I Wonder How Refunds Would Work…

Apparently, hookers in Hungary are now being issued entrepreneurial permits, enabling them to hand out receipts for their…uh…services rendered.

So many questions! Are they itemized? Hand-printed or computerized? Can they be used as leverage when haggling with other prostitutes over pricing? Do you need to keep them for your expense reimbursements if you’re travelling on business?

Well, I’m all for it. It’s about damn time those lazy whores have to file taxes like the rest of us.

 

“OK, so that’s one blow job with extra ass-slaps, and a side of shameful weeping. Cash or charge?”

Go Into The Light, Carol Anne…I’ll Just Stay Here, Thanks.

I’m not much of a scary movie aficionado. It’s not that I don’t like them – I do. It’s just that I’m a massive chicken shit, and I really don’t want to spend the next 2 weeks afterwards sleeping with the covers up over my head and urinating a smidge whenever I hear what sounds like someone walking around upstairs in our 100-YEAR OLD HOUSE when I know I’m home alone, and holy shit I need to stop because I’m scaring myself right now.

Great. Now my fucking teddy bear is haunted and pissing the bed too.

I’m pretty sure my exaggerated reaction to scary movies is a product of my overactive imagination, my generally anxious nature, and the fact that when I was 7 years old, the adults in my life figured that it was just fine and dandy to let me watch “Poltergeist,” even though I still hid behind the recliner whenever those flying monkeys came onscreen during “The Wizard of Oz.”

“You think I’M scary? Bitch, you just wait.”

I don’t care who you are, “Poltergeist” is a scary fucking movie. Those weird blue flying monkeys in fabulous vests lost their ability to scare me once I got past 3rd grade (OK, once I got past my junior year. Of college.) but “Poltergeist” has always proven to be just as scary each time I watch it. The staticky television, the tree outside the window, the kitchen chairs all floating in the air like that? SHUDDER. Of course, scariest of all was that damn clown doll coming to life, which cemented my fear of all things Emmett Kelly.

Bone-chilling fear permanently etched in mind of 7-year-old? Check.

Of course, being the trusting soul I was, in 4th grade I told my good friend Amy about my fear of clown dolls during a sleepover at her house as we sat in her bedroom – a bedroom, I might mention, that was in the very furthest corner of her very big house, totally isolated from everyone who might have been able to thwart a potential clown doll attack. Explaining that she needed to use the restroom, Amy excused herself, leaving me all alone in the unnerving quiet of her bedroom. After about 5 minutes alone, a clown doll – much like the absolutely fucking terrifying one above – came hurtling towards me from the darkened doorway.

I screamed. I flailed. I wondered if I had brought a change of underwear.

And Amy laaaaaaaughed and laughed as she emerged from the doorway. Ha.

Now, Amy was actually a very sweet and wonderful friend – albeit with a sick sense of humor – and today she is a brilliant doctor who saves lives on a daily basis, so I have no desire to seek revenge by, oh, I don’t know, revealing to the internet that she harbored a red-hot crush on Patrick Swayze for years and years.

Oops!

So, yeah, it took me a while to get over that. But to be honest, I never had any other-worldly experiences that couldn’t be explained away by my sadistic imagination or certain Johnny-Castle-loving friends.

Except…this one time. Which I can only write about while I’m here in my cubicle, with the sun streaming in my window and hundreds of other real, live people around me. So, sorry, Company That Pays Me – I would blog at home about this, but I am a total vagina who scares herself with her own stories, so I’m doing this one on the company dime. I’ll consider it payback for the countless hours of my life you consume on a daily basis, ‘kay?

So, this one time. I was about 9 years old, and my sister and I were spending the night at my grandmother’s house. My grandmother’s bedroom was on the first floor of her early-20th-century rowhouse, and my sister and I always slept in the upstairs bedrooms. I preferred the tiny bedroom that used to be my Dad’s when he was little, and my favorite piece of furniture in the room was a chair with shiny red faux-leather cushions fastened to the frame with large brass furniture tacks. The chair sat to the left of my bed, facing the same direction, so that if I was laying on my back I only had to look slightly over my left shoulder to see the chair. It was close enough for me to reach out and touch if I stretched out my left arm.

In the middle of the night, we had a thunderstorm and the lights went out. It didn’t make much difference in my room, since everything was pretty well-lit by a street light right outside my window, but my sister’s room was much darker, so she came in and sat on my bed, waiting for the power to restore so her nightlight would come back on. With my sister sitting on the edge of my bed, I drifted back to sleep.

Then, I woke up. The storm had passed, and I guessed the power was back on because my sister was gone. I turned over my left shoulder to look out the window that was behind my bed and the red chair, and – hoo boy, here’s where my throat starts getting tight – sitting upright in the chair was a baby. It was very still, and it was looking at me. Well, I guess it was facing me, not looking at me, because it had no eyes…just dark, empty holes where the eyes should be. Its face had the blank, expressionless look of a china doll. The best likeness I could find is this – it wasn’t wearing any clothes and it definitely wasn’t sporting any blush or lipstick or hair, but this picture totally captures the stoic expression and terrifying empty eyes:

Holy mother of FUCK.

I remember staring at it for a few seconds, trying to make sense of what was going on, and then I managed to process that CREEPY EMPTY-EYED BABY SITTING STARING AT ME OH MY JESUS, so I balled up under the covers, shaking and barely able to breathe. I was certain it was only a matter of time before it tried to “get” me, so I braced myself for the attack, but nothing happened. I remember making a small gap in the covers to let in some fresh air after a while, and somehow (probably due to the lack of oxygen) I fell back asleep.

When I woke up in the morning, it was, of course, gone. I never told my sister or my grandmother or my parents. I knew they’d never believe me.

Eeeek. That shit happened 21 YEARS AGO, and it still scares me breathless and makes my heart race. Also not helping: that large coffee I just drank. I may also have to poop.

Anyway, fast-forward to the present day, in which I am currently a cast member of a production being staged in the abandoned swimming pool of a 115-year-old library (apparently libraries came with pools back then). It’s all very avant-garde and cool and what have you, but our dressing rooms are quite a distance from the performance space, which requires us to travel along a very creepy corridor and up some very creepy staircases. In period costume. While performing a play about murder and the inescapable presence of the dead. We might as well be holding a fucking seance. You can imagine how amusing it is for me to travel – ALONE and IN DIM LIGHT – from the backstage area to the dressing rooms, trying not to break into a full-on run on the staircase that looks pretty much like this:

“Don’t mind me – just here to renew a book AND STEAL YOUR SOUL.”

So, it’s going to be somewhat of a struggle for me not to freak myself out during the run of the show (and I guess this blog post isn’t exactly helping). I’ll just have to keep myself distracted [read: drunk] and thinking about things that have nothing to do with my surroundings. Kind of like this picture, apropos of nothing, which I found during my image search for the Scary Hole-Eyed Ghost Baby:

Scary, but in a different way. Also reminiscent of a particularly interesting party I attended in college.

No One Ever Said Ovaries Were Fair

So, there’s this woman. She has two kids. She was doing drugs around them, and when the cops tried to bust her for it, she THREW HER BABY AT THEM.

I’m just glad that people like her and Britney Spears were able to reproduce, aren’t you?

“Sorry, mom – I would have snapped his neck, but I had Cheerios crumbs in my Chi.”

When Stealing Office Supplies Simply Isn’t Enough

My job is not one of those scary, life-or-death, tear-your-hair-out-and-crap-your-pants, anxiety-inducing jobs like air-traffic controlling or neurological surgery – or, shit – even wedding planning. So if I fuck up, it’s usually no big deal.

“But, hell – that’s quitter talk,” thought the evil part of my brain responsible for fuck-ups, “I’m sure we can figure something out.”

And so, because I did not read a mass e-mail about multiple-entry visas closely enough, my boss was nearly deported. TO BAGHDAD.

AS IN IRAQ.

AS IN WAR ZONE.

AS IN BOMBS FALL DOWN GO BOOM.

Guess I won’t be getting that bonus this year.

“My bad! Can I have next Friday off?”

How Claire Huxtable Failed Me: An Exercise in Blaming My Shortcomings on Must-See-TV

In addition to an irrational fear of centipedes and a penchant for constipation, one of my many charms is my absolute refusal to be assertive in situations that require me to do so. Of course, I have no problem being assertive in completely inappropriate situations, which is to say that if I’ve had a couple Jack & Cokes and you happen to tell me that some bitch at the next table elbowed you on the dance floor and then gave you a dirty look, OH HELL NO I will not allow that to go down, because THAT’S WHAT FRIENDS ARE FOR, and oh, hey, look, I’m getting kicked out of the bar. How’d that happen?

Dalton, you magnificent son of a bitch!

But when it comes to things like, oh, telling a waiter he got my order wrong, explaining to my hairstylist that I don’t like the cut she gave me, or – GOD FORBID – asking to speak to a manager? Hell no. You go right ahead, Assertive McGee. I’ll be over here with my bad hair, eating the meatball sandwich I did not order AND LIKING IT.

I will now quietly accept my fate as a Romanian gymnastics coach.

And I really don’t know how this happened. After all, I grew up watching ladies like Julia Sugarbaker and Claire Huxtable on TV every week, and those bitches did not front, my friends. I idolized them. When I was in 3rd grade, I wanted nothing more than to grow up to be a sassy black lawyer in Brooklyn, or – if I was still white when I reached adulthood – a well-spoken interior designer in Atlanta. However, instead of this:

“Let the record show…”

I turned out more like this:

Oh, Peter. I understand your pain.

And I’ve tried. Oh, how I’ve tried. But along with being horrendously unassertive, I was also gifted with somewhat of a short fuse (Thanks, Lord!). So my attempts at speaking up for myself tend to go awry at the first sign of resistance from the other party. And by “go awry,” I mean “contain high-pitched screams of profanity and hysterical tears.” Just to pull a completely hypothetical example out of the air, here’s how a conversation between me and the salesperson at a college bookstore might have gone, if he had hypothetically refused to return a very expensive textbook I mistakenly purchased:

GUY AT COUNTER: Can I help you?

ME: I want to return this book.

GUY AT COUNTER: That book is non-refundable.

ME: What?

GUY AT COUNTER: It’s non-refundable. Those books are specific to the semester, so we don’t need them anymore.

ME: BUT I DIDN’T KNOW THAT WHEN I BOUGHT IT AND THERE WERE NO FUCKING SIGNS AND NOTHING ON THE RECEIPT SAID SO AND IT WAS A MISTAKE AND I DON’T HAVE THE MONEY FOR THIS I CAN BARELY PAY MY FUCKING RENT WHAT AM I GOING TO DO YOU ARE HORRIBLE AND AWFUL I HATE YOU AND I CANNOT HANDLE THIS SHIT AND I AM NOT LEAVING UNTIL I GET MY MONEY BACK OH MY GOD OH MY GOD WHY ME OH MY GOD AND MY STOMACH HURTS AND NOW I AM LATE FOR CLASS I HATE YOU I HATE YOU I HOPE YOU ROT IN HELL FOR WHAT YOU HAVE DONE TO ME JUST LOOK AT ME LOOK AT MEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!

So. Uh. I got the refund.

And my friend Bird, who had the great privilege of accompanying me that day, has never been the same. Hypothetically, of course.  

You see, when you go from zero to BURNING RAGE in 30 seconds, assertiveness is not so much your strong point. So, until I figure out how to express myself without untoward amounts of tears and spittle, I’m obligated to go with the more sanity-friendly option: keeping my damn mouth shut and taking it up the ass like a champ.

Someday, Julia Sugarbaker, I will have balls as big as your shoulder pads.

Words of Wisdom from MySpace

I once again found myself searching the maddening pages of MySpace for someone’s profile, and in between flashes of red-hot rage and fury, I came across this very wise and eloquent quote from a particularly insightful young lady:

“Beauty is found in the heart, not in the eyes of some jealous bitch.”

Indeed.

Shock Therapy

I am a 30-year-old married woman with a college degree, a full-time job, and a mortgage. Last night, I saw this sticker in someone’s car window, and nearly pissed myself laughing:

Clearly, I am ready to be a parent.

Ring-a-Ding-Ding

As I’ve mentioned before in this blog, I am a big fan of technology. Namely, the kind of technology that allows me to do most of my job on a computer so that I don’t have to waste paper/directly interact with any of my fool-ass co-workers. Email, the internet, online forms – I love them all so much, I’d like to take ‘em into the supply closet for a handy.

Settle down. I was kidding.

But as much as I love technology, I’m not one of those people who goes nuts over the latest computer or cell phone or iWhateverthefuck. In fact, if it wasn’t for HoST, I’d probably spend my evenings on the davenport watching VHS tapes on a wooden console television and talking on the party line with my rotary phone.  Therefore, when it comes to the cellular telephone, I am typically…behind the times.

“Operator? Give me Sycamore 5-3472!”

Really, I don’t give a shit about what kind of cell phone I have. I pretty much see my cell phone as something that I call HoST with when I’m walking to my car in a particularly shady neighborhood, so that if I am suddenly mugged at gunpoint, he will hear “OHMYGODAAAAAAAAGGGGH!! *clunk*” and proceed to shit himself in panic.

The downside to not caring about my cell phone is that I always have a shitty phone. I didn’t have texting or cameraphone capabilities until THIS YEAR. That’s 2007, my friends. Fucking pathetic. However, when I got my shiny new phone this April, I was absolutely overjoyed at the fact that I could actually download a ring that would sound like a real song and not like something Q-bert composed on a Casio keyboard.

“Hey! Fuck you, too, you uppity bitch!”

When I got my new phone, I spent nearly an entire evening deciding on which ringtones to purchase. What kind of songs, I asked myself, could capture the essence of my worldview? And so, I downloaded:

1. “Yakety Sax,” a.k.a The Benny Hill theme song, and

2. The theme to The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air

And my amusement, it was great. I played my ringtones for HoST. I played my ringtones for the cat. I played my ringtones for any poor asshole who gave me the opportunity. Nevermind that they were probably pitying me for the excitement I showed over ringtones in THE YEAR 2007 –  I was too busy doing The Carlton to notice.

But alas, it wasn’t long before I noticed The Problem: these ringtones – though clever and thoroughly amusing – were LOUD. Even when my phone was buried in my purse and on the lowest volume setting, the sound of my phone ringing would inform the my entire office that I looked at my kingdom (I was finally there!) to sit on my throne as the Prince of Bel-Air. And one evening when HoST called my phone while I was in the grocery store, some lady gave me such a dirty look I thought perhaps I had accidentally shit on the organic cabbage.

“Yo homes, smell ya’ later!”

Unfortunately, the worst was yet to come. A couple months later, I did two things: changed my ringtone to the Benny Hill song, and attended a funeral. I think you can see where this is going. And if you are not familiar with “Yakety Sax,” please, picture yourself in a darkened funeral home, with people expressing their sympathies in hushed tones and the heavy scent of carnations filling the air, and go have a listen.

“I don’t know who’s stiffer, love – me or your Grandma!”