Archive for February, 2008

How about a favor?

Published
by
Anonymous Coworker
on February 27, 2008 @ 9:11 am
in Mrs. ACW, bitches, family, jokes, suhmuhmuh bitch and the worldwide information super-tubeterwebs
. 43 Comments

I realize that for the past few days I’ve been pretty fucking pissed off. Have been… am. Whatever. I guess I’m going through the 5 stages of grief:

1. Denial: The initial stage: “It can’t be happening.”
2. Anger: “Why me? It’s not fair.”
3. Bargaining: “Just let me live to see my children graduate.”
4. Depression: “I’m so sad, why bother with anything?”
5. Acceptance: “It’s going to be OK.”

Let’s see… I don’t think I ever went through the denial stage. I remember getting the the phone call and thinking, “Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuck.” I’m clearly in monkey-humping lust with the anger part. In fact, I mentioned to Mrs. ACW that on Sunday when we went to get food to take to my family’s house I was thinking, “Why are all these people out shopping? Don’t they know the world should stop for me?”

I’m pretty sure the bargaining thing isn’t going to crop up for the same reason that denial didn’t: I just can’t turn off the coldly logical part of my brain. I think it’s that part of my brain that helped keep us from buying a $20,000 vault when my family was ready to throw down cash for anything and everything. I know I’ve flirted with depression over the past few days, like, “Why do my homework? Why exercise? Why care what I’m eating? Why not just drink every night?” But it hasn’t been paralyzing, and usually that same part of my brain kicks in and says, “Shut up. That’s stupid. You’re not the one who just died.”

I guess I’ll eventually get to acceptance, I mean, I know I will, but right now I’m just really fucking pissed. I almost reactively called Wayne a “fucker” in the comments yesterday until I went back and re-read his comment and realized that it was relatively positive message (if only a bit preachy). So yeah, I’ve the anger part down pat.

This is where you come in! Know any good jokes? Magic tricks? Seen something really funny/bizarre/goofy online recently? Please let me know. If there’s one thing I learned from all this it’s that the periods leading up to and immediately following funerals are in desperate need of someone who knows a good joke. Lay them on me.

I’m as tired of writing about it as you are of reading it

Published
by
Anonymous Coworker
on February 26, 2008 @ 12:19 pm
in atheism!, bitches, family, money and suhmuhmuh bitch
. 27 Comments

So yesterday I went to the funeral home with my brothers, my cousin, my mom, and all my aunts and uncles. If you know anything about funeral arrangements, you know it’s the worst parts of buying a car wrapped up with all the fun and excitement of the death of a loved one. It is every bit as sleazy, scammy, and manipulative as you would imagine it could be.*

I’m glad my brothers and I were there, because had we not been, I think my mom and her siblings could have been suckered into a whole bunch of unnecessary expenses, some of which they were suckered into regardless.

It all started when the funeral home started pressuring us into getting my grandfather embalmed. Actually, it started way before that. The death industry has managed to subtly spread the myth that not only is embalming necessary for a body to be presentable, but that it may even be required by law. In Maryland, it’s not the law. There is a stipulation that “extended viewing” would allow the funeral home to require embalming, but nowhere is “extended viewing” defined. When my family sat down to have a discussion about whether or not embalming was necessary, the misinformation was coming out of the mouths of my relatives. “If he’s not embalmed we can’t have an open casket,” or “If he’s not embalmed he’ll start to stink,” or “If he’s not embalmed we won’t be able to bury him.” From what I can tell, all of these are inaccurate. Embalming is expensive ($1600 in our case), unnecessary where cold storage is available, unnatural, and bad for the environment. Does anyone has experience with a viewing and an non-embalmed body? I’d love to hear it.

The next big ticket item that can be ignored, one that we managed to keep our family from purchasing unnecessarily, is a vault. In Maryland a vault is not required, but a graveliner is (I think). A graveliner essentially keeps the ground from collapsing as the coffin degrades, and it keeps some moisture out of the grave, as well as keeping any degrading material of the body or the coffin out of the ground. It’s essentially a box in the ground that the coffin goes into. A vault is a box that goes inside the graveliner, and then the coffin goes in the vault. They start at about $3000 bucks for plain concrete and then go as high as $20,000 for fancy stuff with copper or bronze linings and embellishments. They try and sell you on the vault by saying that without it “weather” could get into the coffin sooner, essentially forcing you to visualize the deceased rotting in the ground. In our case it would have been an especially bad decision to buy a vault because our grandfather won’t even be buried with us at the graveside. The cemetery only does burials once or twice a month, and all the bodies delivered to the cemetery before that day are buried then, no visitors allowed. We wouldn’t have ever seen the vault even if we purchased it. And I wouldn’t be surprised if numerous families had purchased vaults, only for that money to go into the pockets of funeral salesmen. Don’t let a funeral director tell you that a vault is required unless you’ve read the law and know he’s right. In Maryland, he wouldn’t be.

Eventually we got to the coffins themselves, and that was a horrible process in and of itself. They try to sell you on all this fancy, polished, filigreed nonsense, when all you want is something simple and respectful. My older brother asked for a book of cheaper options once we reached the end of the first book and the cheapest option was $3000. We were told that the book we were looking at was the only book available. Then my mom told a story about when my grandfather was making arrangements for his sister and the funeral director then told him that the option he had picked for his sister was “nice”. “No,” he barked in reply, “Not nice. A necessity.” After that story the funeral director magically found a book of cheaper options. My family eventually settled on something for about $1,400 that looked remarkably like a similar option available for $700, but my mom and her siblings took a vote and opted for the more expensive one. I’m still not sure why. It’s not like you can go to a funeral and remember what the casket looked like, or that you could (or even should) look at a casket and guess how much it cost. Just build me one out of plywood. It’ll be good enough.

But that’s the thing about coffins, everybody wants to think that with a nice enough vault, graveliner, and coffin, the body will stay perfect forever. In fact, the funeral director kept talking about how some coffins had gaskets and how others did not. He was really pushing the gasket thing pretty hard, I think for the same reason as the vault: to scare people into thinking of their loved one decomposing. Well guess what? We all decompose. There’s nothing you can do to prevent it. You’re going to be rotting in the ground regardless, and all this bullshit they try and sell you does nothing but prevent the former husk of your loved one from doing what it does naturally. You’ll never see them like that, so why do you even give a fuck? Are you concerned that they’ll check out the digs you bought for them if they come back in spirit form? Why the fuck would they do that? They could haunt themselves up season tickets for the Ravens and the Orioles. They could haunt themselves up a nice little spot in a strip club. They could haunt themselves up a seat in a movie theater. Why would they want to bother seeing the nonsensical shit you bought for them? They are dead! It doesn’t matter what they liked, or what they hated. They’ll never see any of it.

Finally we came to all the small details nonsense that still managed to cost an arm and a leg. A bouquet to go on top of the coffin? $200. A book for people to sign with their name and address? $40. Prayer cards? $80 for 200. And while I’m on the topic of prayer cards, what the hell are they all about? They’re like funeral trading cards. I really don’t understand why people take these things, and I REALLY don’t understand why they take 3 or 4 at a time. It’s just a card with a name, two dates, and a prayer on it. You can make your own for free, AND you can pick your own prayer! I tried to push for only getting 100, but my uncle insisted we get at least 200. I’m glad they only went that high. I can just imagine a box of 500.

My grandmother is still learning of the loss of her husband, hundreds of times every day. Fuck anyone who would dare spin that into a good thing. Comments are back on.

*Here’s Penn and Teller’s evaluation of the death industry on Bullshit. Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.

When it rains it pours

Published
by
Anonymous Coworker
on February 25, 2008 @ 8:07 am
in atheism!, bitches, family and suhmuhmuh bitch
. Closed

So after my dad’s family buried his sister on Friday, my mom loses her dad this past Sunday. It’s like being a rat in a fucked up experiment where I can propose hypotheses about mourning the loss of someone close and then experience it first hand. It really really sucks, and it hurts a lot.

The worst part about it is my grandmother. She has Alzheimer’s so each of my family members had to take turns consoling her as she learned of the loss of my grandfather. After the first dozen or so times I heard her learn the news I couldn’t take it anymore, so I went downstairs with the rest of my family. Eventually, no one else could take it either, so they got her to leave his body (he died in his sleep) and move down into the kitchen. It was okay for a while, but then she started asking why so many people were at her house, and we’d have to tell her again.

I try not to intentionally antagonize religion when I write, but I’m having some trouble resisting this morning. I stopped believing in deities and all that go along with them a long time ago, but I don’t let it bother me when others suppose about the existence of a supreme being. However, I find it difficult to swallow the argument that a loving god could exist and simultaneously allow a woman who had never done anything wrong to anyone to freshly mourn the loss of her husband of 62 years every 5 minutes or so. Can you even imagine the pain of looking around for your significant other and learning that they had died? Can you imagine having to go through that for the rest of your life, every moment spent in pain and loss and grief? Like I said, I don’t believe, and I think this is going to make it harder for me to listen to those who insist that something that loves us is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent.
And don’t give me any of that “mysterious ways” bullshit, because it’s a cop out. This woman is going through Hell.

Anyway, I was asked to write the obituary, so I just wanted to get that out of my system lest it end up in the newspaper.

The cats don’t sit still long enough to keep my toes warm

Published
by
Anonymous Coworker
on February 20, 2008 @ 9:40 am
in Mrs. ACW, bitches, devil cat, house, money, nerd stuff and sex
. 22 Comments

For the last few weeks the temperature inside our house has been nut-shrinkingly cold. In an attempt to save a little money, and because we desire to open the electric bill and not see, “You owe us assrape dollars and non-consensual-fisting cents.” Our electric bill has never been too crazy, really, because I’m that guy who walks through the house and turns off all lights and unplugs items that aren’t being used, but still the bills were more than we wanted to pay. So we’ve set the thermostat for a steady 62 and dealt with it.

Before I go on and eventually reach the uninteresting point of this story, I’m going to preemptively defend myself from those of you who live in the arctic tundra north of the temperate zone better known as the mid-Atlantic seaboard of the United States. Yes, 62 is cold for us. Yes, the temperature in the winter usually only hovers around 20-40 degrees Fahrenheit. Yes, we know you are buried in snow for all but two weeks in the middle of the summer. Yes, we realize that Kelvin is just a guy on your street who stands on his porch in his underwear when it’s -273.15 degrees Celsius outside.* Yes, we realize that you set your thermostats at 2 degrees and you just throw on another sweater. That’s awesome. You’re awesome. We’re all glad that you’re so awesome that you can live in such unforgiving climates. Really, no one at all is tired of hearing you scoff, “27 degrees? Heh, that’s warm for us!” That never, ever gets tired, especially when we grew up in the reasonable climate we grew up in, and you grew up in a snowman’s armpit. So, yes, to conclude this diatribe, our house is kept at 62 degrees and that’s cold for us. Shut it.

Anyway, we’ve been getting by with hoodies, sweaters, and blankets on the couches. That generally keeps us from being so cold that we’re uncomfortable. But I’m 6′2″ and though I’ve got some padding around the middle, my fingers, and especially my toes, get cold fast. It’s not uncommon for my toes to go completely numb, even if I’m wearing socks and slippers. I’m tall and blood doesn’t circulate well to far-away places like my toes. No big deal. I can make do. For example, instead of wearing regular socks, I might throw on some wool socks or thick Xmas socks. Or I’ll sit cross legged and try to keep my toes warm with my hands. Or I might tuck the bottoms of my pants into the top of my socks, and my sweater into the top of my pants. This makes me look like an utter goon, but I don’t care, because it keeps me warm.

Every time Mrs. ACW sees me with my sweater tucked in, or with my pant legs tucked in to my socks she just shakes her head and says, “I can’t believe I’m married to you.” And I guess I could be offended, but the fact is that I really don’t care. She’s stuck with me, and my feet are cold, so until the weather gets a little warmer I’m going to look like the gooniest goon that ever gooned an automatic gooning machine. Also, I retort by saying, “Not only are you married to me, but we also have sex,” which usually just leaves her shaking her head and wondering where she went wrong.

*I so love nerd jokes.

I especially hate those ones with embroidered crests

Published
by
Anonymous Coworker
on February 19, 2008 @ 9:59 am
in Glen Burnie, family, people are idiots and work
. 12 Comments

Due to a conspiracy in coincidence, it looks like I’ll be spending the rest of this week in a suit. Which sucks because I hate wearing a suit, but even worse, because I only have two suits, and they’re probably going to be pretty nasty after 4 days of continuous use.

Today I have an event for work that has me in a suit, tomorrow I have another work event that calls for the old suit and tie, then on Thursday I’m going down to Annapolis to argue about my tax assessment for my house and afterwards have to head to the viewing for my aunt, and Friday is the funeral. I’m hoping that my suit isn’t walking around by itself by then.

I guess if one of the suits gets a bit too ripe I can try and stuff myself into a third suit that I own that’s grown just a bit too small. Though I’m not sure what day would be best to be stuffed into the cotton/poly sausage-casing, since all of them require a full day of being in the suit. Sure, if I was just hanging around Glen Burnie I could wear the jacket, shirt, and tie like normal, and just put on some sweatpants and tennis shoes on the bottom.

You think I’m kidding, but that’s how you can tell when someone is about to get married around here. The groomsmen wear suit tops and pajama bottoms, and the bride has had tulle stapled to her nicest oversized t-shirt. It’s like a white trash pageant and I have a front row seat.

I’ve always hated wearing ties, and by extension really hated wearing suits, ever since I was forced to wear a tie in high school. I think I’ve blogged about it before, but for my entire freshman and sophomore year I wore the same tie every day. And for my entire junior year, I wore a different tie than the first two years, but I also wore it every day for the entire year. By the time senior year rolled around I had a horrible bitch of a girlfriend, but she had bought me a few more ties, so I was able to at least wear a different tie every day. I also came into some hideously ugly hand-me-down ties that I delighted in wearing to freak out the pretty-boys who wouldn’t be caught dead in anything less than Tommy Hilfiger.

But worse than all of that, I hate wearing blazers or sport coats. I fucking hate them. It makes me feel like a child molester dressed me. I realize that not everybody has a need to wear a suit on a semi-regular basis like I do, and I realize that the blazer is the perfect answer for them, but for me, it’s my least favorite piece of clothing. I’d rather be stuck in a suit, or even a tux all day, rather than having to wear a goddamned blazer. I hate everything about them. I hate the stupid gold buttons. I hate feel of the material. I hate how they never seem to fit right, no matter how much they cost, or even if they’ve been tailored. They make me feel like I should be growing a porno mustache and selling used Trans Ams in the parking lot of an abandoned fast food restaurant.

I really don’t give a shit about what people think of me, or how they think I dress. If they don’t like the fact that I’m wearing corduroys, an old tshirt, an old hoodie, and wool clogs, that’s awesome, because they can go shove a badger up their asses. However, when I get dressed up, I want to feel good about the way I look. I still don’t give a shit about anyone else, but I’ll be damned if when I dress up I don’t go all the way. It’s important to me to not half-ass the way I look in a suit. I’ll be a donkey in Tijuana before you catch me in fucking blazer.

The death post

Published
by
Anonymous Coworker
on February 18, 2008 @ 9:52 am
in atheism!, beer, family, nostalgia, potty humor and suhmuhmuh bitch
. 38 Comments

It’s been a bad morning.

At some point last night I decided it would be an AWESOME idea to have a big, fat Screwdriver at 11:30. Sure, I’d started with some scotch at 6:30, then moved on to red wine, then on to a porter, then on to white wine, then back to red wine, then back to porter. It was at that point that I should have stopped, but my stupid drunk brain was like, “Dude. Dude. You know what would be awesome right now? A screwdriver! Yeah! Dude, it’s like, healthy ’cause it’s orange juice. Yeah, we should totally have one. Dude. Have I ever steered you wrong? Yeah. Awesome.”

And so there I was on the couch, screwdriver in one hand, remote in the other, barely able to focus on Ace of Cakes.

It should have come as no surprise to me that I had chest melting heartburn a few hours later, but upon waking I was like, “How on earth could THIS have happened?”

Nearly 8 hours later and the heartburn still isn’t completely gone, and I’ve got, as Angy Hangy put it so succinctly in a somewhat related email from last Friday, “liquid Drano” in my guts. I already dominated the bathroom in my house so thoroughly that when Sherlock poked his head through the door he immediately turned around and walked out. Before this morning I would have sworn that it was impossible for cats to gag.

Anyway, as I’m trying to pull my stupid, hungover ass together this morning, I got a call from my dad that my aunt had just died. She was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer a few weeks ago, and the cancer was extremely aggressive, so it’s kind of good to know that she’s not in pain anymore.

I know I deal with death differently than other people, and my aunt is no exception. It’s hard to say right now if I feel sad. I feel bad for my dad, of course, as well as my other aunts and uncles, my cousins, and their kids. I know they’re really upset. And I feel bad for my Grandmother, because it’s got to be painful to lose a child. But I’m really hard pressed to describe my emotions as sad. I’m contemplative, somber, and pensive, and I sympathize with my relatives, but I’m not sad. And now that I think about it, I don’t think I’ve ever been sad to hear about someone dying. I always express my condolences, because I know death can really tear other people apart inside, but sadness eludes me.

I’ve never had someone extremely close to me die, like my brothers, parents, or my wife. But even when I was a little kid and my grandfather died, I kind of just accepted it. And I think about people that have died, and I miss them, of course, but my mind never dwells on it. It’s kind of like, “Oh, I miss the way he used to joke about how we had three kinds of stuffing at Thanksgiving.” And then my thoughts move on.

I speculate that part of my lack of reaction is because I don’t believe in an afterlife. I’ve accepted death as an inevitability, so the deaths of others, or thinking about my own death, don’t cause me discomfort. I don’t want to die, and I don’t want my loved ones to die, but there’s nothing I can really do about it, so there’s no point in worrying over it.

I’m interested in having a frank discussion about death in the comments if anyone else is interested. How do you react to death or loss? Do you believe in the afterlife? If so or if not, does this comfort you? I hope it goes without saying that today most necrophilia jokes won’t be tolerated, but humor is always welcome.

I’m also a somniloquist

Published
by
Anonymous Coworker
on February 15, 2008 @ 9:10 am
in Mrs. ACW, devil cat, house and ocd
. 12 Comments

Yesterday morning I was reminded of a strange habit that relates to my sleeping. Well, maybe habit isn’t the best word. Nuance? Foible? Peccadillo? Idiosyncrasy? I think any of those might fit. Anyway, basically what happens is that in the first few minutes or so after waking, my mind will occasionally be furiously paranoid.

An example: The other morning I woke up to the sound of metal hitting wood or plastic, and there was a high-pitched tone that resulted from the metal, sort of like the vibrations from a tuning fork. I very rationally thought, “Oh, there goes my ring off the dresser.” Then I went insane. My next thought was that one of the cats was going to ingest the ring (probably because of this), so I was scrambling around on my hands and knees looking for it on the carpet. After not finding it I checked the dresser and found it exactly where it was supposed to be, so my next though was EVEN CRAZIER. Mrs. ACW sometimes leaves her rings all over the damn house all the time. On the coffee table, on top of the toaster, on the window by the kitchen sink, on her dresser, on her nightstand, on my dresser, on the computer desk, on her scrap-booking table, on the bathroom sink, et cetera ad nauseum. So upon finding my ring where it was supposed to be, I crawled back into bed and had angry paranoid thoughts until I fell back asleep.

“God damn it, the cats are going to eat her ring. Then we’ll have to pay out the ass to get the ring back. Then the ring will be ugly and Mrs. ACW will be like, ‘I need a new ring,’ but I’ve got news for her: there won’t be any more new rings after this. She just leaves them all over the place. She doesn’t care if they fall in the trash or the toilet or anything. She always does this with everything. She just leaves things laying around because she’s so materialistic. She thinks we can just buy anything we ever need.” And so on.

For those of you who know Mrs. ACW, you know she’s not really materialistic at all, so I have know idea where this craziness comes from, but it tends to go away after a few minutes, or once I fall back asleep. I’ll wake up later and think, “What was I thinking? What a ridiculous train of thought.”

Another time I didn’t fall back asleep, but actually came out of my paranoid delusions as I was going about my morning routine. As usual the cats were being little bitches and whining for food, so I got up to feed them and found their food container empty. No big deal, I just have to refill it with a fresh bag. But that’s not what my brain was thinking. “I can’t believe this, Mrs. ACW left emptied the cat food container and didn’t refill it. She knew I was going to wake up first and find this. She is intentionally sabotaging my morning. I can’t believe that someone would do something like this. How hard is it to put a new bag of food in the container? In fact, why isn’t she doing this right now? I should be sleeping, I can’t believe this.” And on and on as I gave the cats their food and water. But then as I was walking down the hall to brush my teeth and get in the shower I began to think, “What the hell was that all about? Why would Mrs. ACW intentionally do something like that? That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever thought. I can’t believe I thought she was trying to sabotage my morning. Sabotage?! What the hell?”

And before all you people with Psych degrees put on your Dr. Freud hats and start chomping on your phallic cigars, know that Mrs. ACW has only been the target of my delusional mind those two times. The other times that it has happened it’s been focused on any number of people, animals, and inanimate objects. And this doesn’t happen every time I wake up, just once every few weeks or so. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I’m crazy, and I was really pissed off at a lamp one time. Whatever. Shut up. Eat a dick.

I don’t know why it happens, but I think I have some idea. I know when some people wake up they take a while to get going, and it takes them a bit for their brain to warm up. Like starting a car I guess. For me, on the other hand, it’s like instead of my “car” being turned off overnight, it is instead driven onto a treadmill, where it slowly builds speed throughout the night, then at the point of waking the treadmill is shut off and my “car” rockets forward. Most of the time I keep going, like Bo and Luke evading Boss Hog, but occasionally the car bottoms out, hubcaps go flying, an axle snaps, and all the passengers are killed. On those mornings, I have the paranoia.

Has anyone else ever experienced anything like this?

Baja Beach Club in Baltimore is Closing… which is great because it really sucks ass

Published
by
Anonymous Coworker
on February 14, 2008 @ 9:29 am
in awesome and people are idiots
. 13 Comments

It has been brought to my attention (thanks yous two) that the filthtacular cesspit of crotch-rot and sex-as-self-abuse better known as Baja Beach Club is closing down!

The article mentions that the club owner hopes to go out in a “blaze of cheese” since Baja was known as one of the lamest and cheesiest bars around. I can only hope that the “blaze of cheese” actually results in the literal purification by fire of that entire polyp. It’s like a mole, but not just a regular mole, like a mole with a mole on top of it, and hair long enough that you could wrap it around your finger a few times. It’s a hideous disgusting place.

I also hope that whoever moves in there a) has had their shots, because I’m pretty sure that the toxic concentration of venereal disease that place cultured will survive long past the end of humanity, and b) I hope they have good security and insurance. You know some drunken knuckleheads are going to show up, night after night, pounding on the doors of whatever establishment that will occupy the place, wondering why Baja is closed at 8pm and why there are so many pictures of coffee in the window.

This is so awesome! It’s going to be like watching rats in an experiment. They’ve been rewarded with beer for dressing like greaseball mafioso wannabes for the past 16 years, and now suddenly, the Pavlovian reward will be cut off. Of course, because they’re idiots, they’ll continue to show up, hoping that as if by magic the doors will be flung open and they’ll be able to live as adolescents well into middle age. I am fucking GIDDY at the thought of it.

I also encourage you to read the comments on the Examiner page. Some are happy that the club is closing, and some are idiots, so it’s a pretty good balance. Not that the Examiner usually brings in top-notch commentary from the unwashed masses of the internet, but these comments are especially great. For example:

Now what’s the crowd from Dundalk, Essex and Glen Burnie supposed to do???

you can’t even get in there unless you present an ID with a Dundalk address….very exclusive.

I’m glad I’m not the only one who thought that club was just a breeding ground for stupid people. Stupid people like this:

Thats sad….in the 2 years that i have been going there..i havent seen fights at baja like over at iguana…face it..there will be fights were there is alcohol…ill miss baja very much…go quarter beers!!!!!!!!!!!

From the shoddy grammar, atrocious spelling, and completely incomprehensible punctuation, I’m going to assume that superman_adonis@yahoo.com has reared his tiny, empty head again.

However, in all this, I would be lying if I said that I wasn’t a little sad about the place closing. I would much rather Baja Beach Club manifested itself as filth incarnate so I could piss on the grave. Oh well, I guess you don’t win ‘em all.

Voting, Schmoes, and Outback

Published
by
Anonymous Coworker
on February 12, 2008 @ 9:32 am
in Glen Burnie, Mrs. ACW, awesome, bitches, driving, food, people are idiots and suhmuhmuh bitch
. 21 Comments

1) So I voted this morning, and the whole time I’m feeling like I’m throwing my vote away because a) my candidate has already dropped out of the race, and b) I’m not so wild about these Diebold voting machines that we’re forced to use. I feel like I have just as much luck having my vote counted by writing it on a napkin and tossing it into the wind, crossing my fingers, and hoping it makes it to Annapolis. It’s kind of fucked up when I’m this cynical about the primary, ostensibly the only time when your vote actually counts.

2) I was so giddy about the back of this truck that I detoured from my normal commute home just to get a picture of it:

schmo

In case you can’t see it so clearly (I used my camera phone), the license plate reads “SCHMO” and he has a “W ‘04″ on the left, and a Jesus fish on the right (which is really hard to see in the picture). But yes, I agree with him, he is a schmo.

schmo or schmoe also shmo (shm)
n. pl. schmoes also shmoes Slang
A stupid or obnoxious person.
[From Yiddish shmok, penis, fool; see schmuck.]

Do you think he’s so dumb that he thinks “schmo” is a good thing? Or is he a subversive leftist performance artist? I can’t figure it out.

3) On Saturday Mrs. ACW and I were going out to eat before we had to head out to a party, so we opted to use one of the gift certificates we had gotten for Christmas. The particular certificate we had chosen was good for a number of restaurants, including Bonefish, Carrabas, Cheeseburger in Paradise, and Outback. So we opted for Cheeseburger having recently eaten at Bonefish, and having no interest in eating at a clone of the Olive Garden. However, when we got to Cheeseburger the line was so long that it was spilling out the door. So we instead opted to go to Outback, figuring that at 6:30 on a Saturday night the wait wouldn’t be too long. As we drove from Cheeseburger to Outback I made an attempt to call ahead, and upon speaking to the hostess found out that the wait was two hours.

Fuck you, Glen Burnie. Fuck you right in your stupid, lazy asshole. For chrissakes, it’s just Outback! The steaks are frozen! Everything they serve is over-salted! The food is terrible for you! And yet every time I’m inclined to punish my body there you people are lined up, ready to be slopped, like zombie pigs at the world’s least Australian restaurant. And you’re really going to wait two hours to eat at that stupid restaurant? Really? Are you just so enamored with the shitty food that you can’t tear yourself away, or are you too idiotic to realize that other restaurants exist? I hate you. I hope you fucking choke and die on your Bloomin’ fuckin’ Onion.

You’d think the food was deep fried in crack the way people start salivating just by driving by the place. I’m honestly shocked anytime I’m in there to find people NOT rubbing one out while stuffing their faces. I just don’t understand why people would wait that long for the food. And the curbside pickup! That’s even worse! A line of cars, 30 or 40 deep, waiting for two hours to pick up this shitty food to take home and eat it, as if gas didn’t cost 3 dollars per gallon, as if they couldn’t drive to an Outback in Pennsylvania or Virgina in that time. People are fucking idiots.

So Mrs. ACW and I ate at El Salto instead. It was awesome.

Just Like Aaliyah Said

Published
by
Anonymous Coworker
on February 11, 2008 @ 9:50 am
in Mrs. ACW, people are idiots and sex
. 10 Comments

This weekend we celebrated the successful completion of Mrs. ACW’s 28th year. This birthday has caused her a not insignificant amount of existential stress that I’m completely unable to understand.

If you were to ask me how old I am when I’m not really paying attention, chances are good that I would answer incorrectly, think about what I said, correct myself, and then continue thinking for a minute about whether my first answer was wrong, my second answer, or both. It’s not something that I really pay attention to, or put much thought into. This is not to be confused with my birthday itself, which I pay quite a bit of attention to, and am very aware of.

Good grief, could I end more sentences with prepositions? I’m writing like an illiterate Republican. But I repeat myself. Zing! I’m just joking, almost all the Republicans I know are smart and well-spoken, but seriously, don’t forget to vote tomorrow. Wait, what’s that over there? It’s THE END OF THIS POINTLESS DIGRESSION!

So, yeah, I know some of you people get all worked up about your age too, and I really just don’t get it. First of all, like many things in our society, age is a construct created to classify what someone can/cannot do, or what someone should/should not do. It allows us to not have to ever think for ourselves and instead just slothfully lay about our homes, inhaling bowls of Doritos, and pointing at our televisions to laugh and judge people who are outside the norms. It’s why every few years as a crop of actresses get older we suddenly have “news” reports and articles in “magazines” like Cosmo about how 40 is the new 30, 30 is the new 20, and 20 is the new 18, and how it’s suddenly “okay” for 40 year olds to be sexy again. Why do we continue to buy this bullshit?

It’s akin to thinking that boys can’t be teachers because it’s a girl’s job, or that girl’s can’t be doctors because it’s a boy’s job.* That’s stupid. Why impose these ridiculous criterion based solely upon whether your baby-maker is an innie or an outie? That’s stupid. It’s not as if when you turn 50 you suddenly won’t be able to do anything you weren’t doing 10, or 15, or 20 years before that. Sure, you might not be in as good of shape as you were then, but that doesn’t mean you can’t still play some video games and eat some nachos and watch some VH1.

Of course, like anything, there are extremes than can reinforce even the most unreasonable social restrictions. For example, all those women out there dressing like their teen-aged daughters. Stop it. Why not dress at least like twenty year old instead of a 15 year old? Have a little self respect. You’re not Mrs. Robinson. Nobody wants to bang you.

All this obsession with age in our culture has driven us all completely batshit bonkers over making rules about what different people can do or be based soley upon how long they’ve lived? Want to be president? You have to be 35. I don’t know about you, but I can think of a few 50 and 60 year olds who would be COMPLETELY horrible at the job *coughhuckabeecough*. Want to drink a beer? You have to be 21. Want to die for your country? You have to be 18. Seriously. What the hell is that about? Want to see two or more adults consensually mashing their genitals together? You have to be at least 18, because before that magical day when you turn 18, the sight of such a thing would destroy your brain. I’m sure there aren’t any 15 year olds doing the three-knuckle shuffle to weirder stuff in their heads.

Finally, time itself is a construct. Seconds, minutes, hours, days, months, and years exist for no other reason than we decided to name them and start measuring them. Time, as we have named it, is meaningless. We could arbitrarily change it to whatever we wanted, and eventually people would get used to it and complain about turning 4 years old. Complaining doesn’t make any sense to me in a situation such as this. I’m much more of the mindset that, hey, it looks like I’ve got more than a few years left, so why not do some fun stuff to fill that time?

I realize not everyone is going to be swayed by this, and some folks will argue that because we live in a time of Dorito-eating finger-pointers, they are constrained by the judgmental gaze of the masses. To that I say: why do you even care what those imbeciles even think? The high-point of their lives will be that night when they were watching American Idol and the pizza guy forgot to charge them for the extra order of cheesy breadsticks. Who cares what that waste of skin thinks?

*In fairness to girls, the world would be a much nicer place if they’d get me a sandwich and then get back in the kitchen.

Bad Behavior has blocked 688 access attempts in the last 7 days.