Category: My Life

Portraits in Stupidity, first in a series

The bus driver was a typical morning commute bus driver, stopping suddenly for no apparent reason, letting more passengers on the bus despite the laws governing volume, density, and morning coffee breath. The woman standing next to me had one arm wrapped around the pole for support. In her left hand she held a compact mirror, she was applying eyeliner with her right. The driver would slam the brakes, she’d wobble and narrowly avert skewering her eye. It made me nervous. Not because I’d mind having her out of the gene pool, but I have no idea what kind of detergent you use to get brain out of a new sweater.

3:44 p.m.

The people in my neighborhood:

  • The guy with retro “I listen to indie rock” glasses whose dachshund always wants to know if he’s just bought something edible. Last time I passed him, he was letting the dog smell a CD.
  • The old lady who lives behind me and teeters around her sun room. Watching her, I realized for the first time that old people walk slowly because every step hurts.
  • The perpetually surprised girl who tweezes and tortures her tiny eyebrows until she looks sufficiently terrified.

10:07 a.m.

Are things really this bad in SF? Do guys with IQs high enough to code software need a guide that tells them how to approach a woman at a networking party? Um… you’re networking, it’s a party. Try “So, what do you do?” This is not rocket science, my friends. Then again, this article did have an brilliant piece of general advice for men on the prowl:

“Take a look at some of the spreads in Details. Do
you look like that? No? Get yourself down to the
Castro or whatever gay district exists in your
town, march into the most fashionable and snooty
clothing store you find and demand that a gay
male employee find an outfit for you. ”

11:07 a.m.

Someone gave me some “Tea Leaf Soap” as a gift awhile back. I finally opened it when I ran out of regular soap and used it this morning. It’s a pretty deep green with little brown tea leaves embedded in it, and it smells nice. Of course, I was covered with little brown tea leaves when I finished washing. When I mentioned to a friend that a debris-laden soap seemed counter productive, she looked at me incredulously, as though I’d missed an entire chapter in the girl handbook. “Rinse it off,” she said. Oh. Right.

11:07 a.m.



Ha! This is undoubtedly my favorite photo taken of me in my Halloween costume. You’ve gotta try pretty hard to look creepy in a girl scout uniform.

4:56 p.m.

I always have a pen in my mouth. This one tastes like detergent. Apparently, someone decided to clean my office supplies while I was at lunch.

3:19 p.m.

This guy lives in the suburbs, and every Christmas he puts up wood cutouts of reindeer having sex. The neighbors aren’t amused, but I am.

12:23 p.m.

A friend sent me an email forward about the election that I actually found interesting:

A Zimbabwe politician was quoted as saying that children should study
the US election event closely because it shows that election fraud is
not only a third world phenomena. To illustrate the point, he made the
following comments.

10 a.m.

The best magnetic poem I ever saw was on the office fridge of a little gamer company called Click :

Who is best?

I am.

10:50 a.m.

te>Couldn’t we all use a little John Denver right about now? We could:

Aye Calypso!
The place's you've been to
The things that you've shown us
The stories you tell
Aye Calypso!
I sing to your spirit
The men who have served you
So long and so well

Right. Why am I still at work?

8:47 p.m.

San Francisco Moment:

Guy in a Jeep Cherokee passed me this morning with his radio blaring. He stopped for the light and as the engine roar quieted, I heard, “THE NASDAQ COMPOSITE INDEX PLUNGED TO ITS LOWEST LEVEL IN 15 MONTHS…” He was blasting NPR. Rock on, suburban white guy.

10:16 a.m.

Stuff that creeps me out, in order of creepiness:

  • Russian grandmother sells her living grandson for organ harvesting.
  • Japanese men are signing up for an online service that lets them woo a virtual woman over email. They must court the woman, and if they’re good enough the relationship will, ah, progress. If not, the “woman” dumps them.
  • This museum has an exhibit on the human body that includes fake human feces floating in a toilet. Kids love it.

2:11 p.m.

With my ears plugged from the cold, I mistook an ambulence siren for an aria and looked around for the fat lady.

10:28 a.m.

I saw a commercial this weekend for an E-Z Bake Oven CD-ROM. Two girls sat side by side giggling in anticipation over the rising cake… on their monitor.

GAHHHH! First they take away candy cigarettes, then toys that spark, and now this? Excuse me, Orwellian Overlords? The whole point of the E-Z Bake oven is to mix the tap water and pseudo-chocolate powder, spill most of the “batter” on the floor while you’re pouring it into tiny pans, and let it bake for three hours under the scorching heat of a 60-watt lightbulb. Now that’s entertainment. The day I catch my child watching an animated cake and clapping her hands in glee, I’m unplugging the Telescreen and sitting down to wait for the Thought Police to take me away.

3:30 p.m.

Walking me to work this morning, Fred kept nudging me into the parking meters. I finally asked if I could switch sides with him. He seemed frustrated and said, “I know I’m supposed to walk on the curb side, but in San Francisco all the bums are on the inside.” Good point.

10:06 a.m.

When I was in college, I had an art history professor who would dock our papers an entire grade if they didn’t have titles. So I wouldn’t forget, I wrote “The Coolest Title in the World Goes Here” on my title page. Of course, I never got back to it and I turned the paper in. The best part is, the paper was on “art in public spaces.” Tragically, if one leaves the “l” out of public, spell check doesn’t catch it. Even if you leave the “l” out two or three times.

11 p.m.



Fat Chicks in Party Hats will make you feel like a creep for laughing. The barely English captions are so incredibly random that you can’t stop scrolling. The caption for this one reads, “my date for the prom did taste like choclate! BURP! oh i am so alone.”

Stolen from Metafilter.

3:50 p.m.



This site’s creators aren’t disturbed by the lude nature of amateur porn photography, but the zebra-print drapes must go.
Obscene Interiors has painstakingly cropped out all the extraneous nudity, so you can experience the full horror of beaded avacado bedspreads without distraction.

11:04 a.m.

My nephew Trevor is three, and he’s a big fan of nose picking. I said, “Trevor, don’t do that, honey. People think it’s gross.” Trevor looked up at me thoughtfully with his finger buried up to his knuckle. He said in his most earnest, explanatory tone, “No they don’t, Auntie Mawget. They think it’s yummy.”

3:40 p.m.

All right, it’s true that I’m sick again for the third time in two months. But if one more chipper, healthy person tells me to take echinacea, I’m going to march into their cube and rub my cold-infested face all over their phone receiver.

Then I’m going to call to thank them for their sound advice.

11:16 a.m.

Ladies’ night was at the Rolladium last night, and someone passed around body glitter while we were lacing our skates. I�ve showered twice since then, and I’m still finding glitter in some inconvenient places. Like under my contacts.

3:47 p.m.

This morning’s commute was eventful. I was sitting next to this kid who was booming hard-core gansta rap in the back seat of the bus. Needless to say, the mostly 35-and-over crowd was none too pleased that the music was so loud, or that every other word was an expletive. Finally, someone near the middle of the bus yelled, “Turn that thing off!” The kid turned his boom box up and yelled, “Who said that?” No one answered, so he laughed and turned it up louder. Meanwhile, all of his friends were slumping lower in the kind of perfect embarassment you can only experience when you�re 15. A big, red-faced guy in his mid-50s stood up and charged through the packed aisle screaming “I SAID IT! NOW TURN THAT F—-ING THING OFF!” Whereupon the kid made some rather threatening gestures in return. The older guy yelled, “Stop the bus!” and got off. The kid grinned and turned the radio up louder so all of us could enjoy the full impact of the word “niggah” reapeated 15 times per minute on a bus that had suddenly become rife with racial tension. The kid was black, the older guy was white, and let’s just say the anger was a little disproportionate on both sides. Fab.

The music fan obviously felt big about having dominated the bus. Apparently, there’s a real sense of power in being the gangsta king of public transportation. Right. What he failed to notice was that his actions just reinforced every racist attitude that anyone on that bus ever had about black people. All his friends, who seemed like decent kids, were lumped in with him because they happened to be sitting next to him. I wanted to smack him upside the head and have a discussion about greater responsibility. However, I’m the whitest white girl that ever walked, and he didn’t seem like much of a listener, so I kept my mouth shut. Now I’m stewing about it instead.

10:41 a.m.