Saturday, June 5, 2010

Writing Prompt

This is a response to a writing prompt from the site Writer's Digest.

The prompt was to write a letter, breaking up with Writer's Block. Here's mine.


Dear Writer’s Block,

Really, it’s not you. It’s me. I just feel that this relationship is suffocating me, and I can never get anything done because I’m always upset that I can’t write. I feel like I’m being held back from my true potential as a writer, and that’s not fair to me.

Would you believe, that the times you cheated on me, I was actually happy? Truly, I wasn’t upset one bit when you left me alone a couple of nights and spent it with someone else. No, don’t… I don’t want to know who they were. It doesn’t matter. I just felt so happy and free when you were away, and I must keep that feeling for the rest of my life. I can’t go on living this way.

I know that I told you that my friends all liked you, but I lied. In truth, none of them were too fond of you, and they could see through your exterior better than I ever could, until now. I now see that our relationship has been based on falsities, like the fact that I can’t writer, or that I’m not creative enough to come up with new ideas. It’s not fair to either of us to live a lie for the rest of our lives, right?

Besides, there are so many other people out there for us to experience, and I feel ready to meet those people. A piece of advice, however, is that perhaps for a while you should only hang out with someone for a little while at first, to see if they can get used to you, or if they even like you at first. It was never flattering when you forced yourself upon me and never gave me a chance to decide if I wanted to continue this relationship. Now I’m putting my foot down and saying “No!”  

I’m sure that we’ll meet again one day in the future, but I want you to promise that it will only be a brief meeting, like grabbing coffee or a quick lunch, and you must be on your way. I can’t have you lingering around me longer than a couple of hours, or I fear I will fall back into my same routines, and who knows how much that could affect my life in the future. What if writing is my main source of income, and I just can’t write? I know you care about me, and you wouldn’t want me to have to worry about money like that.

And so I say good bye. We can both part ways for this point on. No other contact is necessary. I’ll leave your things in a box outside my door.

(No longer) Yours,

Nikki

Monday, May 24, 2010

Why you gotta be an ass?

If you work at a restaurant/store/other retail/other service place, why would you answer the phone and be a total dick?

I feel like every time I call a place to ask a question, or set up an appointment, the person on the other end acts like I'm being a huge inconvenience by wanting to use their service or shop in their store. The constant rude conversations I've had on the phone with restaurant/store/other retail/other service places has made me have a huge fear of using the phone to talk to anyone, because I'm so sick of being treated rudely on the phone.

Today, I called a tattoo parlor to ask about getting my tattoo touched up. Now, I didn't get this particular tattoo done there, but there's no way in hell I'm driving two hours back to a city I hate just to get a few spots touched up. So I asked. And I asked all the questions I had to make sure I cover all the bases.

I would probably have an appointment to go get it touched up if the guy hadn't acted like a douche on the phone. I asked if they would charge for getting a tattoo touched up (expecting they would, nbd) and the guy says "Well yeah... cause if we didn't do it, we'd have to" making it sound like I'm a dumbass. Thanks dude. I feel bad being angry at the place because when I did get a tattoo done there, I really enjoyed my experience. But now I don't want to because he was angry sounding on the phone.

That is of course not the first time I've been treated rudely on the phone. But honestly, people who act like dicks makes me not want to be anywhere near the place I just called. Why do they act like I'm a huge inconvenience by wanting to use their service- thusly scaring me away? Oh well I guess.

Right now, I can only think of two places, recently, that weren't assholes on the phone. Those two are:

Kelly Services (a temp agency)
Medco.com's customer service

Both times I was treated nicely, and they didn't talk down to me like so many other places do. When I got off the phone with medco, I was happy and smiling because the woman was so nice. Is it so hard?

The best is when people act like assholes when you are already IN their restaurant/store/other retail/other service place. Once, I went to a hair salon to get my hair cut. There was one woman in there (who looked pissed off). After I sat there for a while, she told me that I would have to come back later, so I asked for an appointment. In a really bitchy way, she checked the computer to tell me a time when I could come back. So I left, feeling a little annoyed, but I wanted my hair cut.

When I did come back later, the woman was rude again! She asked me what I wanted to have done, and I told her I wanted quite a bit of hair cut off. Her attitude was so rude, I almost couldn't believe it. Why, if you went to cosmetology school to learn to cut hair and all that good stuff, then get a job at a place that performs that service, WHY would you act like having a paying customer is a big pain in the ass? Of course, this woman bypassed me and cut some elderly people's hair who hadn't been there half the time I spent sitting there. But in a way, I was okay with it, because I didn't want that bitch cutting my hair.

Luckily, the girl who did cut my hair was nicer, and we got along well cause we're both sarcastic. She apologized for my wait because she had a surprise perm she had to do. I forgave her, but not the other woman.

If you don't want to deal with people, go get a job that doesn't require giving customer service.

Maybe I should just change my attitude and start calling people out when they're rude, just to make them feel like assholes.

Friday, May 21, 2010

Dora the Immigrant Explorer

Apparently, Yahoo! News is lacking on relevent news stories... so much to post a story about whether or not Dora the Explorer is an illegal immigrant. Read the Story Here

It makes you wonder if anyone actually... thinks about things. While in some cases, cartoons or TV shows do develop some sort of background story for the characters, most times there is no background, and sort of develops naturally throughout the show's progression. For example: in the TV series, "The Simpsons," I'm pretty sure when season 1 began, the shows writer's didn't know that Homer would have an absent mother who was on the run from the authorities because of her protests against nuclear power. Or that Lisa might have not gotten a saxophone if Homer had bought an air conditioner instead. Or that Marge wanted to become a journalist.

So why would the creators/writers of Dora the Explorer care whether or not she lived in America legally or illegally. The article does make a good point about the ambiguity of where Dora lives. Shouldn't that be enough to say "Hey, this is a cartoon, meant to teach kids about problem solving and teamwork." Apparently not.

With no proof as to where Dora lives, why then should her immigrant status matter? Maybe she does live in Mexico, and therefore never crossed the border into America. And are Americans so self-centered they automatically assume that this CARTOON CHARACTER (which apparently can't be stressed though) wanted to get into this country? One line of the article suggests that perhaps she's in South America. If so, would she be an illegal immigrant into America? No.

The article touches on race a couple of times in wondering what Dora's story is. But why does it matter? If a person spends any time watching shows for kids, they'd see that almost always there's a weird array of diversity among the characters in the TV show. I remember the show Barney always had a diverse group of kids with different skin color and cultures. Little Einsteins has a group of four kids, two of which are not white kids. The point is to teach kids that just because these kids have different skin colors, they're all still the same as you or me. The shows never acknowledge that the kids look different (with exceptions of shows that specifically talk about race). For a little kid, seeing people of different colors all working together gives them the idea that they're all just people, kids like themselves.

And that's what Dora does. While I'm not entirely fond of Dora the Explorer (she yells too much), she's showing that not every cartoon hero/heroine needs to be a white person or a talking animal/train/car. Even Handy Manny touches on the Latin/Spanish/Mexican culture a little bit.

People who spend too much time analyzing kids' cartoons for stupid reasons ( there are some reasons why one might want to study a show if it really was too inappropriate for kids to watch ) and go cure cancer or something. There are so many other social issues that surround our country that trying to determine if Dora the Explorer is an illegal immigrant is the least of our worries. How about trying to study why girls have low opinions of themselves when they can't match the tall skinny (supposed) role models they see on tv? I believe that issue is more important than race among cartoon characters.

Sunday, May 16, 2010

A New Hat

It's silly, but I have been doing the double crochet stitch wrong. I don't know when or how I managed to come up with this random... thing... but it took until about a month ago for me to realize how wrong I was. And go figure, after this realization, I now know why all my hats always turn out wrong. Ta-da.

So today I spent an hour making a new hat. I followed the pattern for the "Boy Beanie" in Stitch and Bitch: The Happy Hooker. And guess what!!? It turned out the way it was supposed to!

See!

The flower is from a pattern called "Spring in the Winter" which is in the same book. I'm really excited that it turned out right. Go me. So now I can just remake all the hats I ever made for people and effed up on.

Saturday, May 15, 2010

Considerations of Bad People

Because I feel like I haven't vented enough to feel okay about this situation, I'm going to do it some more. No one reads this anyone... so here it goes.

My old roommate Maddy and her boyfriend Mike have an abusive relationship. And they're horrible treatment of other people was one of the main reasons I had to move out of my apartment. I couldn't take it. And further, the person who took my room over and one of the other roommates had to move out because they couldn't stand their fighting and their mistreatment of everyone any more either. So they up and moved out without any warning. So the only people left are Maddy, Mike and her sister Hannah.

Maddy is studying psychology, and that's why I'm so confused as to why she doesn't realize that a relationship where they fight all the time and are insanely jealous when one is not with the other, is a terrible, terrible relationship. And to have bruises all over her arms and stuff? I doubt they're from "falling" as she had claimed before.

And worse off, Mike's former girlfriend had a restraining order put against him, because he exhibited stalker tendencies after they broke up. He couldn't let it go. Because he's a psycho that deserves to be in jail.

Maddy and I used to be good friends. We did a lot of things together and hung out a lot. But once she started dating Mike, it was like our friendship fell apart because Mike wouldn't let her even go to the bar. As far as I know, she's never been... because Mike is younger than her and doesn't want her doing ANYTHING without him.

And now they're moving to Boston together. It's so wrong. I really feel that one is going to kill the other at some point.

Since Maddy had defriended me on facebook, I wrote an obnoxious status like "fuck old roommates who hit each other. that's messed up, man." Mike posted on it saying "maybe i like being hit... and it's my own business" or some shit. So I said "I'm sure you do. It's a nice cover for abusing your girlfriend."

So then Maddy, using Mike's facebook, posted on it, saying some crap about how she's the only one who's ever hit anyone, and that she never wanted to have to talk to me about it ever again. And that the people who needed to be talked to have been? I don't even know what she means, because if she's in that much denial about the fucked up nature of this relationship, who the hell did she talk to? One assumption is that she was referring to the matter of me having to pay rent now because my subleaser moved out. But that doesn't really make sense in context.

Better yet, she told me to enjoy my miserable life. I'm also confused as to why, with her four years of psychology studies, she doesn't realize that by her claiming that I have a miserable life, she's projecting her own feelings out on someone else, because she's too weak to deal with them herself. I haven't talked to her in five months, how would she know if my life is miserable or not? But that's not the point. It's that she's in denial.

So now I regret ever having worried about her safety being with a mother fucker like Mike. If she can't see how fucked up it is, then she deserves it. Why do women allow themselves to be abused like that? My other old roommate (one who moved out) said that Hannah told her a reason Mike and Maddy don't like her and her boyfriend was because their relationship was "too happy." How messed up is that? This tells me that she's jealous that they have a good relationship, where Mike and Maddy have to constantly have something to fight about. Seriously- they fight over the dumbest shit.

In closing, fuck Maddy and Mike and their life choices. I know this is probably none of my business, but I thought when your friends were in trouble you tried to help, but clearly Maddy wants none. I am done feeling sorry for her and her life, done feeling sorry about money troubles and family issues, done feeling sorry for her and her lame ass boyfriend. Both can rot. And someday, it would be a pleasure to punch both in the face.

That is my rant. I think I feel better now. They have become a statistic of relationships that contain abuse and the woman isn't smart enough to leave. Snaps for them.

I'm out.