t be like Build-a-Drunk and bring your own booze.  I don’t work in a BYO joint.

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An Average Day.

17 Dec

WARNING:  I am just sort of typing.  Typing about my day.  Connecting it to past days.  This may or may not make any sense.  Whether or not it makes sense has nothing to do with the peach juice vodka thing I made.  No, but seriously.  I’m hardly even drinking it because it tastes bad.  Anyway, proceed with caution.

Hi guys.  So here I am.  Sitting at my desk drinking this weird concoction of vodka, peach “juice” (which is actually quite similar to baby food, a fact that makes me feel a little weird) and water.  Honestly, it’s not very good and I think I might dump it out.  I am having A Day.  You know the kind.  It’s one of those days where you like, reflect on your life and think about where you thought you would be at this point which is maybe living in some foreign land doing something great for humanity but instead your are sitting at a bright blue desk which is actually made out of an old door that you painted like 6 years ago, drinking vodka flavored baby food.  You’ve never had a day like that?  Even without the oddly viscous liquor?  Oh, okay then.  Carry on.

I, for one, am having one of those days.  I think it is due to the fact that I spent the better part of this sleety, snowy, cold Tuesday in front of my computer reading the 247 slides of a bar-required tips certification course.  It’s this thing where you learn how to not serve underage people and also how to cut people off.  Interestingly, a lot of the male “characters” depicted in the accompanying videos are a little bit rapey.  There is the rapey manager who tells the hostess that she “did the right thing” by informing him of a drunk couple seated in Sherry’s section and the rapey bartender who tells a drunken bar-goer who turns down the snack of cheese that he offered her because she thinks it is too fattening that she “probably doesn’t need to worry about that.” I don’t know.  Maybe you had to be there.  Or maybe the hours I spent reading about R. Kelly prior to the 247 slides impacted my thought processes.  Either way, it has been one of those days.

I decided to go to the gym, put my foot in my shoe, thought it was a dead roach but discovered it was instead an errant hair clip.  Crisis averted!  I have heard about people having dead roaches in their shoes and it is something I do not want to experience myself.  It makes me think of this one time, actually. So there was this one time where I was feeling really sick so I decided, in a moment of overwhelming logic, to go lay on the floor.  I think I thought that if I looked as pathetic as I felt then maybe I would start feeling better.  Anyway, as I lay there, left cheek resting on the cold wood, garbage can at the ready, I noticed this thing only inches from my nose.  What could it be?  It wasn’t moving.  It looked like maybe it had legs. But I couldn’t detect a head.  I called up to my boyfriend who was in the bed curious as to why I decided to lay on the floor, and in the most pathetic voice I could said,

“There is this thing here right by my face and I think it might be a huge dead roach.  Is it a roach?  Tell me it isn’t a roach.  I don’t think I could go on if I knew that I was lying inches from a dead roach.”

I sometimes get a little dramatic when I am feeling sick.

He came down, scooped it up and told me it was no such thing.  Maybe I should just get off the floor.  I did.  But the next day I looked in the garbage can and saw a decapitated roach halfway covered by a tissue.  I am so happy that he didn’t tell me while I was lying there because I think I actually might have died.

Anyway, my day.  As I was saying I decided to go to the gym.  I had started a text thread with my coworkers about the lack of diversity in our tips certification course and also all the rapey dudes.  The thread devolved into some sort of argument about Batman.  I know nothing about Batman.  I’m not girl who’s really into super heroes.  I got to the gym and ran on the treadmill for awhile and didn’t think about Batman once.  Or roaches.  The television in front of me was stuck on ESPN so I was trapped watching NFL highlights and imagining what my life would be like if I gave a shit about football.  I think it would be roughly the same only I would eat more nachos.  Come to think of it, that might just make it worthwhile.  I LOVE nachos.

Then I came home, took a shower, ate a giant bowl of taco salad and watched a few episodes of Weeds.  And now I am sitting here, writing the most pointless blog post ever and all the ice in my weird vodka flavored beverage situation has melted.  In case you were wondering, this dilution hasn’t made it taste any better.  Slightly less like baby food, though, so that’s good.

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Poop, Ghosts and Baby Chickens

10 Dec

Alright you guys so here’s the thing.  I know it might seem, through this blog, that I am an at least passably interesting human being.  I have a job where things happen that people like to read about.  I have an ant farm that at first provided me hours of entertainment which then morphed into soul crushing guilt (slight exaggeration).  Also, sometimes I write letters to people hoping that some solution will come from an unjust situation.  Sometimes the letters help.  Sometimes, not so much.  For someone that goes through life turning mundane activities into adventures, I have quite possibly the most boring dreams ever.  There was that time that I dreamed about waiting for the bus.  And also that time that I dreamed about hoarding peanut butter. (Do you like how I am shamelessly promoting all these past blogs in hopes that at least one of your will click on them?)  Anyway, so in the past few nights my boring dreams have returned with a vengeance.  Okay, well, they weren’t all boring.  One was really boring.  One was super weird and maybe a little bit creepy. And the last one involved a baby chicken.  So, here they are.  Enjoy.

The Boring Dream

So in this first dream, my childhood dog, Buckwheat, came back for a visit.  For some reason, Bucky, who has been dead since the fall of 2001, decided to come and visit me in the city.  He was his fun, silly, slightly stupid Bucky self instead of the scary tumor-pressing-on-the-personality-part-of-the-brain Bucky that made him growl and snap at us.  Anyway, Bucky came to the city and I was running late to meet up with a friend for a drink.  I decided to bring Bucky.  Seeing as how he has been decomposing for the past 12 years, give or take, he was slightly out of shape and was having a hard time keeping up with my brisk New York pace.  Also, he had to poop.  Like, really bad.  So, in the middle of 9th Street he stopped and took a big old shit and it was right then that I realized that I didn’t have a bag to pick the poop up with.  I searched all over, hoping that someone had gently place a plastic bag atop the mountain of garbage that had accumulated on the side of the road.  (I guess in Rebekah Dreamland the sanitation workers were on strike.)  I couldn’t find a bag but I DID find a newspaper which I used to cover the poop and carefully scootch it towards the garbage mountain, in hopes that no one would step on it.  Immediately, someone did.  Bucky and I ran away and then I woke up.

The Weird/Creepy Dream

I’m sure this happens to everyone, but sometimes dead people visit me in my dreams.  Like a few months ago, my grandpa, Papa, came for a visit.  He asked me how my running was going.  I asked him how being dead was going.  He said it was okay but that the cars driving by his grave constantly were keeping him up all night.  I thought that was funny because my grandma, Bama, had been very concerned about the noise level near his final resting place.  I guess she was right to raise the point.  Anyway, a week ago yesterday was the one year anniversary of the passing of one of the bar’s favorite regulars, Mary.  It’s safe to say that she has been on all our minds recently.  On Sunday night, after work, I road the bus home with my friend Glen and we talked about some of the things that make us think about Mary.  For Glen, it was simply riding the bus, the same bus she used to take home to her residence on Atlantic Avenue.  For me it was the smell of tomato vines and the appalling consistency of a vat of blue cheese dressing. You know, the usual.  Anyway, that very night Mary came to me in my dream.  There she was, sitting at the bar, wearing her favorite Christmas sweater with a big Christmas tree broach on it and a few flashing lights.  Mary loved pins.  She had this great baseball cap she used to wear with all these silly pins all over it.  Anyway, she was sitting there, in her favorite spot a few seats to the bartender’s left of the taps, with a snifter full of brandy.  She liked the way it burned her throat.  And boy, did it burn.  After she passed, my coworker/friend/boss Sasha and I each had a glass of it in her honor.  The smell was so harsh it made our eyes water.  We were full-on weeping after we sipped it.  This year we upgraded and had fancy brandy.  Significantly more palatable.  Anyway, as I was saying, there was Mary sitting in her spot.  She just appeared out of nowhere, looking just like she had before she fell ill.  I turned to Sasha and I said “Hey, Sash, look who’s here!  It’s Mary!”  By the look on Sasha’s face it was quite clear that she could not see Mary.  Sasha and I continued right on dream working while Mary and I shared our little dream secret.

The Dream About the Chicken

Last night in my dream I received a box full of eggs.  Naturally I distributed the eggs to all the people near me and then I sat on a chair and looked at the egg gently resting in my hand.  It started moving and breaking.  I thought to myself, “I am basically the worst egg mom ever because I have had this egg for like than 15 seconds and it already has a big ass crack in it.”  I gave the egg to my boyfriend, Pete, and he chipped away at the shell to reveal a teeny, tiny little bright yellow chick.  It was the silliest chick I have ever seen. For some reason that I cannot quite understand, the egg remains ended up in my mouth and it was terrible.  Like, the worst thing.  They were crackly, they tasted bad and the longer they were in my mouth the more space they took up. I had to run to the bathroom to spit them out in the sink and during the interim the chick escaped!  It was just like, bopping around!  This little yellow ball of fluff with itsy bitsy feet and a HUGE beak.  I went searching for it high and low.  I mean, how far could a chick really get.  Just as I was about to admit defeat I saw a little yellow cotton ball on the floor.  Only it wasn’t a cotton ball at all!  It was the chick! So I materialized a box and some newspaper, ripped the newspaper up, but it in the box and then gently placed the chick inside.  All was right in the world.

I guess that’s it.  But because I need some sort of concluding idea, I will leave you with this.  The other day, someone said to me “I never know what is going on in that head of yours.”  Well, now you have the answer: poop, ghosts, and baby chickens.

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The Perils of Novelty Pet Ownership

4 Dec

I think maybe recently I have been overdoing it slightly on the bartending posts but, as I mentioned, when it rains it pours so we must prepare ourselves for the oncoming drought.  Today, however, I am not going to recount to you the ridiculousness of my job but instead I will talk about something even more pressing:  my ant farm.

When I was little I never had an ant farm.  I had a dog and a cat. I had hamsters, gerbils, mice, a guinea pig, Charlie, that I inherited from my friend Alisha when she and her mom moved to Utah.  Charlie was cool.  One summer while I was at camp my mom got sick of Charlie and donated him to the local nursery school where he was very popular.  I don’t recall being overly pleased about that particular turn of events.  My mom has always had this tendency of just like, donating things without asking.  One year she donated all of my Care Bears and Popples.  I LOVED my Popples.  When I was really little I would walk around downtown Maplewood holding between 5 and 10 Popples by their tails, a big puff of stuffed animals that could be turned inside-out to reveal their alter egos:  soccer balls!  Baseballs!  Balls of no distinguishing characteristics whatsoever!  Granted, when my mom got rid of my Care Bears and Popples they had been sitting in plastic cartons in the basement for the better part of two years but then one day I wanted them and they were gone.  Same thing happened to my dad’s electric fry pan that he used no more than two times a year to make fried matzoh.  Nevermind that you can make just as good fried matzoh in a regular, non-electric fry pan.  It’s the principle!  If you don’t nail it down, off to some fundraising sale or another it goes!  NOTHING IS SAFE! I bet if I still lived at home I would one day wake up to find myself with a $5 sticker on my forehead in the basement of St. Francis during it’s annual garage sale, my mom standing with some perspective buyer saying

“Yea, she’s in perfectly good condition but at this point she’s just taking up space.”

Anyway, back to the farm.  I never had a farm.  On top of the multitude of normal-kid pets, I had one of those see through frogs.  Remember those?  My see-through frog initially came as a tadpole with teeny tiny legs and I got to see him morph.  Then he just hung out at the bottom of the tank with his arms outstretched, looking dead.  One time in the middle of the night I thought he WAS dead and I had a total meltdown and ran into my parents room screaming.  He wasn’t dead but I think it made my parents concerned about the depth of my attachments to animals that were either stuffed or imitated being dead about 95% of the time.  Then they bought me sea monkeys.  I ordered them from the back of my older brother’s comic book and you know what I discovered?  They were not monkeys AT ALL.  They were microscopic specks (AKA brine shrimp) that you could only see using a magnifying glass and even then I was fairly convinced the company had just sent me a tank with some specks of dirt in it.  Even with all these ridiculous mail order pets I never had an ant farm.  That is, until about 3 weeks ago.

So there I was, out with a few friends, talking about this and that (and ant farms), when my friend Mike went on his Amazon Prime account from the bar and ordered not one but two ant farms.  Two days later I received the following text, with accompanying photographic evidence:

Mike: So…2 of these Ant Farms showed up at my apartment on Sunday! Do you still want one?
Me:  ANTFARMMMMM!!!!
Me: I’m so excited!
Me: Did you put your ants in???
Mike: It doesn’t come with the ants so I ordered them separately. Probably get them early next week.
Me: Why wouldn’t it come with ants?
Me: What good is an ant farm with no ants??
Me: Are you excited about the farm?!
Mike: I am, but I want the ants!
Me: Me too!!!
Me: Antzzzzzz!

For anyone wondering, this conversation is typical and is a reason why no one should ever give me their phone number. Ever.

Fast forward about a week and, you guessed it, arrival of the ants!  They came from Utah and they have no Queen because apparently it is illegal to ship the Queen into New York. Also, they bite.  Mike found out the hard way.  You have to transfer the ants from a tube into the farm and in the process one escaped, bit Mike and then, in all the surprise and hubbub, got smashed.  RIP ant.  Obviously, being afraid of death by tiny ant pincer, I made Mike transfer my ants into their new home which is not made up of sand like the days of yore, but is instead comprised of this weird blue goo that is like the trifecta of awesome: tunnel component, food, AND hydration.  Ant super food!  The first few days of ant ownership were blissful.  My ants were busy at work, tunneling away! Sometimes they made tunnels that brought them back up to the surface, sometimes they made tunnels that for some reason they didn’t like and abandoned, and sometimes they made tunnels that were secret passages to previously made tunnels.  Ants that perished along the way were deposited in the discarded pile of blue goo on the east side of the farm to where other ants occasionally came to pay their respects.  Then, one day, the ants stopped.  They had built all the tunnels they wanted to build.  They found the deepest most section of the tunnel and now many of them crouch there, in eager anticipation of the arrival of their Queen.  Only she will never come.  She is stuck in Utah.  The few ants that have come to understand this reality have now set upon excavating the rubber strip that secures the lid onto the farm.  This is both sad and alarming.  It would be terrible to be bitten by this now bitter and angry horde of ants.  Realistically, I don’t think they will manage to escape because the rubber strip is big and is affixed to extremely hard plastic, plastic that event insects capable of carrying 50 times their own weight cannot contend with.  So now I avoid looking at my ants because every time I do I feel like a horrible asshole.  So now the question remains:  do I free them into the wilds of Brooklyn where they will surely die, or do I leave them inside their prison where they will also surely die?  Sigh.

In conclusion, owning novelty pets as an adult is fraught with feelings of anxiety, guilt, and internal monologues about mortality and the meaning of life.  And to my ants:  I am sorry.

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This is Not a Tip. This is a Story About an Asshole.

26 Nov

Today I am writing my blog from my parent’s house.  Happy Franksgiving week, everyone!

Generally speaking when I write blogs about people, I either don’t know their names or else I change them to save them from embarrassment.  This is the kind of person that I am.  Following the events of this past Thursday, however, I have decided that I am not vindictive enough and that this is a character trait that I must try and develop.  If people act like assholes, after all, they should be called out and called out by (first) name!  (Clearly I am in the very early stages of vindictive-development.)  Also, this dude was such an incredible shithead that I think I would be doing the world a disservice by not calling him out.  So, here goes.  Let us all hope that he doesn’t sue me for libel* (he’s a lawyer, god help us all).

So, you guys, sometimes working behind the bar really blows.  It sucks when you have gotten dumped only days previously and you have to keep running down to the basement to cry in secret.  It sucks when you have a fever.  And it REALLY sucks when some asshole smears his own shit all over the walls of the men’s room.  Worse than all that, though (well, maybe not worse than the shit on the walls but I think that was a once in a lifetime experience), is when someone who has previously been 86’ed walks in and you can tell they are not going to leave without a fight.

As a first little piece of advice here, and I am pretty sure I have mentioned this somewhere before, if you have been asked to never return to a bar, you should probably just never return there.  I mean, why in the world would you?  Seriously, if I was ever kicked out of a bar I would make it my business to never even walk on the same block as the bar.  No, I probably wouldn’t even walk within 3 blocks!  I would be so ashamed that an entire neighborhood would be completely off-limits due to my own obnoxiousness.  But some people just don’t have that same decency or self-respect.  Some people think that they are entitled to go anywhere they damn please and if they scream loud enough then other people will understand their logic and acquiesce.  Only in most places of reason and normalcy, that doesn’t actually work.  Sometimes, not all the time, but sometimes the bar in which I work is a place of reason and normalcy.  It was such a place last Thursday when this guy Mike walked in and assumed he would have his way.  He assumed wrong.

So there me and my friend were, behind the bar, when we saw him walk in.  After some talk, I decided I would break one of my rules by leaving the safety of the bar and talking to him face-to-face.  My only other option was to yell to him from behind the bar because he was standing a ways away, thereby drawing everyone into the drama and making it significantly worse.  So, I calmly walked over to him and then…

Me: Mike, you can’t be in here.  And you can’t have that drink.  If you want to come in tomorrow and speak with the owners, you are more than welcome to do that but as of now you are not allowed to be in here.

At this point, this lovely gentleman made a gun using his thumb and forefinger, held it up to my forehead and pretended to shoot me.

Me:  Okay, well, that is on camera so now any chance you ever had of being let back in here is gone.

Then the yelling began.  He asked me if I was the “enforcer.”  Admittedly, this is a funny question because I am like 5’4″, 115 pounds and he is, from my perspective, kind of huge.  At least 1.5 times my size.  But this underscores for you non-industry readers what it is like being a bartender, and a female one at that.  A lot of the times the people you get into it with could overpower you no questions asked.  Hence why it is always smarter to stay behind the damn bar (stupid Rebekah, stupid!).  Anyway, I (with a slight giggle) told him I was the enforcer.  Then he started calling me a slave.  Apparently not serving him meant that I no longer had any agency whatsoever.  And then all of a sudden I was a bitch and a whore.  Oh, and somewhere in there  I was also useless.  Can’t forget useless.  At some point after being called a bitch, after his girlfriend slapped me in the arm and before Mike threw money at me, my co-worker and I did sort of an asshole hand-off.  I walked behind the bar, she threatened to call the cops but actually just called our boss who lives upstairs, and then she went out to deal with him.  He recycled all his favorite epithets on her, “slave” being his favorite.  At some point he crumpled up a $20 bill and threw it at my face.  I really hate when people do that.  Like, REALLY.  Honestly, if he had never thrown the money at me I probably wouldn’t ever have written this blog but that is just so incredibly disrespectful and demeaning that I can hardly stand it.  I mean, who does that?  You know what?  I do work for money.  But do you know who else works for money?  You guessed it, lawyers!  But you don’t see me going into a court room and throwing money at him.  No, sir.

This went on for quite some time.  At some point I remember standing behind the bar, him yelling all kinds of insulting things and me simply saying, “well, you’re welcome to your own opinion.”  I truly believe that.  He is welcome to it.  Only, his opinion is wrong.  But whatever.  No point in splitting hairs over it. Eventually, after much yelling, he left.  I was happy he left because it meant I didn’t have to deal with him anymore but I was sad he left without handcuffs on his wrists. 

Later I found out this is like a normal thing for him.  He just gets shitcanned and picks fights with people and then his booze-induced selective memory allows him to think that none of it was his fault.  But at some point, you would think that he would realize that the amount of altercations he gets into is because of him and not because of every other person in the entire world.  I was trying to explain this to someone and in doing so I said “well, one of these days he is going to pull this shit on the wrong person” to which this guy responded, interestingly, “I think maybe he’s the wrong person.”  That got me thinking.  Maybe he IS the wrong person.  How sad would it be to wake up one day and realize that you are that theoretical ‘wrong person’ everyone is always warning people they might one day meet?  That person has no friends and eventually dies alone in a tiny apartment somewhere and has his face chewed off by his dog because no one notices for days that he’s dead and the dog is hungry.  Poor dog.

Anyway, all that happened before 10pm.  I had to work until 4.  I was not my normal, sunny self.  Good thing I didn’t learn until a few days later about the other customer who decided to call me a cunt because I didn’t want to hear her gloating about keeping Mike out of jail.  (For the record, I am sad he was not led out in handcuffs and will continue to feel that way.)  Ah, the bar business.  Good times.

(By the way, any neighborhood bartenders who want to know this guy’s full name because I know for a fact that he frequents a few of your establishments, — Kris, I’m looking at you! — I am more than happy to oblige.  Part of achieving my goal of vindictiveness is  coincidentally paralleled with my goal of warning others of inevitable volcanic eruptions at their places of employment.)

*As far as I understand it, one can only sue for libel if the the information being shared is an untruth that will do that person harm.  This story is a truth and I don’t think anyone in a position of power reads this blog so I’m pretty sure any real harm is out of the equation.  Safe?

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Harassment via Loud Speaker! A Novel Experience!

19 Nov

What follows is a rant.  So, consider yourself warned.*

As I have mentioned before, I enjoy running.  I love that it allows me to move my body. I love that I get to clear my mind.  I love that, as a four-season runner, I get outdoors on days when I normally would cower inside, wrapped tightly in my house sweater.  (Yes, I am aware that the fact that I have a “house sweater” makes me sound old.)  Perhaps most of all, I love that when I go out for a run I leave all technology behind.  Well, okay, that is not entirely true.  Sometimes I bring a podcast with me but that is only on days when I run over 13 miles.  Aching hips and the monotony of repeated running routes can spell the premature end of a specific workout and can, if repeated weekly, make the race I am training for terribly uncomfortable.  Believe me, I know.  And so, on those high mileage days, I allow myself a slight distraction.  Normally, though, I find the freedom from technology and the ability to take in the sights and the sounds of my neighborhood a perk to my running habit.

Today was no different.  I am just starting the process of training for the Manhattan Half Marathon at the end of January.  Yes, January.  In Central Park.  Sadly, this will not be my first time being stupid enough to run this race.  I am actually embarrassed to say that a few years ago when I ran it the temperature at the start was something like 13 degrees with a real feel of like, 5.  For the entire first loop of the park my feet were so cold they had gone numb and I literally felt like I was running on planks of wood.  It was absolutely terrible.  And yet I registered for it again.  Like a moron.  So I headed out of my house for an 8-9 mile training run, abandoning my phone on my bed.  I made my way up and around the cemetery and then, on Fort Hamilton Avenue, I experienced what was perhaps the worst case of street harassment directed at me ever in my life.  Well, it’s tied with that time the food delivery guy grabbed my ass like three houses up from my front door.  So there I was, minding my own business, enjoying the fall colors and the weird car-repair place that looks like an old-school drive-in restaurant with those girls that deliver the food on roller skates, when I heard, from what sounded like an intercom,

“Can I eat you down there, honey?”

Wait, what?  I stopped running.  I honestly could not believe that what I thought I heard was actually what I heard.  I looked around, saw an out of service MTA bus, the driver staring at me.  And then, just as I began to run again, thinking my ears must have deceived me it happened again.

“Can I eat you down there, honey?”

I turned around.  Through the haze of my anger the only thing I thought was that it must have been coming from the bus.  I took note of the time, the bus number, the cross streets.  I thought about whether or not I could give a description of the driver.  I hyperventilated.  Running when you are insanely angry and feeling violated and kind of afraid is no easy task.  I rehashed what happened again and again in my mind for the next mile until I convinced myself to let it go and think about something else.  Without a phone I couldn’t report it right then and I couldn’t snap a photograph.  I did, however, check my memory of the bus number every 5 minutes or so to make sure that when I made the report, which I was most definitely going to do, I would have all the details correct.  So I enjoyed the rest of my run as best I could, which was actually made easier by the fact that the park is one of my safe spaces.  I am always, always happy in the park.  If there comes a day when I am unhappy in the park, I will move away and not look back.

I arrived home and immediately went online to find the number to report complaints about MTA subways and buses.  511, in case you were curious.  I called and, after going through a whole lot of different menu options, I was connected with an extremely unhelpful lady.  The conversation went as follows:

Me: Hi. So I would like to file a complaint but I first am wondering whether or not it is possible for MTA bus drivers to make announcements on some sort of outside speaker.
Lady, snottily:  Well, why would you want the inside announcements to be heard outside?
Me:  Well, I wouldn’t, which is actually part of why I am calling. I just don’t want to make a complaint against someone and have them get in trouble for something that it is not possible for them to have done.
Lady:  So tell me the complaint and I will let you know.

I relayed my story to her.  She laughed.  Asshole.

Lady:  Well, I just can’t imagine anyone would say something like that.
Me: Yea, I couldn’t either until someone said it to me. So you can imagine why I would want to report this person.
Lady: Hold on.

I was then on hold for like 5 minutes while she did some combination of the following things: continued laughing, told all her friends about what I had told her, pretended she was doing something when actually she was just sitting there playing Candy Crush on her phone, or sought out a supervisor or bus-knowledge-haver to find out whether it was possible to make outside announcements.  She came back.

Lady:  It’s not possible.  Anything else?
Me:  No.  Thanks for your compassion.

It occurred to me that maybe the lady on the phone was lying.  I don’t know why she would do it but I thought it possible.  I hung up the phone and immediately posted on Facebook the following message which some of you may have seen:

Does anyone know whether MTA drivers have the ability to make announcements that can be heard outside the bus?

I received the following message from my friend Kevin which was so funny that it almost made the whole experience  worth having:

Does anyone know whether MTA drivers have the ability to make announcements that can be heard outside their heads?

Anyway, the whole experience sucked.  And it sucked even more because I was so convinced that it was the MTA bus that I didn’t look around for vehicles like cop cars and tow trucks that would be more likely to have outdoor speakers.  But also, it’s like, fuck you.  Who does that?!  Who makes sexually explicit comments to someone running over their fucking intercom?!  It’s like, let me broadcast that I am completely devoid of a moral compass.  Let me express my manhood by publicly making this woman feel entirely disempowered.  I hope someone sticks a nail in all his tires, breaks his speakers, and kicks him in the nuts.  Not necessarily in that order.

*That was really for you, Dad, since I know how much you love the rants. 🙂

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