No, I Do Not Want to Lower My Interest Rate

17 Sep

Okay, so, someone told me that I already posted about this topic.  There is a strong possibility that that is the case but I have a sort of bad memory and also I don’t feel like going back through all my posts to see whether or not there is any truth to this claim.  Also, I don’t really care because this is a topic I find so frustrating that I am perfectly happy to post about it more than once.  What could possibly be so important, so frustrating, as to necessitate possible repetition?  Why, the inefficacy of the National Do Not Call registry, or course!

So first of all, in doing some research to write this blog post, I encountered the following important message from the National Do Not Call Registry:

Scammers have been making phone calls claiming to represent the National Do Not Call Registry. The calls claim to provide an opportunity to sign up for the Registry. These calls are not coming from the Registry or the Federal Trade Commission, and you should not respond to these calls.

I have to say this does not instill me with a lot of confidence, not that I really had much before hence the need for this either first or second post on this topic.  But seriously.  Scammers have been pretending to be the National Do Not Call Registry?  What do these scammers say when they get you on the phone?  Do they ask you if you want to be included on the Registry and then when you answer in the affirmative they yell “psych!  You’ve been scammed, mother fucker!”  Do they some how manipulate the Registry so that you can never be added to it, no matter how many times you attempt to register either by phone or through the internet?  Do they then call you daily, rubbing in your face the fact that you fell for their cruel, cruel joke thereby aiding in the development of a very real and deep seeded fear of your cellular telephone? There are so many possibilities.

Anyway, I went onto the site once again to be certain that my phone number has indeed been registered because I get a lot of sales calls and it makes me mad.  It makes me mad not only because they are annoying, not only because I get excited when I get a phone call, only to have that excitement extinguished when I am faced with the pre-recorded voice on the other end of the line, but also because I think that the “companies” that make these calls are mean-spirited.  In my experience, most of the calls are attempts on behalf of the call-ee to get the caller to do something involving their credit.  If memory serves it has something to do with lowering interest rates.  I am actually not sure as to the nature of the call because I am always planning what I am going to say to the actual person on the other end of the line when I finally get the opportunity to speak with a representative.  I always opt to speak to someone.  I then attempt, always fruitlessly, to gather some information.  I have found that if you ask any of the following questions, or make any of the following statements, the person on the other end has been instructed to immediately hang up on you:  what is the name of your company; where is your company headquartered; this call might be recorded for quality insurance purposes; I am going to report you to the FTC.  The other day I was in a particularly saucy mood when I got one of my hated calls.  I, as always, chose to speak with a representative.  The lady I spoke to was, coincidentally, also feeling saucy.  Or maybe she is always saucy, I don’t really know.  Anyway, this happened:

Lady: Hello, would you like to try and lower your interest rate on your credit card?
Me: Which credit card are you referring to?
Lady: Do you want to lower your interest or no?
Me: Yes, but I doubt you can help me with that.  You need to stop calling me.
Lady: Need is a very strong word, ma’am.
Me: Yea? Well, so is ‘asshole,’ which is what you are because you called me during dinner.
Lady: Click.

It actually wasn’t during dinner at all.  It was the middle of the afternoon.  But what does she know?  I might have to go to work at 4. I might have a very strange schedule.  I might eat dinner for breakfast and breakfast for dinner.  I might have just lost my temper and made a stupid word choice error, a word choice error which I then beat myself up about for the following three days (actually the case).  You see, I was fully expecting to sass, but what I was not expecting was to get sassed right back.  Because usually the response to my sass is a hangup, which I also find very rude. It’s like, you called me, not the other way around.  If I had called you and sassed you, then you therefore possess the right to hang up on me.  But since you called me, I think the only party in the interaction that should, by the laws of phone etiquette, be allowed to hang up on the other person should be the callee.  You see, I was going about my day, minding my own business, thinking about rainbows and unicorns when you interrupted my day with your bullshit, and not to mention illegal, sales call to my personal cellular telephone and then you had the nerve to hang up on me, leaving me feeling not only angry but also rejected?  That’s really fucked up.  Anyway, I just really think that hanging up on someone you called, and also sassing someone when you are imposing on her day, is simply beyond the pale.  I am getting all worked up again.  Fucking lady and her fucking bullshit imposter credit card company.

So here’s another thing.  Those sham companies make me really angry because they prey on stupid people and that is just not right.  Most people find these calls to be just annoying.  Some people like me find them to be absolutely infuriating but I’m an extremist.  But then there are some people who think these calls are being made by people who actually want to help them and they give the person on the other end of the line all the information to totally fuck them over.  I mean, there must be people that share their personal information or else these companies would not be able to pay their employees, and therefore they would cease to exist.  There are some people in the world who are stupid, and it isn’t their fault.  There are also some people in the world who are NOT stupid but who lack basic financial literacy because for some reason teaching people about money and saving and investing and budgeting is not something that is considered important in this country.  (Well, I think some could fairly make the argument based off recent strikes, budget cuts and policy changes that teaching anything at all period is not important in this country but that is a discussion for another day.)  I just think that most people work hard for what they have, be it a little or a lot, and it is really not right to go and call them and trick them into thinking you are trying to help them and then take advantage of their stupidity or financial ignorance or whatever and steal from them.  And then what do the owners, or employees, of these companies say when asked what they do?  What if they were on a first date and the person on the other side of the dinner table was all, “what do you do?”  Do they say “I own a company that blind calls people and hopes they’re stupid so I can relieve them of all their savings?”  I would hope that if I were on that date I would pick up my drink, throw it in the persons face, pick up his drink, throw that in his face also, and then storm out.  Or, better yet, I would smile, pretend like I thought that was cool and then, when he was in the bathroom, register his email address on like every pornography site ever.

As you can see I have given all of this quite a bit of thought.

Oh, but the point of all of this that I totally forgot to make is that I registered my phone number on the National Do Not Call Registry sometime in like 2010 or 2011 and I still receive all these phone calls!  What the hell am I even on the damn list for if I am going to get the calls anyway?  Or am I on the sham list and I just never realized it?  While writing my thesis I wasted more time than I care to admit researching different phone numbers that had scam called me and then reporting them to the National Do Not Call Registry.  It really just isn’t right.  The National Do Not Call Registry owes me a lot of time.

So, yea, National Do Not Call Registry, get your shit together.  Protect the stupid people.  Also the people who get extremely angry about receiving scam calls and then find it necessary to spend an hour writing about it on their blogs. I am sure I am not the only one.

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I Dread This Day

11 Sep

Every year I dread the coming of September.  Part of that is due to the fact that I am a summer baby.  I was born in mid-July in the middle of a heat wave.  I imagine my mother cursed me throughout the final month of my fetal development.  To me, although September means better running weather, the turning of the leaves, the overabundance of apples screaming to be turned into apple sauce and pies, it also means the inevitability of winter.  Winter means layers, jackets, goose bumps, frozen fingers and toes, shorter days, frigid puddles topped with ice, snow stained with dog piss.  Winter is not my season.  Never has been, never will be.  But September also means another thing:  another year has passed since September 11th, 2001.

I dread the anniversary of the fall of the World Trade Center.  My mind always, without fail, calls up that photograph from the front page of The New York Times of the man plunging to his death, floors and floors of windows providing the chilling backdrop.  I think I will take that image with me to my death.  I recall the way I found out. My professor, in a voice cracking with emotion, told all of us from the New York City area to quickly call our families, to not be alarmed if calls didn’t go through, that the system was probably overloaded or failing.  All of a sudden I thought of my dad and grandpa who worked in the city.  Of my brother who had planned to fly out to Europe that very morning.  Of all my friends who had just moved to New York to go to college.  I remember sitting in the stairwell, in tears, on the phone with my mother saying to her that we must have done something wrong, that we must have created a world so horrible for some people that the only way they could communicate their anger and suffering was to kill thousands upon thousands of innocent people.  I believed then as I believe now that in order to understand horror, in order to understand the unthinkable, we must look inwards.  Perhaps not as individuals, but as a nation.  We live in an interconnected world and although I would never borrow the language of victim-blamers everywhere by saying that we deserved what we got, because I do not believe that in even the tiniest of ways, I would say that what happened to us did not occur in a vacuum.  It was not random.  It was, at least in part, a reaction to decades of poor foreign policy and problematic international relations.  It was a clash of ideologies, of lifestyles.  It was so many things.

And through all of this the overwhelming emotion that I feel is not anger, it is sadness.  I can apply all of my pragmatism, my knowledge, my now years of hindsight but all of that is just a way to deal with the sadness I feel.  I feel sadness that, as my mom said to me the other night, that was my JFK moment.  It was the moment I will always remember.  It was the moment when the world became a little scarier, a little less fair, a little less predictable, a little more unthinkable.  It was the moment when everything I had read about the reality of the world as a whole was dropped on my doorstep.  It was the first moment in my life that I felt afraid.  I felt afraid and I felt a heaviness and a sadness in every single inch of my being.  Every cell, every drop of blood, every tendon.  I felt sad when I boarded a bus home from college a few days later and could still see the smoke billowing from the wreckage. I felt sad when I passed the town train station and saw the cars whose drivers never returned home from work to pick them up.  I felt sad when I saw the reaction of the American public change from unity to one of hatred, anger, fear, racism.  I felt defeated when my friend, who is of Iranian decent, reported to me that she was spit on outside of one of her classes.

And I hate what came next.  What this attack allowed us to justify.  What it has done to the international community.  I cringe at the knowledge that we feel the right to inflict our collective need for revenge on innocent families.  That we are putting countless people through the pain that we went through.  It makes me crazy that this led to companies like Blackwater, to the increased power given military contractors, to the amount of money spent on violence while people at home suffer.  It infuriates me that people will “Support Our Troops” while simultaneously voting for smaller government, for less money going to the support those men and women really need when they come home.  I shudder to think of the fucked up idea of patriotism that has been born from this tragedy and the many that have followed since.

All of the specifics that I just mentioned are actually not important.  You can agree with them or not agree with them.  They are my own very personal and unique way of making sense of it all.  But I guess the point that I am trying to make is that my feelings about September 11th are very complex.  I think we all have complex feelings.  I can feel sad about all the people that were lost while also feeling angry about what our reaction to the attack has wrought.  I do not have to feel one or the other.  This is not a game show where I only get to choose that which is hiding between door number one or door number two.  I feel everything.  But the thing is that, for me, September 11th is the only day that I allow myself to feel the sadness separately from all of the other conflicting emotions.  It is the day that I remember those horrible videos that replayed over and over and over again.  It is the day that I wake up and feel proud and lucky to call this city, this country, my home.  It is the day I allow myself to recall those abandoned cars, that Times photograph.  As I have said before, there is not an emotional pie.  An individual feeling sadness about an event does not mean that there is less room, less left of her, to feel other things.  It does not mean that she cannot also step back and place our actions as a country into the bigger picture.  Sometimes, for me, it is just important to remember, and experience, those most basic emotions we were born with.

I dread September 11th because I cannot rationalize my emotions, all I can do is feel them.  On September 12th I can return to the world of international politics, of national responsibility, of the implications of actions.  I can insulate myself through my experience, my intelligence, my pragmatism, my life.  But for today, I will be rolling with a pack of tissues and I will not apologize for that.

The Internet is SUCH a Crazy Place

28 Aug

So, a couple of things have happened since I last posted.  So, last week I wrote a post about the whole incident that happened in Ireland at an Eminem concert at Slane Castle.  I didn’t really expect too much of a response since a lot of people were writing about the same thing but I was wrong.  Somehow my blog got linked on a Flemish-language newspaper and my blog EXPLODED in Belgium.  (Keep in mind the word exploded is entirely relative.)  So I had my two best days ever in the history of my blog one right after the other.  I even got some hits off of Twitter which basically never happens for the following two reasons.  One, I am confused by Twitter as a general rule and two, I have like 51 followers.  I had 52 but then someone unfollowed me.  When you have basically no followers you notice the ebb and flow.   Then this sad thing happened.  I noticed that, after the HIT EXPLOSION my daily hits were slightly higher than normal and came from search terms instead of my blog followers clicking on their emails or my Facebook friends finding the link there.  I then noticed that I was getting all sorts of hits from people looking for the image of the girl giving head at the concert.  (If you don’t know what I am talking about, just read the aforementioned blog, it will fill you in.)  So, okay, I have a few things to say about this.

First of all, seriously people, I don’t understand what is so damn exciting about a photograph of a girl sucking a guy’s dick.  If you really want to see what sucking a dick looks like, go suck a dick.  Set up a camera on the other side of the room and have it take a photo of you in the middle.  Put a stupid lime green hat on the person on the receiving end of the oral gratification, have that person throw his hands up into the air and basically you have the photo.  Not that exciting, really.

Secondly, if you really insist on seeing the photo, which makes me think less of your value as a human being because neither the girl nor the guy featured in the photo gave their consent, why don’t you try searching Google images?  You know what Google images is?  A way to find images.  You know what a photograph is?  An image.

Thirdly, porn.  It exists and it is everywhere.  The beauty of porn is that if you are turned on by people that look as though they are not consenting of the photograph being taken or the film being filmed, you can find that only the people actually have consented.  Acting, you know?  So you get the best of both worlds.  You get to view people engaged in sexual acts that maybe look like they are not participating willingly or as though they don’t know they are being photographed/filmed, but you are not being a horrible creatch and reinforcing all the fucked up gender stereotypes that run so rampant throughout our culture.

Fourth, think about what your desire to look at this photograph means and start asking yourself tough questions.  Do you think she deserved all the negative attention she is getting?  Why?  Would you feel the same way if the roles were reversed, if it was a man pleasuring a woman?  Would she still be the slut?

Fifth, I hope you read my blog when you accidentally got there.  I hope you read it and starting thinking about your role in the world.  And I hope you know that I think you are a complete asshole.

So another thing that happened is that I received an email from my friend Debbie complete with a screen shot that demonstrated the fact that my blog has been banned by the company for which she works.  We think it is because I wrote a post about going to a male strip club and that, throughout that post, I used the word “penis,” both in the singular and the plural, very liberally.  On the one hand, I sort of feel as though you haven’t really made it until you’ve blown up via  Flemish newspaper and been banned in a couple of offices.  On the other hand, I use the word “vagina” ALL THE TIME.  The word vagina is even in the title of one of my categories.  And yet it wasn’t until I used the word penis that my blog got banned.  So, that’s fucked up.

And finally, today I received a comment on my blog that said the following thing:

“Read on twitter you do a bit of bartending, would you be interested in us customizing your own bottle openers? We have a free promotion going on right now, send an email!”

My very own FranklyRebekah bottle openers.  I never thought I would live to see the day.

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A Bit About my First Twitter Altercation

22 Aug

So this is one of those instances where you, fair readers, are just going to have to bear with me on this little adventure through my mind.

So have you all heard about this incident involving an Irish girl at an Eminem concert at Slane Castle in Ireland?  No?  Well, let me give you the run down. So this past weekend Eminem gave an outdoor concert at Slane Castle.  At some point during the show, some guy (who it turns out is from Belfast) took a photograph of a girl giving head to some other guy and then posted the picture online.  As you can imagine, the picture went viral within hours and people all over Twitter and Facebook and Instagram and whatever other social media the kids are using these days came up with two (that I know of) different hash tags to allow them to discuss how much of an immoral slut she is.  This shit was everywhere.  (To their credit — and because the girl is 17 which, depending on the country, makes viewing images of her in a sexually explicit context equivalent to viewing child pornography — Twitter, Facebook and Instagram have done what they can to remove the photograph from users’ pages.  We will see whether going forward they will track down and report those who have distributed the images over the past few days.)  Following the incident and upon finding out that the image had gone viral, the girl had to be hospitalized and sedated to calm her down.  I hate to think what this girl is going to have to endure in the coming months.

According to the internet, she is a slut.  And according to one Jamie Glavin with whom I had my first-ever Twitter altercation,

“People defending the actions of that fucking #SlaneSlut need to be fucked into a bag, drowned and burned. Fucking stupid Useless cunts”

Okay, so first of all I don’t actually know what that means.  How does one get fucked into a bag?  And once one was drowned, why would it matter that one was then burned?  Or are some of us “fucking useless cunts” drowned and others burned?  Is it an every other?  Do we pick out of a hat?  And where does this Jamie (a) find the energy to fuck all the “useless cunts” and (b) track down all the bags into which he fucks us?  I wanted to ask him all these questions but unfortunately the character limit on Twitter would not allow me the pleasure.  I did, however, report his behavior to Twitter which will likely do nothing.  I still felt slightly vindicated.  He then posted the following status on his Facebook page:

“I have an awful feeling that if I make a slane girl related status I’m gonna end up on the news and eventually in court for hate crimes. I can’t handle that kinda publicity. However, I will let slip that I am more than willing to slowly kill, gut, skin and cook any of the stupid cunts that consider defending her as they are truly the proverbial fucking cherry on top of the fucking miserably disgusting cake that this country and its people have become. I’m a burn this motherfucker down.”

Obviously I have been having a lot of fun cyber-stalking this guy because I have way too much time on my hands.  Also, Jamie Glavin is just a perfect example of someone who is an idiot.  Also, a perfect example of someone who believes that women exist for public consumption. These people are, sadly, everywhere.  Just yesterday, while standing outside of a bar on 1st avenue with two guy friends while they smoked, an old dude walked up to me and said “you really shouldn’t dress so sexy.  It’s making it difficult for me.”  To which I obviously responded, “the way I dress is none of your concern.  Don’t talk to me.” Me being a female in shorts and a tank top in the middle of the summer in New York City makes me a consumable sex object.  Because I am in possession of breasts and a vagina, people have the right to come up to me and comment on how I am dressed and how the way that I am dressed impacts their day.  Me calling people out on that fact makes me a bitch, makes me unable to take a joke, means that perhaps I shouldn’t dress the way I dress because I am “unable to handle the attention” that my behavior generates.

So let’s put this into the context of this incident in Ireland.  So the photo of this young woman giving head goes viral.  As does the photo of her kissing the same young man and the one of that young man with his hands up her shorts.  There is never a time, however, where the young man is accused of being a slut, of being immoral.  His behavior is never questioned.  Him having his hands up her shorts is a demonstration of him accessing that which he deserves, while her “allowing” it to happen makes her a whore.  He is still pure and good and dominant.  She is a slut whose defenders are all “useless, stupid cunts.”

Let’s take this even one step further.  About a year ago a photo of an Irish guy named Eamon Keegan licking a woman’s breast at a soccer game in Poland spread like wild fire through the intersphere.  According to Keegan, this incident came about because, “We were all in Poznan, with all the Irish fans at the game and these two Croatian girls walked through and everyone started singing ‘Get your t*ts out for the lads’ and they actually did.”  The photo went viral.  The Ireland defender Sean St. Ledger starting a Twitter campaign to make Keegan a Twitter sensation.  Keegan even won the “Irishman of the Year” award run by the popular website balls.ie.

So you know what? The problem is not the women and men who defend the honor of yet another teenage girl who unwittingly became infamous online.  The problem is the people who take these photos and share them, immortalizing moments that maybe we wish we could forget because, honestly, we all have them.  The problem are the people who think that the victims of these online bullying campaigns deserve to be criticized by people all over the world.  The problem is the attitude that “lads” should be celebrated for public sexual acts while the women are lambasted.  Eamon Keegan is a hero while this young lady is a piece of of garbage who opened herself up to public criticism because she dared engage in sexual behavior at an outdoor concert.  It is people like Jamie Glavin who think it is their right, no, their responsibility, to denigrate a young woman that are the “the proverbial fucking cherry on top of the fucking miserably disgusting cake that this (world) and its people have become.”

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At Least There Were No Penises

19 Aug

Or, in the spirit of Rocky and Bullwinkle episode titling, The Day I Went to Hunkomania.

Before this past Friday, I only had one known experience with a male stripper.  A couple of my friends in college decided it would be hilarious to hire a stripper to come to their dorm room for our friend Janice’s birthday.  So we all gathered, under the pretense of pre-gaming with watermelon flavored vodka (shudder) before a birthday night out, when the buzzer rang.  Janice assumed it was just another guest.  Then, an aggressive knock on the door with an accompanying voice declaring we had elicited noise complaints.  Janice, wide-eyed, opened the door to find a decent looking man decked out in a police uniform that looked as though it had been purchased at Ricky’s.  It was a little too spandex-y, the wrong color blue, and had a very fake-looking badge that read “sheriff” affixed on the right side.  I’m pretty sure there are no sheriffs in Hartford, Connecticut.  Janice was still busy apologizing for our volume when the dancer plopped down the boombox he had been carrying and started slowly unbuttoning his shirt.  Janice’s face morphed from one form of horror to another.  I bee-lined, red-faced, to the corner, being sure to be out of harm’s way, and, while the dancer gyrated in a royal blue thong, I made a quiet promise to myself that I would never again be in attendance at such an event.

Fast-forward about 8 years to last Friday.  As one of the bridesmaids in an upcoming September wedding, me and a fellow bridal party member took it upon ourselves to organize a bachelorette party for the bride-to-be.  It had come to our attention through various routes in the grapevine that this particular bride would very much enjoy an audience with strippers.  Through various internet searches I decided that if we were going to do the stripper thing, we would go to the most hilariously-named strip club in the city:  Hunkomania.  I promptly put ten tickets to Hunkomania, plus a hot seat for the bride-to-be, on my American Express card.  I mean, if I was going to charge tickets to a strip club, I might as well get some extra Jet Blue miles, am I right?

As the night approached I became more and more nervous about the whole thing.  I spoke with a few people and was told, in equal measure, both that there would be no penises and that there would be penises everywhere.  I kept my fingers crossed for no penises.  I had all these ill-fantasies of me, sitting in a neon-lit room, bass blasting, penises in all directions.  I am not going to say that I like penises as much as the next person because, honestly, that would be a lie.  Penises serve their purpose and when they are not serving their purpose, I would like them to be tucked away in their underwear house.  And that is the case for a penis I know.  Stranger penises are a whole other story.  I never want to see a stranger penis.  So, you can imagine my dismay when I imagined dozens of stranger penises in every direction.  That would not a happy Rebekah make.

Upon arriving at the club I was happy to find that there were no exposed penises.  Instead, there were topless men with very nice abs and a lot of shrieking women.  I tried to get into it.  I ordered my drink and put a few singles in the waist band of a school teacher (for real, he told us).  I looked around at the carefully toned bodies.  I giggled with my fellow Hunkomania attendees.  It was all going well until some dude stuck his head in my chest!  No hello, no how are you, no check for consent, straight to the motor boat.  Okay, so, not only do I not like stranger penis, I also do not like stranger touching especially when that touching comes from a dude and involves anything other than a light tap on my shoulder. I told him to stop, he told me, while being muffled by my breasts, that it was okay.  I told him it was most certainly not okay and got my fingers prepared to poke him in the eyes.  He noticed my fingers and backed away slowly, careful not to make any sudden movements.  I figured word would spread that the girl in the pink and white striped dress was an observer and not a participant.  I was safe for a bit of time until this guy who I nicknamed in my head “The Humper” because every time I saw him he was literally writhing on someone decided that I looked lonely.  He sat next to me, leg draped over my leg, and said

The Humper: Do you know what’s about to happen?
Me: You are going to stop touching me?
The Humper:  No, do you know what’s about to happen?
Me, in a menacing voice: Do you know what’s about to happen?

The Humper then decided it was wise to move on to other people.  He honed in on the bachelorette which, I think, was the perfect decision. Also, I think my lightly veiled threat made its way through the rest of the hunks and I was able to enjoy the rest of the show with minimal physical contact and absolutely zero penis sightings.

All-in-all I think it was a success.  Zero penises.  Personal space established.  Bachelorette in the hot seat.  Some of the finest abs I have seen in real life.  Once the initial shock of it all wore off I was able to enjoy myself.  I was also able to ignore some of the more, um, questionable aspects of the show like when it opened up to news coverage of the Kennedy assassination and the fact that music from The Lion King and costume including headdress accompanied the first black dancer to take the stage.  Sometimes you just have to check your political sensibilities at the door.

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Thursdays: The Night the Freaks Come Out

9 Aug

Somewhere around midnight one of my Thursday night regulars came in and asked me how my night was going.  I told him I thought there must be a full moon or something because everyone was being really weird.  It was only when he asked me if they were weirder than the week before or the week before that that I realized that every single Thursday night people are weird.  It is the night all the freaks come out.

The night started out normal enough.  Busier than it has been this summer but nothing crazy.  The usual suspects were there, drinking their usual drinks, hanging out with their usual friends, running up their usual tabs.  There was one girl there who I had never seen before who insisted on waving me down (a definite no, no) and ordering from me when my back was turned and then getting insulted when I told her that if I was not facing forward, I was probably not listening to her.  Anyway, she wasn’t weird she was just an asshole.  The actual weirdness didn’t start until sometime around 11.

So there I was at around 11, minding my own business, not paying too much attention to the slowly escalating argument in the booth at the front of the bar when all of a sudden, yelling!  There was a guy in a red and white striped t-shirt, practically standing on his toes as he tried to get in the face of one of our (much taller) regular customers, well call him Kevin.  He said something about it not being all in good fun.  Well, here we go.  I decided that since I tend to stoke the fire rather than put it out, I would let my coworker handle it — hopefully she could get the yelling to stop and figure out what had started it in the first place.  A few minutes later she came back behind the bar and told me, through uncontrollable giggles, what she had found out:  the fight had started over some pockets.

As I am sure many of you know, it can be very difficult to get a straight story out of someone who is really drunk.  They get the order of events all wrong, they sometimes forget the initial question halfway through answering it, they crack nonsensical jokes that are side-splitting to them but make absolutely no sense to anyone else.  After about 45 minutes, I managed to piece the pocket fiasco together.  There are still some holes but here is what I managed to find out.  A group of friends were outside the bar smoking cigarettes and talking.  Kevin, who didn’t know this group and was also outside smoking decided to strike up conversation with them.  Somehow, and I am still unclear as to how this happened, they decided that it would be really funny to “collectively rip the pocket off of Kevin’s t-shirt.”  I don’t really know how people go about collectively ripping someone else’s pocket off, but there you have it.  I actually think that probably it was only one person who ripped the pocket but the girl who told me the story decided she was not a snitch and thought that if they all did it then no one would be held responsible.  In reality, I didn’t really give a shit who ripped the pocket, I just thought it was ridiculous and knew I would want to write a blog about it.  So fast forward about 1/2 hour later, Kevin walked over to one of the guys in this group and decided to exact revenge on behalf of his wounded t-shirt.  He reached across the table and ripped the pocket off this other guy’s shirt.  The problem with this plan was two-fold.  First, the guy whose shirt he ripped was not actually present during the original incident and second, this guy had a bad temper and no sense of humor.  Hence the yelling.  Initially, my coworker managed to diffuse the situation but, drunk people being drunk people, Kevin decided that the best plan of action was to continue to mock bad temper guy for the rest of the evening.  It wasn’t until I informed Kevin that bad temper guy also had no sense of humor and that’s why he was getting so mad that Kevin finally backed off.  Either that or he got distracted by his on-going attempts to unclog the toilet in the men’s bathroom.

Kevin spent a good 1/3 of the night in the men’s bathroom trying to plunge the toilet.  We kept telling him to just leave it, that we would take care of it, but he was a man on a mission.  The best thing about it was that every time someone opened the door to the men’s room, you would get a glimpse of Kevin standing there, plunger in hand, paper towels all over the floor, defeated look on his face as he stared into the bowl.  We concluded that the toilet required a snake.  Kevin would not be swayed from his mission.

But that’s not all!  Sometime after the pocket period, but during the toilet bowl period, some of our other Thursday night regulars came in.  They work nearby and come in after they finish up their shifts, sometime between 1:30 and 2.  Most of them are easy, low key and fun to talk to but one of them is a little bit of a creech so I try to never go out from behind the bar for fear I might be blind-sided by an unwanted hug.  So there I was, hiding behind the bar, when my coworker and I noticed this rather odd smell.  We saw the creech standing there with a recently-extinguished match.  But the smell wasn’t from a match but something much stronger, much stinkier.  And then we were told that the creech decided to light a potato chip on fire to “demonstrate how much oil is in each individual chip.”  I told him that maybe next time he could teach his science lessons outside the bar.

So, that’s basically what happened.  I will leave you all with this one last piece of advice.  Probably don’t get into a debate with someone at 4:45 in the morning about whether Judaism is only a religion, or a religion and en ethnicity.  Especially when that person is driving you home and has a concealed carry permit.

 

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Tip # 9 on Being a Good Bar Customer

8 Aug

And we’re back with more tips, folks!  If you missed the earlier tips and wish to catch up, look no further than the following links.  Tip #1, Tip #2, Tip #3, Tip #4, Tip #5, Tip #6, Tip #7, and Tip #8.  If you wish to share the tips with your bad bar customer friends in a not-so-subtle way, please do!  Let the missteps of others inform our future booze establishment behavior. And now, without further ado, how not to behave if you get 86ed from a bar.

If you end up getting 86ed from a bar, AKA you are never ever allowed to set foot in there ever again, probably you should just never ever set foot in there again.  Obviously, I would advise you all to never behave in such a way as to get yourself 86ed, but if you do, have some pride.  I don’t know much about other cities in the world, but New York City has a lot of bars.  A lot.  There are bars everywhere.  It is easier to get a drink in this city than it is to do a lot of other things that normal people do in their day.  Here are some examples: it is easier to get a drink than mail a letter because there are basically no mailboxes; it is easier to get a drink than to find a public restroom because there are basically no public restrooms; it is easier to get a drink than go to the grocery store, the pharmacy, or the hardware store because, at least in my neighborhood, you pass at least 8 bars en route to almost any of these other destinations.  The point of this is that if you get 86ed from one bar, there are plenty of other bars you can go to unless, of course, you have gotten 86ed from all of them which is a problem I am not prepared to deal with at this time.  If you have been 86ed from All Of The Bars Ever you should probably talk to someone.

Some people who have been 86ed from my bar get it.  This doesn’t mean that they like it, but they understand that once they are refused service for acting like an asshole, they probably should not show their faces there again.  The thing about the people that get it is that generally, in their case, acting up to such a degree as to get kicked out was such an aberration for them that they are ashamed and take a pretty severe detour around the bar whenever they are in the vicinity so as not to have to relive their embarrassment.  Then there are the people who misbehave, get 86ed, and insist on walking by the bar on the regular, peering in the window and mean-mugging.  No joke.  I can think of two solid examples of this type of person: this one guy who online stalked one of my coworkers and the woman who tried to beat me up over the bar.  It’s as if they think that if they stare at the bar often enough, they will put some sort of hex on the bar and either we will go out of business or we all will suddenly be struck by strange cases of amnesia and will forget ever having 86ed them in the first place and they can happily go back to online stalking and bartender threatening.  Finally, there are the people who have been definitively 86ed from the bar and yet continuously try to come back in.  Today I am going to talk about a few of these people but not all of them because, sadly, there are just too damn many of them for one post.

Sometimes you have a really annoying customer who you hate and you really wish that he (I am just going to go with ‘he’ here because statistics!) would do something that would allow you to kick him out for good.  But no.  He walks ever so close to the line without ever crossing it.  He comes in on drugs.  He does not understand the volume of his own voice or that he is incredibly annoying.  He seems to think that “paying for drinks” is a new phenomenon that simply does not apply to him.  He spills his drinks so much that I am forced to erect safety barriers out of coasters.  Sometimes (okay, one time but I like to think it happened over and over again because it is just so damn funny) he tries to sit on a garbage can and the lid breaks and he falls into the garbage can with his legs and arms sticking out of the top of it and everyone leaves him in there for a little while because they are laughing too hard to pull him out.  Anyway, this guy gave me such a headache but there was nothing I could do about it.  I had to serve him.  But then, one day, he got super wasted, somehow got himself buzzed into my coworker’s apartment building, and proceeded to walk up and down the stairs yelling and knocking on every available door in hopes that she would open hers up.  She didn’t.  This went on for over and hour.  He started at 4:15am.  He subsequently got 86ed from the bar.  That was at least 6 months ago.  And still, all these months later, he regularly tries to get back into the bar.  His most recent attempt came at 3pm on a Sunday afternoon.  I was behind the bar, as I generally am at that time, when he walked in.  The second I saw him I started shaking my head no.  He looked back at me with an expression of complete bewilderment. Then he said, “is she here?” referring to the victim of his late night stair climbing rampage. She was, in fact, there.  Before I got a chance to say “it doesn’t really matter if she is here or not, you are not welcome to drink here” my coworker came flying down the bar, finger wagging, sternly repeating “no!” He began to argue, realized there was no point, tried to look defiant and walked out the door.  I doubt this is the last we will see of him.  But here’s the thing.  He isn’t like, an awful guy.  He just can’t drink. He crossed the line.  He followed someone to her home.  It could just be over but no.  He has to continually make our jobs harder and also make himself look like a complete asshole by repeatedly trying to sneak one by us.  Guess what?  We are not stupid.  Also, if you really need your fix of Raspberry Stoli, I am pretty sure I can point you in the direction of a bar that has some.  Basically, in any direction because there are so many bars.

A few days later on a really weird Thursday night (I think there was probably a full moon…there had to have been a full moon) this other annoying guy walked in.  He is another one of those guys that I am just itching to get rid of but he hasn’t done anything bad enough.  Yet.  He always walks in with the worst people because shitty people, I have found, tend to either be complete loners or travel in packs.  They don’t tend to go around with people who are cool.  Anyway, one of the women he walked in with was too drunk for me to serve.  She couldn’t put her elbow on the bar without it sliding off, causing her to almost fall forward off her chair.  She also would not speak to me without having her hand over her mouth, thereby making her thickly slurred speech that much more difficult to understand.  I was so busy arguing with her about how I would not serve her another drink (why does this happen?) that I didn’t even notice that the guy next to her was someone who we kicked out about a year earlier for screaming at one of the owners when she refused to give him another drink because he had already had something like 12 Bud Lights in an hour and could not hold his head up.  And yet he could scream.  Go figure.  Anyway, in the midst of explaining to elbow lady, for the 5th time, that no, she could not have a beer, I noticed that the guy sitting next to her was Angry Bud Lite Guy.  I told him that not only could he also not have a drink, but he was actually not allowed in the bar.  He then started yelling about how he didn’t want a drink and how he hated the bar anyway and would never actually go there.  I pointed out the flaw which was that he was, at that very moment, in the bar.  This did not go over well.  Anyway, yadda, yadda, yadda, he yelled, I stared at him, he yelled, I threatened to call the police, he yelled some more, then one of our other customers who is SO BIG walked over and sat next to do the dude, causing him to immediately flee the scene. (Sometimes bigger is better, it turns out.) But that’s not all!  Angry Bud Lite Guy then pulled his favorite party trick:  call the bar over and over and over again for the rest of the night, asking for the manager every time he calls even though he is already talking to her and complain about how he never misbehaved in the bar, how he never yells (while yelling) and that we are all stupid.  Again, if you want a Bud Lite, go somewhere else.  Seriously.  Keep your drama to yourself and let me do my damn job.  Staying up until 5am sucks enough without your spit landing all over my face while you yell at me about how you never yell.

So, yea, probably don’t get 86ed but if you happen to, just stay away.  We don’t forget.  Also, as I said before, have some damn pride.

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A Different Beefcake Ruined my Workout

29 Jul

Maybe you all remember back in October when I wrote about how a trainer at my gym ruined my workout.  No?  Well, you can read it here.  To recap, I was in a place I hate being (the gym) doing something I hate doing (lifting weights) and I was forced to talk to someone I had no interest in talking to.  There was no escape and I was pretty sure I would see him around every time I convinced myself to go to the gym so being overtly dismissive was out of the question.  I do not like having unnecessary bad blood if I can avoid it.  Anyway, I pretty much pretend like I don’t recognize him whenever I see him which is, obviously, the mature way to handle the situation.  I just carry along with my day, doing squats the way I am supposed to do squats and ignoring his looks as he does like 50 kabillion pull-ups because he is so strong.  I’m just glad he doesn’t talk to me anymore.  Or, well, I was glad he didn’t talk to me anymore before a new trainer decided to give me advice.  Now I would take the old beefcake over the new one any day.

So there I was, post-run, doing some ab things on one of those big balls.  He was in the midst of training this other woman when he caught a glimpse of me doing my workout and said under his breath, in a voice that was way too excited for the circumstance,

“Ooh! Tucked ab rolls!”

Unfortunately I didn’t have my music, making it harder for me to pretend like I hadn’t heard him. Whatever, I pretended anyway.  Then he leaned over and said

“Miss? If you want I can show you a variation to do on those that will really engage a whole other part of your core.”

I hope those words are never said to me again.  Anyway, against my better judgement I agreed to hear him out.  So he showed me something that I guess was maybe a little bit better and I thought the whole thing was over and I would just go along with my life, avoiding his glance when I walked through the gym.  Pretty much I like to think when I am at the gym I am invisible. But no, of course he wasn’t done.  He then wanted to watch me do the weird, new, obviously very exciting tucked ab rolls.  Then he said that, if I wanted, he would do some sort of movement and flexibility test which comes with my membership.  It felt like a strange thing to turn down so I acquiesced. I mean, how do you turn down free!  He asked for my number or email, I opted for the latter.  Last Thursday afternoon, at 12 o’clock, was my 45 minute appointment.  It was the most uncomfortable 45 minutes of my life.

After running through a few normal questions, he told me he wanted me to do this stepping exercise to try and figure out my vo2 max.  While gathering all the necessary equipment, he told me that he had scored an audition (a role? a place?) on this show Fit or Flop which, he informed me, is a show to try and find the next Jillian Michaels.  Personally, I don’t know why anyone would want to be the next Jillian Michaels because, as far as I can tell, she is a bitch who yells all the time.  But whatever, to each his/her own.  In informing me of this opportunity which I cared oh-so-much about, he told me about another trainer with the same gym company who is on the current season of Fit or Flop and had created a workout class called “coregasm” which was designed, surprise surprise, for women because women have orgasms while doing core exercises.  I thought of informing him that if this were the case then basically all women everywhere would have really awesome abs but thought better of it and instead told him that I was sick of this obsession with sexualizing everything.  I figured this would be a clear sign that I am was not interested in discussing sex or sex-related topics with him.  Apparently not clear enough.

No more than 5 minutes later he was on about this woman he works with at another location who makes and markets all these cute workout tops with fun sayings on them.  Every Friday the trainers at this other gym wear her t-shirts to try and drum up some interest.  I thought that was nice.  He then informed me that he got the shirt that said “fitgasm” on it. Of course. He promptly launched into a whole story about how one of the members at the gym told him about his own fitgasm and said that he thinks women have them more than men and that if he were a woman he would work out all the time.  Seriously, dude.  Let’s go through this again:  if women had an orgasm every time they worked out two things would happen.  One, the gym would be more crowded with women and two, the gym would be louder.  We’re not stupid.  We know a good thing when we experience it.  But again I didn’t say any of these things.  Instead, I looked at him blankly and said “yea, people say really inappropriate things all the time” hoping that he would read that comment as “you say really inappropriate things all the time.”  Obviously he didn’t.

Fast forward 4 awkward comments later to when we were wrapping up the longest 45 minutes of my life.  He started explaining to me why he had asked me lots of questions at the beginning of the session including “what do you do to unwind.”  He then said to me, “you know how you said you like to hang out with friends?  Well, this other client I have told me she likes to” –he looked around the gym suspiciously and lowered his voice to a whisper — “have sex.”  Dude!  I said the only thing I could think of to say which was “um…I’m sure her partner is very happy about that?”  He nodded his head enthusiastically.  Ew.

So that was pretty awesome.  And by pretty awesome I mean incredibly awkward.  I have been left over the last few days wondering if this is his chosen behavior all the time or if there is something about me that screams “yes, please talk to me about sex and sex-related things at every possible opportunity.”  If that is the case then I need to change that thing because trainer, I do not want to talk to you about sex ever at all.  And now, after this incredibly weird experience, I am left with two responsibilities.  One, I have to hope that you don’t realize that the link at the bottom of my email is to this blog because it would be uncomfortable if you read it and two, I have to avoid you every time I go to the gym from now until eternity.

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Because Women are Defined Forever by the Politicians they Fuck

24 Jul

I am an avid reader of The New Yorker.  For the first few months I received the weekly magazine, I awaited its arrival with baited breath.  I was riding the train to and from class in Manhattan on a near daily basis and had plenty of time to rip through the half dozen or so articles, the Talk of the Town, the book and movie reviews, the satire.  When I first started reading it, I read it from cover to cover, making sure not to miss a thing.  I was almost compulsive about it.  As time went on and I stopped going to and from the city as often, I began to fall behind.  I now have issue upon issue filed away that I have yet to touch and still I save them, sure that one day I will return for all the valuable information I didn’t have time for in the past.  I refuse to intentionally discard any of them, so consider myself slightly lucky for the loss of a few issues over time.  (Of course, the obsessive side of me is agitated by the holes in my carefully organized collection.)  I am actually half convinced that one day I will be found dead in my apartment, crushed under the weight of piles and piles of back issues of my favorite magazine.  

Recently, I have been in a slight New Yorker rut, toting around unopened issue after unopened issue.  Today I decided all that would change.  I grabbed the July 22nd issue that has been wrinkling in my shoulder bag (a shoulder bag that, by the way, is imprinted with an old New Yorker cover, how predictable) and decided to quickly read through the Talk of the Town so I could more quickly get to the article I was really interested to read, an article by Rachel Louise Snyder called “A Raised Hand:  When domestic violence turns ugly.”  Well, I got waylaid by a Lizzie Widdicombe piece called “On the Couch:  Comeback” that touches upon the return to the political scene for two disgraced New York politicians:  Eliot Spitzer and Anthony Weiner as comptroller and mayoral candidates respectively.  I have actually been thinking about how to address this exact topic for some time and Ms. Widdicombe, whom I normally enjoy quite a bit, gave me just the fodder I needed.

Just today I was ranting about the return of Spitzer and Weiner, lamenting the fact that if a female politician were to “sext” someone a photo of her tits or use the services of an escort, her career would be over.  There would be no comeback attempt because there would be no chance of anyone taking her seriously.  She would be a whore.  She would be a bad example for our children.  People would be digging into her past, looking for any sexual deviance.  If she had made an allegation against someone for sexual misconduct, it would be dredged up, analyzed and mocked, more so even than at the time it was filed.  She would go from being a respected politician, to being maligned by the newspapers in the same way as was Ashley Alexandra Dupre, the “call girl” who’s mere existence brought down Spitzer,  a woman who was, after all, simply doing her job.  Dupre, as it turns out, is more than just her job.   According to the assistant editor of Rolling Stone Andy Greene (as quoted by Widdicombe), Dupre was a singer with a voice “not much worse than Britney Spears.” But, he continued “it’s a really tough road for her to have a music career because she’s a prostitute.”  Apparently, her time as a sex worker makes it near impossible for anyone to imagine her as anything other than that.  Dupre is a prostitute, Spitzer is someone who gave in to temptation; Dupre lacks morals, Spitzer is merely weak.  For many Americans, being a paid participant in the sex trade devalues a person, and yet high powered men who pay for the services of women like Dupre can get their lives back in order with a few well-timed apologies and maybe a publicized visit to a therapist. Spitzer, after all, was given two shots at being a talk show host.  And now he is back in politics.  None of this is to say, of course, that people utterly forget what happened, that the offenders aren’t mocked ruthlessly (I mean, Weiner, really? The jokes write themselves!), or that a return to the political scene is easy.  The point is that a return is possible, which it is not for women.  Until recently, Dupre wrote a sex column for the New York Post because once you’ve been a sex worker that’s pretty much all people want to hear out of your mouth.  Anyway, back to Widdicombe’s article.

In her short piece, Widdicombe talks about the entrance of these two men back into the political scene.  She takes the approach of analyzing their “infidelities” using the perspective of marriage councellors, making the argument that these two men need to salvage their voter-politician relationship much in the way they had to salvage their marriages.  (Granted, this is going to be much harder for Weiner given the recent release of more information about his sext-ploits.)  In conversation about Spitzer’s return, one therapist she spoke to, a Doctor Jim Walkup, said that voters “remember the look of that woman” (italics mine), referring to Dupre.  And, a Doctor Christina Curtis added, “his wife” — Silda Wall Spitzer — “having to go up to the podium, and the humiliation.”  She is remembered for, and defined by, her humiliation.  The New York Post, oh-respectable publication, called her “the first door mat” and I think I read somewhere that she blamed his visits to Dupre on herself.  Patriarchy at its finest.

I actually don’t really know where to go from here.  I guess part of it is that I would expect for The New Yorker to have a more nuanced discussion, even in a short piece, of the roll that gender plays in all of this.  The writers have been known to say much more with much less words.  These men have taken advantage of their power and privilege and although they were forced to resign their seats at the time, they are still relevant.  But what about Dupre?  She is just “that woman.”  And despite her high powered career, our national memory of Wall Spitzer is best captured in these words by Katy Waldman of Slate:

“Silda Wall Spitzer impressed herself into our collective memory when she stood, chalk-gray, beside her husband as he resigned from the New York governorship in 2008. It was a wrenching image of devotion or delusion, depending on your take…”

I guess what I am looking for is a simple admission that when these high-powered men take their dicks out, there is collateral damage and that the damage generally has a female face.  Monica Lewinsky, after all, is remembered for little more than that stained blue dress but the reality is that she wasn’t simply an exploit, she was and is a person.  Furthermore, despite the fact that Bill Clinton earned himself the unfortunate nickname “Slick Willy,” his opinion still matters.  His support of Barack Obama makes a difference.  He is still respected.  And yet the only thing that matters about Lewinsky, even all these years later, was that she gave the President head in the oval office.  These women are all human beings.  They deserve our respect and they deserve to be acknowledged for something more than simply their involvement in some dude’s temporary political undoing.  We have to acknowledge the power dynamic that exists between a well-established, well-respected, powerful man and the oftentimes much younger women that get wrapped up in, and brought down by, their after hours activities.  We have to acknowledge that men of power, and specifically straight, white men of power, get a pass from us when they fuck up, even when they fuck up over and over again.  Sure, give Spitzer and Weiner another chance, but lets not use it as an excuse to unearth topless photos of Dupre.  The women that get caught up in all this are simply living their lives, and they deserve to go on living it outside the shadow of some powerful guy.  They also deserve a second chance.

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Rebekah’s Official List of the Worst Jobs Ever to Have in NYC During a Heat Wave

18 Jul

On a walk down 5th Avenue today in the height of heat (well, let’s be honest, basically every time feels like the height of heat this week) and after seeing some idiot running on the sunny side of the street without carrying water, I started thinking about some of the jobs that I would absolutely hate to have during this heat wave.  To be fair, most of the jobs I am about to list are jobs that I would hate to have at basically any time but right now they seem especially unpleasant.  Also, I am pretty sure that these jobs can fit into one of the three following categories, or some combination of multiple categories, thereby making them especially awful:

(1) Jobs that involve mostly being in the out of doors during the sunny part of the day and especially those jobs that include intense, or even not so intense, physical exertion of some kind;

(2) Jobs that involve dealing with things that are stinky which are necessarily made extra stinky by the oppressive heat;

(3) Jobs that involve dealing with the public because, let’s be honest, the heat makes people crazy.

These items appear in no particular order mostly because the heat has made me too lazy to come up with any sort of scoring system to make ordering them make sense.  Also, if you have suggestions for jobs I might have forgotten, feel free to send them along and if they might my highly rigorous standards (AKA as long as they are funny and/or things that I would hate doing) I will add them in!  And without further ado, Rebekah’s Official List of the Worst Ever Jobs to have in NYC During a Heat Wave.

1. Sanitation worker2. The people who clean out the port-o-potty’s in Prospect Park or, let’s be honest, anywhere at all
3. The counter person in one of those trendy, or not-so-trendy, food trucks
4. Traffic cop, both the people who give out tickets and the people stuck standing in the middle of the asphalt surrounded by hot and angry drivers who they have to tell where they can and cannot go (wearing pants and one of those silly orange vests for safety)
5. The lady who sells empanadas (or as I like to call them, fried sandwiches) on 5th Avenue and then has to push her cart all the way back to Sunset Park which involves going uphill
6. Emergency response people
7. Door men at fancy hotels (sort of related question:  are there door women?  I have never seen one.)
8. Security guards who have to wear black t-shirts and stand outside looking tough.  In my experience looking tough makes you hotter
9. Delivery people for restaurants
10. Postal workers
11. Seriously pregnant women (that counts as a job, right?)
12. Someone working in an ice cream store that has run out of ice cream
13. Winder washers
14. People that lay asphalt
15. Anyone working on the roof
16. Camp counselors
17. People who work in the kitchen.  Believe me, I just boiled some peanut butter and honey and other shit to make homemade granola bars and basically almost died
18. Movers
19.  People who deliver kegs of beer to bars and have to somehow get them down the stairs and also people who deliver sodas and beer to grocery stores and bodegas
20. People who work in a store that’s air conditioner has broken or that has owners who are too cheap to buy an air conditioner and so not only are those people stuck working in the stuffy stuffy place in which they work, drowning in a pool of their own sweat, but also they have to deal with all the people who come in expecting a rush of coolness only to find stagnant heat and then they say something stupid like “what, no air conditioner?” and you have to try and not bite their heads off
21. People who have to wear costumes as part of their job.  This is not so common in NYC but I’m told we have that racist guy who runs around Central Park in an Elmo costume…although, come to think of it, he sort of deserves to be hot and uncomfortable (thanks, Paul Haney!)
22. Anyone who has to work in a basement with no air flow with a lot of machinery which overheat to the point where when they walk outside they actually feel cooler (Paul Haney again!)

So, that’s the list.  Feeling thankful (for once) that the bar in which I work is The Most Air Conditioned Place Ever.

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