High-school Never Ends.

I was walking into DSW to check out their clearance rack when someone in the parking lot made a pretty loud moaning sound.  I realized when I looked that this person was laughing at something with a friend so I went on my merry way.  While I was going on my merry way her friend - or her, I'm not sure which - said, "she's wearing that skirt," in the most sarcastic tone she could muster it seemed.  I'm not sure if they were trying to pick a fight with me, but they were certainly being responsible adults.  I didn't give the lady a funny look or anything; her loud noise made me look over impulsively, an instant reaction, because something about it made me wonder if everything was okay.
So I spent some time being offended.  The five-year-old me crossed her arms and stuck out her pouty lip saying, "that wasn't very nice..."

I don't think race had anything to do with that, but it reminded me of something that happened to me a long time ago:
It was near midnight on a Friday and I was sitting at a stop light enjoying some rather loud techno on channel 93.3's Eleven program (before they started playing crappy techno) when a white car pulled up next to me.  This car was full of drunk girls (that is giving them the benefit of the doubt, I don't know if they were actually drunk).  The passenger got my attention and had me lower my music.  What she proceeded to do was fling racial slurs at me.  She looked so proud of herself while she did it too.
I don't remember what she said, or what I did because the whole thing was so surreal, but I'm pretty sure I did something dumb like say, "uh, okay," and roll up my window.  She laughed and laughed and laughed at my reaction though.
I spent a good deal of time being offended over that one, and it still irks me to think about it.  The five-year-old me wanted to throw something and cry, and she still kind of pouts about it.
This happened in at least 2008, maybe 2009.  So a while ago.

In high-school I spent a week being physically ill because when I turned down one of my classmates for a date he decided that he, and all of his friends, would spread rumours about having slept with me.  He had a lot of friends.
When I turned him down he said, "it's because I'm black, isn't it?"
I wasn't clever enough at the time, but I should have said, "no, but now it's because you pulled the race card."

In middle school I also spent some time feeling physically ill when girls I thought were my friends started spreading a rumour that I had gotten a favourite teacher of the class suspended and/or fired (I can't remember which) for reading out of the bible.  The ring leader for this one was Jewish and I was Christian.  It was her father who had gotten him in trouble, but for whatever reason she decided I should take the fall.
The whole thing was pretty ridiculous, seeing as nothing needed to be said about it.  I was kind of sad the teacher was gone, but it wasn't the end of the world to me.  I guess other people thought it was really important though.

Things like these tend to just happen to me, and I'm not fast enough on the uptake to really respond properly.  It takes me a moment to process events and decide how I feel about them.  In the mean time, I usually end up doing something stupid that I look back on and facepalm.

They do say that hindsight is 20/20.

The original point of this is that I think it's ridiculous that people who are supposed to be full-grown adults can be so spiteful and immature.

FAIR WARNING: do not read past this point if you are easily traumatized.

On a related note of losing faith in the human race: There's a case of a man raping his girlfriend's 6-month-old daughter to death.  He was convicted, and sentenced to the death penalty but now his attorneys are saying that the sentence is too much because the man was so drunk he wasn't in control of his actions.  They say that while he intended to rape the child he did not intend to kill her.
I heard about this on Monday I think and I'm still traumatized by it.  Maybe it's because I have an 8-month-old, I don't know.

I just want to live in my little bubble of not ever knowing about a man who is capable of raping a 6-month-old child.
Now is the time for science to come up with some sort of selective memory erasing device.
Get on it science!

A Word in Edgewise

A large part of why I come off awkward when in group settings is my inability to insert myself into a conversation.  This happens for a variety of reasons:

1. I don't have anything to say.
2. I didn't think of what to say fast enough.
3. I waited too long for a break in conversation and now the topic has shifted.
4. I'm too nervous to say anything at all (for fear of looking like an ass).
5. I don't know the group of people well enough.
6. I'm having a good time just listening.

Some of these sort of blend together, but I thought I'd list them separately because I felt it was warranted.

The biggest reason I don't contribute has recently shifted from being too nervous to not thinking of what to say fast enough or waiting too long to speak up.  Some months ago the reason was that I just didn't know anyone well enough to feel comfortable saying anything.
It doesn't help that I hang out with awesome, cultured, smart people now.  I used to feel intimidated.
Since having the wee one and steering my diet choices in a direction that pleases me I have more in common with them, so it's easier to contribute to a conversation.  Sometimes I feel childish because my contribution was just relating my own experience to the conversation; I didn't have anything new and interesting to add.

I suppose the entire root of my hesitation is being worried about perception.  I worry a lot about how others perceive me, especially if it's someone I know will be in my life for a long time, or someone I admire and would like to keep in my life for a long time.
My in-laws fall into this category.  I made a conscious decision to just relax a while ago (and I'm sort of being successful with this) and that has helped me a lot with communicating with them.  For a while there I was pretty nervous around them.  A lot of that was because I didn't know them very well, but a good portion of it was also that they're awesome people.  They're also different than anyone else I know, which is sort of a dumb statement considering that everyone is different.  What I mean is that most of the people I know and knew before meeting hubby had very similar interests like video games and anime.  We didn't talk about much else really.  My in-laws are very down to earth people and they've been doing what I wanted to be doing with my life for a long time.
Meeting them convinced me further that hubby was the man I wanted to spend my life with.  I would have married him regardless of in-law awesomeness I think, but it helps that I felt like I wanted to raise our family in his family...if that made any sense.

I digress.
My point is, the more I feel is at stake with the people I'm conversing with, the less I tend to say.  Which is sort of shooting myself in the foot because it has happened before that those people took my quietness as aloofness.  I've been told that someone thought that I put myself above everyone else, which can't be farther from the truth.

[EDIT]
I don't mean to imply that my old friends are any less awesome than my new friends, because that's not true.  I meant to say that my interests (and myself) have changed a lot since I've been pregnant and I have more in common with those I've met recently, generally speaking.
[/EDIT]

Tipping.

There's a story going around about a pastor writing a snarky remark on a receipt instead of a tip:

"I give God 10% why do you get 18?"

So.
Uh.
Yeah...
*awkward shuffle here*

I didn't know it was a woman who wrote it - I assumed the pastor was male - but I'm going to take a guess and say she was having a bad day.  That might just be me projecting myself onto the situation; maybe she's just a jerk.

In my opinion, it really doesn't matter that she is a pastor.  What matters is that she pulled what one might call a "dick move."  Stuff like this happens to servers all the time.  I heard a story of a waitress who got stiffed on a huge dinner bill by a woman who wrote, "sorry, I'm a single mom," or something similar on her ticket.  The two situations are very similar.

What irritates me about this woman is that she clearly has no idea what it's like to practice Christianity.  Or maybe she slipped up this one time.  Either way, she set a terrible example.
What also irritates me is the waitress posting it online.  I don't think that was really called for.

Anyway, as a general rule, I give a dollar on every five, about 20% (if the bill is $22 I give $4), unless the service is pretty bad.

Because waitressing sucks, and I know it sucks from working as a busser at Gunther Toody's.  Why would someone go and make a crappy job worse by being a general tool?

Gender Neutral.

Feminism has been in the OPED section of the Post a lot this past week.  The original article that prompted me to write this is in the recycle basket, and I don't feel like digging through papers to retrieve it.  Mostly because I can't remember which paper featured it.  Anyway, I don't remember the author's name is the point I'm trying to make.

The whole article was written bemoaning the fact that little girls (of age 3 or so) are inclined to choose dolls as toys and love the color pink.  In the same paragraph the author says little girls should be more interested in race cars and less frilly things while little boys shouldn't touch dolls lest they be gay.  She does give statistics on boys who choose "feminine" toys growing up to be gay men, but it seemed that her opinion was little boys who play with dolls are going to be gay (which is bad).

First off, discouraging a little boy from playing with dolls will most likely do nothing to "alleviate" the chances of him being gay.  This idea strikes me as ridiculous.

Second, what is wrong with little girls playing with girly toys?  Or liking pink, for that matter?  There was one sentence in the article stating that if your little girl happens to continue liking pink as an adult, that's okay.  It sort of felt like throwing a dog a bone, though.

It's articles like this that make me think feminism should actually be called masculism.  The basic idea here is that women should strive to be like men, from the age of 3.  Because playing with dolls and liking pink is detrimental to women's rights? 

And what's with the double standard here?
What does it say about society that women dressing like men is touted, but men dressing like women is considered wrong?

I'm not buying the feminist movement.  If it were worth anything there would be feminists pushing for office jobs allowing babies in the workplace or something similar.  Since when did fighting for women's rights include shunning the differences of the sexes?

There was another article in today's OPED by Kathleen Parker.  The second to last paragraph put it very nicely.  Friednan's movement has reached full adulthood and, one hopes, is seeing a shrink.  While women have the same need as men to lead meaningful lives, the feminist mystique's great failing was in advancing the notion that caring for children posed an obstacle to self-realization.

As my dad said (hilariously after a glass of wine):
You can run faster with your skirt up than your pants down.  But that doesn't work anymore because everyone's wearing damn pants!

A Note on Language.

My midwife said something that struck me at one of our visits.  She said that she felt bad whenever someone called a baby a "good" baby because the use of the word "good" to describe an easy baby implied that all other babies were bad babies.
She has a point, and now, whenever someone asks me if our little one is a "good" baby I tell them that he is an easy baby.  Because now I feel sad for the more difficult babies that are being labeled as "bad" by default.  I know that this isn't what people are saying when they ask if he's a "good" baby, but I can't get it out of my head.

This line of thought was provocative; I started thinking about the words we use and how it affects our perception of people, places, and objects.  To use another baby example, hubby referred to the little one as pathetic one night while we were driving home and he was crying in his car-seat.  I got defensive because I associate "pathetic" with negative connotations.  Hubby was using the word for it's actual definition, and he had to explain that to me.
But, how many times have you heard someone use the word "pathetic" to paint another person or thing in a bad light?  How many times have you used it in that way?

Another thing this makes me think about is the way words can lose their meaning a little over time and use.  The word "awesome" has been sort of dulled over the years for me because of how frequently it's used.  Awesome is supposed to mean that something leaves you in awe, like mouth gaping, speechless, awe.  I hardly ever hear it used this way and so it has sort of lost the potency of its meaning.

And then I start thinking about my own language.  I can sometimes have strange diction, or sentence structure when I'm speaking (or writing for that matter).  This leads to bad impressions, or that face-tingling embarrassed me that can't do anything but say the wrong thing - occasionally it leads to hilarity and good times.  For this reason, I don't mix well with people who offend easily.  I generally spend most of my time with them backtracking, trying - in vain - to explain what it was I meant to say when I said whatever asinine thing that actually came out of my mouth.

So the station at which my train of thought arrives is this: my language use is something that I should pay more attention to, but I like the weird things that I say sometimes.  Even if they get me into trouble, which they do. 
I guess it makes for good stories later?