Not Very Mysterious

Once there was a dork who couldn't get a woman. So he studied, as dorks are wont to do. He made up a new persona, dubbed himself Mystery and started scoring by the dozens. Other men were shocked and pleaded to be taught his ways. And then VH1 gave him a show because that is what they do.

Pick-Up Artist is fundamentally a good show (my definition of a good show). It has lots of train wrecks etc... But there is also something so desperately sad about it. And not just with the dorky guys all jockeying to hang out with a white man who wears a furry top hat. The dorky guys are all sort of sweet and bemused, except for the creepy forty-five year old. The dorks do what dorks do, bumbling through their tasks. Most of them are young enough that they probably would get a girl eventually.

But see then they would have to have a dorky girl. You know, someone who operated on their level. Now my sweetie is a geek to nth degree, but Nox embraces this about himself and sticks to geeks. And that boy can pull some ass. Geek girls fall into his lap. I'm not even jealous anymore because he can't seem to help it.

Anyway, these guys want to go to CLUBS and score. These are not guys who should be at clubs. They're probably pretty funny and sweet in a smaller enviorment, but we here in the U.S.A. think everyone should be An Extrovert! We! Love! People! YAY!

Mystery essentially teaches these guys how to devolp a fake persona that will last long enough to meet new people, get a girl to home with you and make with the naked time. Has no one heard of liqour? I'm pretty sure that's worked for uglier, less personable men.

How long does the persona last you? Several of these guys are under employed or unemployed. They aren't exactly natural romeos either. I'm not saying money is the key, but unemployment is unattractive. Sorry, it is. I don't need you to be a lawyer, but you shouldn't watch more day time television then your mother.

The thing that bothers me the most, is that as a woman, I feel demeaned. There is a lot of talk on the show about 'respecting' women or 'looking for a deep realtionship'. But the facade is thing and eventually Mystery will slip and say things like 'the target has to earn your attention'. Target? Are they shooting things now?

The type of woman that goes with guys that consider them targets are not the type of girls that date geeks. Just saying.

Catch you on the flipside,
CGL

Cha-Cha-Changes

Oh Bowie, how I love thee. Yes, I redecorated around here a little. The background was getting on my nerves as was the Western lettering.

Revenge is Ice Cream

Hi, my name is CGL and I like bad reality television.

It wasn't always this way. Once upon a time I scoffed at friends and loved ones who enjoyed things like Big Brother and American Idol.

Project Runway was the gateway drug. It wasn't like the rest of those shows! It was was about something! There were pretty clothes and Tim Gunn!

Oh, how the mighty have fallen.

The beginning of the end was Surreal Life. I watched the first season because I have an unreasonable love of Corey Feldman that began at the tender age of 11. I think I skipped a season or two, but was sucked back in.

Flavor Flav is a mutant. A mutant who makes for awesome television. I can happily sit and knit and watch the thosands of shows that sprang from his tired loins.

I still can't watch Survivor or the Bachelor. These hold no interest for me.

But if it was spawned by VH1 or Bravo there is a good chance that I am enslaved to it's awesome hideousness.

The train wreck that was Flavor of Love 1,2, I Love NY and Charm School, I found endlessly enthralling. Who were these girls who were willing to kick, bite and scratch there way into the heart of an ugly ex-crack addict that wears the outfits of an unmedicated schizophrenic?

I know the deep ugly reason why I love these shows. The girls and guys of Flavor and/or Rock of Love, hell even the denizens of Project Runway and Top Model are the people that made me feel rotten in high school. They were all prematuraly ready for the bedroom and considered themselves the kings and queens of the school. These are the girls that would smile at you while their friend tripped you in the cafeteria.

I thought I had let go of the bitterness. I thought I had decided that their bitchness was just to be accepted and left in my past.

But there they were, larger then life and clawing at each other to get at men that have no interest to them or perform for judges who would precisely and kindly rip their egos into itty bitty bits.

Revenge, even vicariously, is so very very sweet. And cold....like ice cream.


Catch you on the flipside,
CGL

"A name makes no matter to me, as long as I can call you my own."

- A Knight's Tale

"Hi you must be the new girl. If you need anything I'll be the Irish guy over in computers."
"Great! I'll be the Jew in cellphones."

Not a movie quote or a racist confrontation, this was actually the first conversation I had with Nox. Our actual anniversary date is sort of arbitrary as neither of us could remember when we actually started going out. The date we settled on was August 19 (his parent's anniversary and two days after my parent's anniversary...weird). Anyway, one way or another it's been two years now.

I have loved spending this time with him and look forward to more.

And if you're reading this, Happy Anniversary honey!

The Most Predictable Woman in the World

Mom: We will call you from Spain! It will be fabulous for I have a phone card!
Me: Uhh...I would buy a phone card when you get there from someone who will also tell you how to use one in English.
Mom: LALALALALA My Hispanic friends told me this would work!
Me: They are from Mexico not Spain...
Mom: LALALALALALALALA

Me: This is what will happen, they will go away and not call because they can't figure out how to use her phone card. She will keep telling my father that it is fine, I know will somehow surmise that they are perfectly all right. My father will eventually figure out that his daughter who suffers from similar anxiety issues will actually be thinking that they are dying in Spanish prison after being brutally beaten and robbed. He will then call right when I am on the verge of calling the cruise line to make sure they are alive.

Five Days in to them being away there is no phone call.

Nox: They're fine. Seriously. They're both 50+ years old. THEY. ARE. FINE.
Me: ::in tears:: Death! Spanish Prison! Mugged!
Nox: ::administers hugs and probably wonders what he did to deserve this::

Seven Days into trip, I start searching for cruise line's phone number when my cellphone rings.

Dad: So we couldn't figure out the phone card. Your mother wouldn't let me call you. She said you would know we were fine.
Me: Anxiety issues!
Dad: I know! I told her!
Me: ::sigh:: Well. Yeah.
Dad: I'm going to do a comedy act at the talent show on Saturday and tell poop jokes about the Duty Free shop!
Me: I love you, Dad.

My mother? Most predictable woman ever!

Catch you on the flipside,
CGL

Come See the Librarian in her Natural Habitat

I don't often talk specifically about my work because I live in fear of someone tracking down my blog go 'AH-HA' and I lose my job, can't find another and have to live with my parents forever.

I am temporarily revoking that anxitey today because my job provides great material. As you may have surmised (or probably just flat out know since the two and half people who read this blog actually know me), I work in A Very Small Library that is not public. I will amend to this that my patrons are..special. They do not suffer from severe retardation, but many of them are somewhat learning disabled. This leads to all kinds of fun moments.

In the Very Small Library (VLS from now on, my office sits in one corner. It is nearly entirely glass from four feet above the floor on up. I assume this design was chosen so that the librarian could keep an eye on the patrons, but generally makes me feel like an exhibit at the San Diego Zoo. Especially at feeding time. The door is to the left of me and I face slightly away from it. I am constantly taken off guard by knocking. Unfortunately there is literally no way to rearrange the furniture.

A combination of my patrons abilities and this glass office leads to moments like this one. I am sitting at my computer, mostly zoned out and a patron knocks...not on my door, but on the glass in front me. Which means he walked behind the reference desk and is staring down at me. He then gestures for me to come help him at a computer.

When I can around, I asked him gently to never do that again and he looked completely confused. I realized that it had not even occurred to him to check to see if I had a door.

My continual frustration with my patrons is not that they aren't smart. I like a lot of them, some well below the average intelligence range. It's the lack of simple social niceties that bothers me.

Ooooh...gotta go it's feeding time and I smell chocolate!

Catch you on the flipside,
CGL

Radio Silence

My parents have been away for four days now and I have heard nary a word from them. I'm not quite full blown worried yet as they did travel out of the country. It's likely they are having a really good time. Last time they went away for a week they only called once five days into their trip (which was extra special as I'd just had The Unfortunate Mostly My Fault Blowout with Nox). I hope they're out there and not mugged or somehow in a Spanish prison. This is not entirely unlikely if you know my Mother.

Of course, this is the same week that the Nox's parents went aways so instead of some nice relaxing private time, we are running back and forth from each other's homes taking care of dogs. I love my puppies, but they get very anxious when the parents are away and fall out of their good habits. Boy Dog has woken me up at 3am to pee every day so far, no matter how late I let him out before going to bed.

Grumble.

Catch you on the flipside,
CGL

Inappropirate Job Hunting

All right, so I had a really cute post planned for today about parents and the comparison thereof and so on and maybe I will still write it, but there's something that just happened that I have to talk about.

Last week I received a job application in my mailbox. Which would be fine, except we currently don't have a position open at Very Small Library. I sent a very polite, sort of bemused e-mail back (no way I was going to send her real mail back) mentioning that we posted all positions online on a big website. Already I was weirded out. I know some people practice this technique to get jobs, but it felt very pushy to me and uniformed. We're not a huge complex with hundred of opportunities.

Then, just now I received a phone call. "May I speak to the Library Director?" I answered that this was she and the woman on the other end expressed surprise. Already warning flags went off. See previous to me there was a four year reign of a male director, who had many many crazy part-timers come and go (to the continual mirth of the other departments).

"I sent out an application a week ago and I was wondering.."

Now at this point I knew exactly what was going on and behaved rather poorly. This is not the first time on of the previous part-timers have called looking for work, although the last one applied when there was an actual job opening.

"I sent you an e-mail." Which I had, very politely I thought considering the non-thoughtfulness of her application.

"Oh! I didn't get it...that's weird..." She trailed off. Now whether or not she got it doesn't matter. If you want a job, you're supposed to impress your prospective boss, not passive-aggressively accuse them of not doing something. I sort of lost my cool at this point as I just wanted her off the phone.

"We don't currently have a position open."

"Oh, but if you have one in the future..." I hate this expression. It sounds so desperate and sad. There is no position open, I'm not even being particularly patient with you. Why would campaign for future non-existent positions?

"This is a rather small library." I decided to state.

"I know, I was there when it was set up..." DING. DING. DING. You worked for us once and no longer do.

I'm not sure what I said after this exactly, but it was something along the lines of:

"We aren't anticipating any openings. Goodbye."

I know it was unnecessarily rude and abrupt. I do have some guilt about that. However,s he violated major rules of a job hunt that I know about as a first time job holder:

1. Don't send out mass mailings to places that aren't actively soliciting applications. Someone has to deal with that mail and you waste a lot of people's time just so you can find out what you already knew: they have no openings.

2. Unless you have insured that a. your old boss still works at there and b. they still like you, don't assume you have an 'in'.

3. Even if you assume you do have an 'in', call first do not send an application. People change jobs. Also? If you didn't know the person changed jobs (in this case over a year ago) you don't know them well enough to have an 'in'.

4. If you do violate 1 and you don't hear back, don't call! This is not a calling situation. If there was an actual ad you were replying to, by all means call. Why why why would call after sending in an unsolicited resume to a place you haven't worked in at least five years?

I am not excusing my own behavior as there is never cause to be as rude as I was to this woman. In my ideal world, I am Donna Reade sweet to everyone. This woman crawled under my skin for some reason. Oh well, I hope she finds gainful employment elsewhere with her disorganized campaign.

As Numerous as Grains of Sand on a Beach

I have a teeny tiny obsession which was started and enflamed by Geo and Law. There is a family, wholesome and strange known as The Duggers.

The Duggers have (as of this week) 17 children. For those of you who have not seen the TLC specials, let me recap: Michelle and Jim Bob started out with normal ideas of family production and had three wee bairns. Then Michelle had a terrible miscarriage due to birth control and the Duggers decided to leave their child production up to God from then on. I believe Michelle has been almost continually pregnant since that decision.

All right, so they have a large family. Why am I so interested? Because these people are starting their own cult. Oh, that’s not what they say and they have no formal declarations of religion on their show beyond vague Christian sentiments, but its there between the lines. The children are all dressed in concealing clothing and the girls don’t seem to be allowed to cut their hair (Michelle’s is waist length). The overall appearance is very very conservative.

And then there’s The House. They bought a large track of land and built a house on it. Not just any house, but a house that you would buy in Costco if they sold houses. And? The kids still don’t have their own rooms. Because they wanted it that way. That’s right, the teenagers were choosing to live with their itty bitty siblings instead of having privacy. Which I suppose is admirable, but also rather spooky. The land that the house sits on is fairly massive and the hope is that the children will settle their families on it. It’s going to be a Dugger Compound.

Of course, these kids are not allowed to attend public school where they might learn things and have experience outside of their family. No, they are home schooled on top of everything else. I have nothing against home schooling for children who have difficulties dealing with that environment, but from all appearances the Duggers would do reasonable well in public school. And would it really be a crime to know life outside of your own family, even if it is made up of seventeen people? On all the TLC specials, the Duggers insist that all the kids have outside interests and social lives, but there is never any evidence of this. Any depiction of ‘outside’ interests always includes the rest of the family.

Recently they went on vacation in an RV with a trailer. The boys slept in the trailer and the girls in the RV. It was a pleasant enough Discovery special with lots of inserted health facts as it was after all, Discovery Health airing it. While on an airplane over the Grand Canyon, all but three of them threw up. The narrator commented that that couldn’t keep this family down and moved merrily along. It was an oddly paced moment. Other then that the trip looked uneventful enough considering.

I have watched similar shows about families with tons of kids and none have captured me like the Dugger specials. Normally, I would reserve my opinions about their choices and appreciate the fact that America is home to so many different kinds of folk. Except they have opened themselves to these sorts of things by allowing cameras into their homes. Once you put your life on TV, you are forfeiting your privacy, even if your intent is to glorify your life style.

Now, to be fair if this was a hundred years ago, no one would blink at this family except to comment on their low mortality rate. Perhaps the Duggers are just anachronistic and should simply remind us of more pastoral times. Perhaps they even represent a dying America full of DIY projects and a can-do attitude.

So it’s probably just the cynic in me that looks at the happy group and thinks ‘incipient cult’ or ‘messianic complex’ or ‘God expects you to make your own choices, that’s why we all have free will. Please do not blame him for you having 17 kids.’

Catch you on the flipside,
CGL