I was out walking yesterday morning. While I walk, I listen to a book on tape, and I’m currently listening to Wizard and Glass (thus the reason I was so interested in casting someone for Roland last week). The tape ended about 15 minutes into my 1-hour walk and I didn’t have the next tape with me, so I switched over to the radio, to Ace and TJ‘s morning show, to be exact. They were in the middle of a conversation about, I think, the best ways to meet men. A woman called in and said she was a bank teller, and she and her single bank teller friends, if a nice-looking customer came in, would check out their balance to determine if they were, as someone put it, "husband material." Sometimes, she went on, she’d write down their address and drive by their house. She ended up dating one customer for a little while by doing just that. Personally, if you’re using a guy’s looks and his bank balance to determine whether he’s husband material, that’s a sad little statement, really, but to each her own. I didn’t think checking out bank balances was a terribly bad thing – I was once a bank teller, and I’d check out balances from time to time just out of curiosity, but after a while, money becomes not money, if that makes any sense – it would become more like these important colored pieces of paper you had to count out. Like Monopoly money. It would be like "Yeah, he’s got ten thousand dollars in his checking account, big whoop." Of course, I also wasn’t single, so maybe it was different for me. Anyway. Yankee Pete, who’s part of the show, just lost his mind. He was incredibly pissed at the idea of a bank teller checking out his balance for such reasons, and said "If I knew a bank teller was checking out my balance like that, I’d want to reach across the counter and punch her in the face!", and he went on to tell the caller that she was trash and crap for doing it. I didn’t really get why he was that pissed – I mean, it’s human nature to be nosy, isn’t it? I figure if any of my readers work in the credit card department at AmSouth, they’ve looked up my account to see how much I owe. (Don’t deny it. When I worked at the Bank of Boston, I killed time putting in famous names and checking out their accounts. I’m sure it’s a big no-no, but no one ever specifically said "Don’t try to find JFK Jr.’s contact information…") But I just accepted that Yankee Pete was pissed for reasons I didn’t understand, and kept walking. But then. You know, people can be SO FUCKING STUPID. This woman calls in, all horrified, saying that Pete had said he WOULD punch a woman in the face, and she couldn’t believe that Ace and TJ, being Southern gentlemen, let him say such a thing, and that Pete is an awful, horrible person, blah-de-blah. What kind of a sheltered fucking life must you lead to think that just because someone says they’d want to do something, they’d actually do it? Just because he’d want to punch a woman in the face doesn’t mean he’d do it, and how stupid and lame do you have to be to not KNOW that? I’m often seized with the compulsion, upon viewing another trail of hairball vomit, to start shooting kitties, but you’re not seeing a lack of cat hair ’round these parts, are you? So then, she goes on about how horrible violence against women is, and Ace and TJ and Angie (the sole woman on the show, and oftentimes the sole voice of reason – though actually, they tend to take turns being the voice of reason. Except for TJ, which is why he’s so fucking funny. But I digress.) jumped to Pete’s defense, saying that they know he’d never hit a woman, that they’ve all worked with charities that promote women’s rights, and so on. The woman says "Has Pete worked for that charity?"
WHAT. THE. FUCK does that have to do with it?! Like if Pete was prone to violence, he’d – when it came time to volunteer at the shelter – say "Oh, I’m sorry. I can’t volunteer for the women’s shelter. I’m PRO violence against women! I LIKE to smack my bitch up!" You know, I’ve never volunteered for the Leukemia Foundation. Therefore, I’m apparently pro-Leukemia. She managed to sound like the biggest idiot I’ve heard in a long time, and whenever I think about it, I manage to get pissed off all over again. It was just her repeated insistence that Pete saying he "would want to" smack someone equaled his actually doing it that made her sound like such a clueless fool. Here’s the thing. You can’t hear someone for a few hours a day and decide you know who they are the other 20 hours a day. To me, Pete sounds like a nice enough guy, but what do I know? Maybe he runs nekkid through the graveyard at midnight and robs convenience stores. You don’t know someone from the limited exposure they put out to you, and to think that you do is idiocy. Which neatly leads me into the aforementioned assholes running rampant on the internet and sending out emails these days. Mar recently found out she was pregnant. Instead of sharing every detail of her pregnancy, she decided to keep it private. Guess what? That’s HER CHOICE. People who had never read her before began emailing her and telling her they wanted every detail. When she said she was keeping the details private, she got shit for it. Thanks, assholes. Now a great weblog is gone. Way to go. A slew of assholes have emailed Lis lately, being their asshole self. Mo got an email from an asshole. You know what? If you email someone and tell them that they’re fat, that their artwork sucks, that they’re going to die for something they chose to do, that they’ll never achieve what they want to do, so they should just give up, YOUR MOTIVES ARE NOT PURE, dumbass. You’re not going to come across as anything but a huge, flaming asshole, no matter how much you’re of the impression that it’s for their own good. What’s so wrong in your lame and pathetic life that you feel the need to lash out and send an email like that to someone you don’t know? It’s obvious to everyone in the world that your intent is to cause hurt, and while some people may be fully able to shrug off the venom aimed at them, many people cannot. What the fuck is wrong with you that you need to shit on someone else to make your own fucking pathetic self feel better? And why can’t you just hit the "back" button instead of unleashing your bullshit on someone who doesn’t know you, and probably would rather NOT know you? You know, it’s one thing if you aim your assholery my way – though to be honest, I can count the asshole emails I’ve gotten on both hands and a few toes, but I couldn’t possibly count the wonderful ones, ’cause I can’t count that high – but when people like Mo and Lis, who are awesome, talented, sweet, funny, wonderful people get emails like that, it enrages me. Makes me, for instance, want to punch you in the face.
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