Travel mistle-woes

Sorry for the delay… I would have posted this earlier but I trapped at the airport.

There’s no way I can escape it. My parents live in another state, a 10 hour drive from where I live. If I fly, it’s only a 90 minute flight but I get caught up in the insanity at the airports. If I drive, I lose 2 days of family time and deal with the nutcases on the road. Not to mention I would add too many miles to my car.

We were booked on a flight to get home on Tuesday evening. I checked the flight mid-afternoon to learn that our flight has been pushed back 2 hours which would get us into the closest airport (2 hrs away from home) at 11pm. So we call and reschedule to the earlier plane which is scheduled to leave at the same time our flight was originally scheduled for. (got that?)

We get to the airport and still see that our “new” flight has the same departing time. Yippee! We can go home. We get though security and go to the gate where we wait for 2 hours only to learn the fight’s been cancelled because of weather. (wait… our family in NY says the weather is fine. What’s up with that?) While we wait on a very long line of tired and unhappy travelers, my husband calls my parents to see if they are willing to come get us. We get rescheduled for the first flight out the next morning (Wednesday).

Up at 4:30am, excited to finally be going home, we are 45 mins early for our 7am flight only to find out at 7:30 that it’s cancelled because of mechanical failure. We get rescheduled for a flight departing at 6:45pm. Again we call the parents. Both of us call work to let them know there’s no way we can get there. Understanding bosses are wonderful but they can’t make the work stop piling up.

What about our luggage? Will it leave and when? We’re told it will get to NY but they don’t know on what flight or on what day. Wonderful.

Are you following this so far?

At 4pm, I check the flight status and learn the flight is pushed back to 8:30. This is where I’ve reached my breaking point. In my frustration, I am unable to speak coherently to the airline without a slew of profanity. So I hand the phone to my husband so he can handle things. He is assured that to the best of the agent’s knowledge our flight will take off that night and told "no, sir, we will not reimburse your tickets because of the toubles you've encountered." Sigh.

While he talks to the airline, I use my cell phone to call the place where my car is living so it doesn’t get towed.

So yes, in the end our flight took off – at 9:00pm, getting us into NY at 10:30.

Now it’s luggage time. The luggage belt is moving but out suitcases are not on it. I wait on the lost baggage line (which is being handled by 1 very unlucky person) as we get notice that a sign on the door says that the lost baggage department will close at 11pm. WHAT? How can they close when we all need to talk to them?

Finally it’s our turn to speak with the agent (at 11:25pm). We give her our luggage claim stickers and voilà -- she has good news for us! The bags are in the storage area and she’ll make sure someone there brings our bags up for us. We just need to walk across the airport to the storage center.

Ok, so in the end I guess I shouldn’t bitch. We landed safely, got our bags and found my car in one piece. We got home last night (or was it this morning) at 2:30am… and I still made it to work.

We need to find a way to teleport… I just worry that if/when we do, I’m gonna arrive at someone else’s destination.

Creepy men on MySpace want to have sex with me.

(If you think this is addressing you, then it probably is.)

I got an email from someone on MySpace awhile back, telling me that what I needed and subconsciously really wanted was to be FUCKED HARD....by HIS 'massive horse dick' of course. Wow. All that cock and he's a mindreader to boot. Any woman who'd turn that down must be an idiot.

Guess you'll just be calling me George W from now on, then, because boys, if you've ever said anything like that to me, ever considered saying anything like that to me, or ever looked at a picture of me (or me myself, for that matter) and thought, 'Damn, what that woman needs is my man meat all up in her', I've got news for you. It is never going to happen. Never. Absolutely not. Hell will freeze over, Kerrymen will stop playing football, Lindsay Lohan and Carnie Wilson will swap wardrobes, and the NYC subway system will smell of lavender, and still, it will not happen. You are barking up the wrong tree, and if you keep it up, the only one of us that's gonna get rammed is YOU.

Newsflash, retards. NOT every woman on MySpace is a raging cockhound. NOT every one of us is here in the hopes of achieving our lifelong goal of getting 500 penises shoved into all our orifices over a 24 hour period. (There are enough of those kind of women here, however, that the Dick Brigade should be well occupied by them and kept far away from me. I find them. Why the hell can't the men?) One simple READ of a fucking profile should make it perfectly clear to all you wankers who's who. It should not need to be beaten into your thick skulls like this.

But ehh. I guess you're just too busy jacking off to read, huh?

Oh yeah, and do not even try to tell me that my pictures are misleading. I'm going to spell it out for you in black and white. I am a former fattie. I spent most of my life with a great set of tatas and no real way to show them off because I was too ashamed to show the rest of me. I only started giving a damn about my appearance at all over the past 5-10 years. I have worked my ever lovin' ass off at getting to where I am now, and if I want to take pictures that show the fruits of my labour, that's my right. You would probably do the same thing if you lost a net 100lbs. So can it. Besides, people with two X chromosomes need some jackin' material too. (Or jillin' material, as the case may be....heh....)

So to recap....men....you're creepin' me out with all your disgusting shit. Those of you with wives and girlfriends are disrespecting the living hell out of them, but that's no surprise, seeing as you'd send completely demeaning emails and comments to a total stranger, so it's obvious you don't hold women in terribly high regard no matter who they are. If you approach me on here in a platonic manner, I don't mind that at all....I'm one of these people who can never have too many friends and don't care who they are so long as they're good people. But if you approach me as a friend and then start bombarding me with inappropriate emails, comments, and propositions, your ass is GONE. I am not stupid. I know what you're up to. Platonic friends do NOT talk about converting you to Team Weenie.

My work here is done. If you have any questions you can feel free to forward them to me, but if they're stupid, I'll feel free to delete them without responding.

So what if Christmas is technically over?

This is a repost of something I wrote back during the Christmas season of '02. That was not a good year for me. Neither, frankly, was this....which explains why (a) I didn't write, like, an update or anything, and (b) I didn't even post this till after the first half hour of December 26. Deal with it. And keep these things in mind, please. Most of em really aren't seasonally-specific.


Things you absolutely will and will not be doing in my presence this holiday season if you value your life and/or the remainder of your 32 pearly whites at all....

1. You will not touch me.....and I mean so much as lay one solitary finger on me, particularly not in a crowd setting. It goes like this....you push me, I knock you to the ground and kick the shit out of you. It's not really that hard a concept to grasp.

2. You will not touch anything belonging to me, either, whether it be my car, my coat, my trolley, or my child. Such an action will result in the loss of at least one finger.

3. You will have the common sense not to give me any sort of poisonous junk food as a present.

4. You will also have the common sense to realise that the above rule also applies to presents you buy for my kid.

5. You will not ring your bell in my face and demand I give you my 'spare' change to 'help the poor'. God helps those who help themselves. You and the fucking poor can go out and get a job for yourselves like the rest of us. I hear Duane Reade is hiring.

6. You will, however, take your bell and stick it where the sun don't shine upon request from yours truly.

7. You will not expect me to accompany you to any Christmas party where they're not planning on serving anything but fried bananas and $3 rum.

8. You will not wax poetic about the holiday season being a time for family togetherness. You should know by now my opinion on all this forced family togetherness. It exists purely for the benefit of people so offensive that if not for their family's 'obligatory' tolerance of them on special occasions, nobody would ever be bothered with them.

9. You will like my holiday decor, and you will bloody well tell me how much you like it.....the more often the better.

10. If you suck at judging sizes, you will not guess I wear a size 12. I realise I'm not as impossibly tiny as I once was, but a 'mistake' like this will cost you big time. Just ask the stolen coat peddler down by City Hall who ended up picking his wares out of a gutter after his lousy eyesight prompted him to assume in such a manner.

11. You will take your fat ass and your 50 jillion packages out of the middle of 5th Avenue and you will let me pass. You will also refrain from talking on your cell phone as you saunter down the middle of 5th Avenue with your 50 jillion packages. You will not ram into me, make me walk around you, or force me to listen to your vapid conversation or else I will be forced to fire you and all your belongings in front of the next bus that passes by.

12. You will not lecture me on 'keeping the Christ in Christmas'. No, I don't believe in any of this religious rot, and yes I'm probably going to burn in Hell forever and ever and ever because of it. But that doesn't make your argument any less pointless, groundless, or fucking stupid, or for that matter any more likely to convert me, so you might as well save your hot air for your parish buddies and leave me the hell alone.

If all of these rules are respected over these next few weeks, I don't see how there would be any problems at all.

Merry Christmas, all!

***

Yes. And god bless us every one. :)

Yuletide Lament

Christmas Day, 2006. The end of the year is nigh. My mother is puttering around the kitchen making greenbean casserole. My dad is beached out in the living room, watching television. Somewhere in the house, my schizophrenic brother has his hand on a doorknob - the drugs he's on give him OCD. I'm dressed for dinner, waiting for it all to be over.

Comfort makes me anxious; idleness...depressing. I've been stuck in this house for days, unable to drive because I left my license in New York. Not that there's anyplace to go, the choices being Wal-Mart, Target, or Best Buy. I've been spending unholy amounts of time on Myspace, YouTube, and Radioblogclub, catching up on my pop culture. It's all the same damn cycle of scandal, satire, and airbrushed success. It makes me nauseous.

So, I started reading a few books I brought, but they're all badly written. Mind you, this is Jeanette Winterson and John Buchan. I scoured National Geographic and Scientific America, but my usual enthusiasm for all things science seems to have fallen out of my chest along with my broken heart. The things I do love about the Midwest, its highways and big sky, have fallen over the fine line between overwhelming and irritating.

I asked my Mom to take me to a movie, Little Miss Sunshine. It's playing at the second run theatre over in Independence - $2.00 tickets. The movie is clearly hilarious. I hardly cracked a smile. Instead, I started crying when the teenage brother ran screaming from the car after he learned he was colorblind. I want to pull over a car and run out of it screaming. Damn leaving that license.

I tried to jot some thoughts down in a journal, but its mostly self-serving, achingly personal, and as badly written as a Jeanette Winterson cookbook. They says its not suppose to matter, a journal is for you. I can't fathom writing for anything other than an audience. I can't imagine DOING anything for other than an audience. I always feel watched, looked at, shafted. Perhaps it is the God in me that won't go away no matter how many times I proclaim my new found atheism.

Back in my pseudo-religious, spiritual days I seemed to be happier only because I felt like I was being watched, graded, studying for the PAT - Paradise Aptitude Test. My actions and thoughts were carefully made, wrong and right dissected like a pair of Siamese frogs.

I'm not happier without God, but I feel free. Or, rather, loose, unstrung, slightly hollow. Less like a bird, and more like a clay pigeon. I can't turn back, belief at this point would be for belief's sake, and belief isn't like art - there's nothing free association about it, nothing mammalian or spontaneous. It just hugs you all your days like a strange picture book from your childhood you can't forgot.

In a few days, the year will be over. It was my tenth in New York City, my tenth since I started college, my 28th on this rotating ball of green gases. I spent the first half of the year building my bridges, and the second half burning them down. The year began with promise, middled with a pleasure, and ended with my essence drained through a sieve. I'm starting 2007 a whole new person, I person I can't stand.

Happy Holidays.

Eat, talk, or go somewhere else

Yes, I’m the one who complained about people using cell phones in the bathroom. The day after I posted the cell-phone-bathroom-people complaint, another one presented itself in full force. I think “they” heard me and notified their friends, the cell-phone-restaurant-people.

Here’s the scene: I met a friend for lunch at a small Japanese-Chinese fusion place. We were the first 2 customers of the lunch crowd. We order, settle in to enjoy the conversation then SHE came in. SHE was seated on the other side of the restaurant from us. After placing her order (very loudly) with the waitress, SHE dialed someone and held a complete conversation. And continued WHILE SHE ATE. So for about 30 minutes we heard her very loud side of the call… only to be treated to an amazing hush when she left.

I didn't (and still don't) give a damn about this person or about her complaints about work or her holiday plans or even how much she spent on a Christmas gift for that guy she's dating but who is afraid of committment. Why did we all need to know her business?

Enough already.

This all made me wonder: does a cell phone etiquette guide exist? It does! Dan Brody of InfoWorld.com publised something that might help cure some of these people: “The Ten Commandments of cell phone etiquette.” Below is a portion of his article:

“1. Thou shalt not subject defenseless others to cell phone conversations. When people cannot escape the banality of your conversation, such as on the bus, in a cab, on a grounded airplane, or at the dinner table, you should spare them. People around you should have the option of not listening. If they don't, you shouldn't be babbling.

2. Thou shalt not set thy ringer to play La Cucaracha every time thy phone rings. Or Beethoven's Fifth, or the Bee Gees, or any other annoying melody. Is it not enough that phones go off every other second? Now we have to listen to synthesized nonsense?

3. Thou shalt turn thy cell phone off during public performances. I'm not even sure this one needs to be said, but given the repeated violations of this heretofore unwritten law, I felt compelled to include it.

4. Thou shalt not wear more than two wireless devices on thy belt. This hasn't become a big problem yet. But with plenty of techno-jockeys sporting pagers and phones, Batman-esque utility belts are sure to follow. Let's nip this one in the bud.

5.Thou shalt not dial while driving. In all seriousness, this madness has to stop. There are enough people in the world who have problems mastering vehicles and phones individually. Put them together and we have a serious health hazard on our hands.

6. Thou shalt not wear thy earpiece when thou art not on thy phone. This is not unlike being on the phone and carrying on another conversation with someone who is physically in your presence. No one knows if you are here or there. Very disturbing.

7. Thou shalt not speak louder on thy cell phone than thou would on any other phone. These things have incredibly sensitive microphones, and it's gotten to the point where I can tell if someone is calling me from a cell because of the way they are talking, not how it sounds. If your signal cuts out, speaking louder won't help, unless the person is actually within earshot.

8. Thou shalt not grow too attached to thy cell phone. For obvious reasons, a dependency on constant communication is not healthy. At work, go nuts. At home, give it a rest.

9. Thou shalt not attempt to impress with thy cell phone. Not only is using a cell phone no longer impressive in any way (unless it's one of those really cool new phones with the space age design), when it is used for that reason, said user can be immediately identified as a neophyte and a poseur.

10. Thou shalt not slam thy cell phone down on a restaurant table just in case it rings. This is not the Old West, and you are not a gunslinger sitting down to a game of poker in the saloon. Could you please be a little less conspicuous? If it rings, you'll hear it just as well if it's in your coat pocket or clipped on your belt.”

Amen.

My Holiday Gift to You: Southpark's The Spirit of Christmas

Well, it's that time of the year again, when the joys of the holiday season are synonymous with standing in line, getting groped by Macy's store elves, and getting hugged tightly by relatives whom you hardly know who enjoy sharing stories about how you whizzed yourself when you were six.

Good times.

There are several films out there that try to show what the Holidays, and especially Christmas are really all about, but of all of them, I think this one says it best...my personal favorite:

South Park's The Spirit of Christmas.
Just click play.

Warning: this is extremely offensive. Major cusswords. In fact, if you're not offended, there's something seriously wrong with you. However, this is EARLY Southpark, one of the original cartoons. This is some priceless stuff right here. If you are offended by religious humor and major cursing, please don't press play and then get pissed off at me. You have been warned.

Enjoy, and have a Merry Christmas, Happy Hannukah, Groovy Kwanzaa, Happy New Year, and any other day during this Holiday Season.




xoxo
Billychic

Snowfight!

Spreading some holiday cheer...

Just hit play.

To pee or not to pee

I, like most people, go into the bathroom to, well, do my business.

Today I went in, closed myself in a stall and had to listen to someone’s telephone conversation. From another stall. And it wasn’t just her part of the discussion I heard, I was subjected to the whole damn thing. See, she had a Nextel and had it on speaker. Lucky me.

So I had to go but didn't want to share the sounds with the unknown person on the phone.

Wait – aren’t I in the right place to do this? Why do I feel like I’m intruding on their privacy when they're the ones who should be apologizing to the bathroom patrons?!

Picture this… sounds in the ladies’ room…
“Girl, you should have seen it. Tasha was acting so stupid.”
Muffled, fuzzy response. FLUSH (from a third stall)
“Yeah, her guy was there. She was hanging all over him and…” water running at the sink.
FLUSH (from another stall)
“You’re shitting me!”
HAND DRYER NOISES

Oh come on. When did it become acceptable to talk on the phone in the bathroom? Don’t we deserve a break from the phone to do what we need? When did the phrase “let me call you back” disappear from our vocabulary?

Do other people really need to hear me go to the bathroom?

Apparently it’s not just women who do this.

My friend David had a similar experience. He went to the men’s room and went into a stall since he’d recently had surgery and needed to change the bandage. As David was working on his bandages, a guy walked into the men’s room chatting loudly on his cell. From what could be heard, the guy was trying to close a sale. David made every effort to be obnoxious – flushed the toilet multiple times, coughed, sneezed, blew his nose – and it worked. The person on the other end much have heard… the guy on the phone told the person at the other end that someone in the office was fighting a bad flu and got out of the bathroom very quickly.

Just give me a few minutes -- I’ll call you back.

How Men Screw Up Romance

Too cute. Just press play.

Thanks, Jamie...

Whistle While You Work

Here at my job
I am in hell
Getting kicked in the face
As they wish me well;
Making barely enough
To put food on a plate
While shrewish voices
On my nerves do grate;
Veiled threats and barbs
Are casually thrown
By ruthless women
Who drag me down;
Half of whom can't spell
Or speak their mind
Unless it's petty,
Catty, evil, and unkind;
Who talk behind backs
And smile to the face
Making every passive aggressive effort
To put one in their place;
Surrounded by cunts
Who leave one out of their clique
Behaviour not fitting of work and superiors
Enough to make one sick;

Superiors - a strange word indeed
For it is the furthest from the truth
Superiority in name
Only under this one roof.

Perhaps it is me
I ask myself day to day
Who takes it to heart
When I should just walk away;
But I've always maintained
That I wish to try
To give the benefit of the doubt
Without asking why;

So while I search for another
Job that will fit
I try to pass the time
While I'm mired in shit;
I dream dreams of the wicked
Of retribution and pain
Of my victory in their debasement
Of their losses and my gain;
Yet all it really does
In the end, I must admit
Is remind me the need
To just up and quit.


Bastiids.

DRINK! DRINK! DRINK!...or not.

Father Jack Hackett, World Famous Irish Alcoholic



If you're an average recreational internet user, I have probably been drinking for longer than you've been alive. It's not that I'm SO FECKIN OLD (even though I'm getting there)....I'm just a raging alcoholic and became that way at an age when people shouldn't even realise OTHER folks have problems of this nature. This isn't something I'm proud of, or something that's at all easy to admit, but it's the truth, and it's something I had to come to terms with in order to do something about it. And I had to do something about it, because if I didn't, it would kill me.

I was, for a very long time, PROUDLY the world's highest functioning alcoholic. I went to school tipsy, I aced exam after exam tipsy, I travelled tipsy, performed music tipsy, got into grad school on scholarship and graduated tipsy, gave speeches and presentations tipsy, and worked....supervising other people, even....TIPSY. And most people never had a clue. I was unmedicated for anxiety and mostly unmedicated for depression (and wrongly medicated when I WAS...seeing as I wasn't DEPRESSED but bipolar), so I went about medicating myself the best way I knew how. And it worked. So I kept it up. After a long while however, when my tolerance raised a bit too much and my stress level did as well, I started to slip up. Got in trouble at work....serious trouble, that given my profession, I'm lucky wasn't more serious. Began making a public ass of myself a bit more often than before, which also got back to my job. And then there were the health repercussions, which were many and some of which were severe. I had gone off the bottle a few times in my long career as a drunkard, but never longer than the time it took to carry a baby. Any time I attempted when not preggers crashed and burned in under two months. Until the summer of 2004, that is, when I decided to give it up for good.

'For good' in this case meant just under two years. This summer, stress and pain (the latter probably mostly as a result of the former) led me back to the drink. And fucking hell did I make up for lost time. Due to the fact that I WAS so bloody stressed (for a couple of reasons I'm not getting into here) and that I was on sabbatical from work to recover from surgery, there was nothing to stop me from going out damn near every night and getting blind drunk. This was no longer the functional alcoholism I'd kept up in my previous life. This was Paris Hilton in 20 years....next stop, BOWERY.

Nothing in this world has quite the emotional effect of waking up in the afternoon with a head full of sand, fully dressed and covered in bruises you've no idea how you got, in a bed you don't remember falling into....and not having the foggiest idea of how you got from the bar to the apartment you're lying in, or what bar you were drinking at, for that matter....or what exactly happened last night after 9pm. Nothing that is EXCEPT for having that happen 5 times in the same week. I have been an alcoholic for years, sure, but I have never been THAT kind of out of control drunk, and it scared the shit out of me. The other things that scared the shit out of me were the amount of alcohol I had to consume to GET that drunk (50 Cent might be Mr 9 shots, but me, I'm Mrs 20 shots...of Jamesons, that is) and the fact that consuming that much booze had started me regularly vomiting large quantities of blood. Not good, not good at all. You don't have to be the Surgeon General to figure that out.

I will skip over the descriptions of fights I got into during my Summer of Inebriation, the places I can no longer show my face in (it takes a lot to embarrass me, but when I find myself screaming off key renditions of 'The Rare Ould Times' with foul words randomly placed in where I feel they are necessary, roaring inappropriate things about 'the filthy fuckin' Yanks' in any bar in the USA, and uttering words about select individuals that would sound far more at home on the tongues of Mel Gibson or Michael Richards, that is enough to embarrass the ever loving shit out of me), and the people I've offended, because that's only going to make me feel worse about myself. Besides, the emotional and social implications of being a slobbering drunk wear off, or at the least, you can drink them off. The physical, however....and of course, the LASTING EFFECT being a drunk has on your REAL friends, family, kids, etc....the ones who are too good to be scared off right away...are a little harder to remedy. I saw just how hard in the case of my grandfather. A drunk like me till about my age, he sobered up just a few years older than myself and stayed that way for another nearly 50 years. He'll be dead 9 years this Christmas week. His kids STILL aren't over the way he was. His own father died of drink at 60. Of the two of them, it often seems like Great Grandpa had it easier....although he never got to see grandkids, retirement, or experience sobriety at all (from what I hear, he was quite a bit like Father Jack, if also a bit better looking) At least he didn't have to spend the rest of his days hearing and seeing the damage he did to his family. But me, I'm a masochist. I'm willing to give it a shot. I've already heard enough from enough of them....what're a few more words? I can combat them a lot better sober.

So tonight I went to my first AA meeting in YEARS. Don't really know how well my relationship with AA is going to go, seeing as I'm pretty much Atheist and they're all about the Higher Power, but at this point I'm willing to try anything. I've been weaning myself off the drink for the past few weeks, and the last two haven't seen me take one single drop. Last time, though, it wasn't this difficult to keep up. Maybe it's the season. Maybe it's because I'm well and socializing again. I don't know. All I do know is that I need help this time and I'm not afraid to ask for it. I think this is what they call taking the first step....