ROAD BITCH: The story of my life

Before I explain how bad NC drivers are, let me tell you two things about the South:

First, let me clarify that when people talk to you about "cities" in the South, they don't mean real cities*. They mean something similar in size to large suburbs in the North, except there's less traffic and less stuff to do. What I mean is that when I drive around Raleigh, NC there's typically street parking available, a scant few couples dispersed on the sidewalk, and if it's a weekend night, a 10-minute wait at the most popular restaurants. That's kind of nice.

Second, when they say there's a slower pace of life here, this has only been apparent to me in a few ways. (A) It takes at least twice as long to grab a cup of plain ol' black coffee anywhere here than it does in Chicago and (B) people walk excruciatingly slow. I'm talking pausing-between-steps-to-not-run-into-the-person -ahead-of-you, awkward-passing-people in the grass, block-away-from-your-apartment-but-not-sure-you'll-make-it-to-the-toilet-because-man-in-front-of-you-is-strolling-at-an-insanely-leisurely-pace slow.

Taking these things into account, I am wondering why, how, why!? are the drivers here so incompetent? They seem to be simultaneously so hurried that they can't be bothered to pay attention to traffic laws and also lackadaisical about actually arriving anywhere efficiently. For example:

1. Traffic. There's no traffic, per se, but there are traffic jams. The reason this occurs is that 50% of drivers, seeing that they will need to merge with the lane to their left in the next mile, choose to stay in the right lane, ZOOMING past people who merged at an obediently reasonable distance from the stoplight. Then, a car's length from the intersection, they force themselves into the leftward lane. This practice, I conclude, is what causes the slowdown in the left lane in the first place.
2. Turn Signals. In spite of their exquisite predilection for merging where no one wants them to merge, it seems as though NC drivers are unaware that their cars are equipped with turn signals. I would say that 90% of the time a car in front of me applies its brakes, I am not sure if there is a dead animal in the road, if their engine has stopped, or if they are in fact turning left or right. It's like a mystery novel without any clues or red herrings, and if you aren't paying attention you could die.
3. Intersections. NC drivers do not seem to understand intersections. In fact, let me explain it for them right here: When a light turns yellow, you stop if you have time, and continue through if it would be unsafe to attempt to stop. Whether or not the car in front of you makes it through the light is not the deciding factor. If the light is already red, do not proceed through the intersection. Do not stop in the middle of the intersection. Do not honk at someone with the right of way who will not let you illegally turn into their lane. Easy, right??? Maybe you can print it out and put it on your windshield.
   

So let me tell you about my day yesterday. I was driving to Target to buy a leash for my cat. (This is a topic for another day.) The following events happened in the should-be-15-minutes-but-took-45-minutes trip.

• Several cars in front of me, a car came to a complete stop on the freeway (with everyone behind him having to slam on their brakes from a 55 mph speed) to let a car from the left lane merge in front of him.
• A few minutes later, another car in front of me swerved ENTIRELY off the road and into the grass and then IMMEDIATELY back on again, without regard for the confused and frightened cars behind him. When I passed him a few minutes later I realized that he was fiddling with his blackberry instead of looking at the road.
• At the fateful merged-intersection #1, the light turned red as a car was passing through. Instead of like, you know, continuing... this car came to a complete stop in the middle of the intersection and then attempted to back up into her lane, which had a car in it already because rational drivers assumed she would continue through the intersection.
• At merged-intersection #2, as we were merging onto the interstate highway, the enormous white trash truck behind me was throwing a hissy fit, honking, and flashing his brights as two cars simultaneously tried to cut me off without using turn signals. All this as we made a 45 degree highway exit and merged into 70 mph traffic.

My first commandment for driving in NC is to never let people merge in front of me. If they continue trying after I make it clear I won't let them, I give them the finger and a big smile. I am not some nice country girl. They can kiss my ass.

NC drivers, listen to me. You need to get better. You need to take your drivers' exams in another state so someone can tell you what is right and wrong. You need to get your money's worth out of those expensive new-fangled turn signal gadgets. I do not want to wonder if I'll die driving 1.5 miles down a country road to my boyfriend's house. THANKS.

*Except in Texas. Texas has real cities, or so I've heard.

People... people who bore people

Maybe you get the impression, reading this blog, that I'm not exactly like most people you might run into on a daily basis. Maybe I'm a little more neurotic, more observant, more narcissistic, more loquacious, more cynical. Maybe I have a unique perspective or even put new words and a new voice to things you've thought yourself. Or MAYBE if you don't have a good vocabulary or any sense of imagination, you'd describe me as "weird."

I was called weird in grade school, middle school, and high school. Then somewhere along the line, most people grew out of whispering behind my back about my "weirdness," and I guess I took that for granted because apparently I have to deal with it again now.

My boyfriend and I were having coffee on campus when we ran into a younger student from our program that he knows. He introduced us and we both said hello to each other before parting ways. The next day he heard from this student that she heard from other people in her year that I am "weird." Considering that I haven't even had a conversation with these jerks, I'm sort of pissed off about it.

1. Who meets someone's girlfriend and immediately turns around and calls her weird? I tend to associate that caliber of social ineptitude with autistic spectrum disorders and children under ten.

2. The individuals who are apparently referring to me as weird have, as far as I know, interacted with me one time. They crashed a party I hosted in my apartment, stood in the middle of the living room ignoring the other guests and drinking my liquor, and stared at me like deaf mutes when I smiled and greeted them. I guess I'm the strange one in that situation, but it's strange relative to the norm of inexplicable rudeness.

Thus, what I understand about the label "weird" is that I am a distinguishable personality from the indistinct mass of mounded flesh and Walmart clothing that makes up this group of students. I shouldn't feel offended, right? I should feel complimented that I'm not a boring, bland, uninteresting plebeian Ph.D student. But I'm still pissed off. If you're reading this, you lackluster potato-faced redshirts, why don't you kiss my ass? It's not my fault you put so much effort into being average that you didn't have time to develop a personality.

What can brown do for you?

NOT MUCH.

I had the most annoying experience with UPS this week. I ordered some bedding from Urban Outfitters and had to pay $10 for shipping. Urban Outfitters accidentally (?) omitted my apartment number on the shipping label, so when the package was delivered, they had to take it straight to the building office and leave it for me. Whatever incompetent debile working there at the time told them that I had moved out of the apartment complex and not left a forwarding address.

This baffles me, since I've been living here for two years and stop into that office all the time and make small talk with those ladies. Anyway, UPS had to take the package back and it experienced something called an "exception," which essentially means they are confused and plan to take actions that will completely inconvenience the intended recipient.

Instead of calling the phone number that I had associated with the billing and shipping address when I placed the order, UPS decided to call my parents' house. This, too, confuses me, because I'm not sure how they got the phone number. They reached my father, who couldn't imagine why I would be ordering anything off the internet and assumed UPS was some sort of scam artist targeting me and trying to squeeze my address out of him. He told them they would have to call me. They told him that I had to call their help line.

UPS's help line has one of those automated voice-recognition navigation systems employing a frustratingly peaceful woman's voice. You can choose from options like "track a package" and "send a package" and "shipping information," all of which require you to clearly state numbers and letters and words in a clear manner such that a robot can decipher your speech. So imagine me sitting at my desk in lab, running an experiment next to whirling and whizzing pumps and electrical equipment, enunciating a random stream of 8 billion numbers and letters into my phone, trying to maintain the emotional vigor of Al Gore. "I'm sorry, I didn't understand you." Aaaaaand repeat.

This help line helped me learn that my "package has experienced an exception," and could I please "pick it up within 5 days at the UPS facility." What UPS facility? The one in my town? A quick phone call there told me that they only sold shipping materials and did not handle packages. In order to talk to a person, I had to play the old "I'm too stupid to use a phone" trick and nod mutely at the phone until a representative from customer service came on the line. Her advice? "Just go to the UPS facility to pick it up." WHAT UPS FACILITY? "The one nearest you."

After I extracted an address from this clueless peon, Google informed me that it was a 20 minute drive from my apartment. An hour of telephone runaround and 20 minutes of driving later, I had my stupid pillowcases. Thanks for nothing, UPS!

Addendum

I was thinking about my previous post's pleas to Shonda Rimes & Friends. Yes, I would still like some sort of massacre to occur at Seattle Grace. Yes, I would like it to happen as soon as possible. Yes, I would like every major and supporting character to perish without any dramatic dialogue or mourning involved. But in addition to this, NO ONE CAN COME BACK AS GHOSTS. Especially ghosts that have sex and warn people about cancer. Especially ghosts with spin-offs, or ghosts that appear on Private Practice. Also, I would like the president of ABC to formally apologize to America and all countries where Grey's Anatomy is syndicated for this poor excuse for entertainment.

Thanks!
Love, Elyse

TV Guide

As you may recall, I canceled all television service to my apartment a month ago. It's been a quiet month in my apartment. I kind of like it, but sometimes I need to do something... mindless... so today I watched some of this season's premieres (on my laptop).

1. Grey's Anatomy: First of all, why do I waste my life watching this drivel? The dialogue is painful and all the characters are ridiculous. But I think I've beaten the bad dialogue horse too much in my life; today, I'm going to beat the bad plot horse. Thanks for killing off boring George, Shonda Rimes & Friends, but there's still lame Izzy, boring Meredith, boring Christina, boring Derek, lame Alex, lame Meredith's sister, and the rest of the lame, boring cast to kill off. I suggest that a bomb explodes in Seattle Grace, flattening the entire hospital, because this show is like a roach infestation. If you don't obliterate them all, they'll come back even stronger than before in some incorrigible spin-off. We can't have that again, people-- I will not abide by another show as terrible as Private Practice. Also, I'm growing impatient about the speed at which character deaths occur. You can't afford waste an entire episode deifying a character who had no redeeming qualities. Be honest, you're glad he's dead. It's okay to move on with sociopath-like speed. You have other bad characters to kill, SR&F, and I want them all dead before sweeps (except Patrick Dempsey). Please start with Izzy. Now let's get crackin'!

2. Eastwick: I'm still not sure how I feel about this. On one hand, they took an awesomely dark, overtly sexual and sadistic book about three gorgeously powerful women and turned it into a frilly, flouncy, cutesy-magicked version of Desperate Housewives. I hate Desperate Housewives as much as Grey's Anatomy. On the other hand, the guy who plays Darryl the Demon is way hotter than I imagined him in the book. But on the first hand, Rebecca Romijn can't act well enough to sell her character. But on the second hand, who cares, because she looks sooooo good kissing Darryl. But on the first hand, no no no, don't ruin literature with cliche dialogue, plots, characters, soundtrack... even the font in the credits is predictable. No, ABC, no. Just.... don't. I beg you.

3. House: I used to love this show until one day I realized they ran out of ideas in the second season and still needed to give Hugh Laurie something to do to justify his huge salary. I would prefer that they have him tap dance and solve riddles for an hour instead of murdering all the respect I had for the show's writers. Who writes for TV these days? I'm starting to think it might be a group therapy project in an adult care facility: cut and paste things from newspapers and novels until you run out of space on the page, then doodle set designs on them. The sixth season premiere is a modernized and watered-down plagiarism of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest." I'm not even going to explain to you how the writers have stolen the plot of the movie point-by-point, because I have more respect for you than that. It's even worse than plagiarism because it takes a work of Ken Kesey genius and infuses it with the same tired cadence we've all come to know and detest in House dialogue. I like a good homage as much as the next cranky bitch, so when they come up with a good homage I'll certainly give them credit for it. Where's the creativity? At the end of the episode, 13 sleeps with a stripper and kills herself, Wilson throws a sink out the window, House gets a lobotomy and the giant Indian-- I mean, FOX -- puts the sad, empty remains of this program out of its misery... oh, sorry, no... that's what would happen if I wrote this episode.

Are you on the Bus?

I am fortunate enough to enjoy a completely free transit system in my town. There is no parking on campus so we all save hundreds of dollars a year being able to ride the bus to and fro. I am absolutely not complaining about the gratuitous transportation provided by the good people of Chapel Hill today. Absolutely not. Indeed, today I'm complaining about the good people of Chapel Hill.

As someone who took buses around Chicago for four years, I am freaked out when I ride the buses here. In Chicago, if I saw the same man every day on the way to and back from work, I would probably consider him to be stalking me. But my little bus route has few enough riders that I actually notice when new people are on the bus. Not only that, but I can remember things about the people I see every day.

There's the girl with the bag I really like. Sometimes I hate my bag so much that I want to ask her to trade with me. There's the guy that dresses well and smells awful. There are the girls with perfectly straight, blond hair-- I have no idea how anyone keeps their hair so smooth in this humidity. There's the girl who is always sucking face with some guy and looking at me as if I should be jealous. I'm not jealous, lady... no disgusting tongue maneuver you perform can make me wish I were you. I can out-maneuver you any day of the week, honey.

Then there is this guy on the bus that I tried to ask out last year. He had long black hair, piercings, fingerless leather gloves, and always wore classic rock t-shirts. One day he and I both wore a Beatles shirt, so I got on and sat next to him, then tried to talk about how funny it was that we were both wearing a Beatles shirt. It got awkward real quick (as you may have suspected). Later in the year, he cut his hair and looked respectable and I lost all interest (as you may have suspected).

I have not yet lost interest in cornering strange men on the bus and attempting to make them love me. It's a fun game. Today I happened to be sitting next to a marginally attractive man and quickly noticed an unpleasant odor emanating from an unidentifiable direction. It definitely wasn't Attractive Man. I became increasingly paranoid that he might think I smelled like baby poop-- I wanted to turn to him and say, "Sir, you should know that I just stepped out of the shower 20 minutes ago and thus have not had the opportunity to generate the nostril profanity we now experience." But that would have been even more awkward than the sometimes-goth boy incident.

Suddenly I located the origin of the scent: BAD SMELLING GUY was sitting right in front of us. He became impossible to ignore. Why was BSG on the bus at this unusual time? What have I done to evoke this inopportune fortune? Well, I've done a lot of bad things in my life, so I can't really claim I don't deserve to sit next to an odoriferous person or two... but I digress. The smell continued until BSG got off the bus at the stop before mine.

People, I beg you. Please don't go on the bus if you haven't showered in weeks. Just walk home from work-- it's not like a little sweat will make you stink worse than you already do. It makes it really hard for me to terrorize good-looking men with my flirtations when an ambiguous odor shakes my deluded self-confidence.

Joe the Plumber Uses the Dictionary

Joe the Plumber Slurs Gay People: I Would Never Let "Queers" Near My Children

All that press from the last election must have inspired Samuel Wurzelbacher to brush up on his learnin'. In the above article, "Joe the Plumber" takes it upon himself to define the word "queer" to the Huffington Post, adding, "People don't understand the dictionary."

I can understand your confusion, America. After all, Joe is concomitantly defending bigotry using the dictionary and defining marriage using the Bible. Seems backwards! Can you help me understand, Joe, the difference between church and state? Can you look it up in the dictionary for me?

And let me just say, I don't want Joe the Plumber near my children, just in case willfully ignorant bigotry is contagious.

I hate riding the bus

Yesterday I was riding the bus home from the grocery store. It had just begun to rain lightly and the bus was not crowded at all. In fact, there were many, many seats available. Two men boarded at the Credit Union. Instead of taking a seat, they decided to stand in front of me. Not only did I have to stare at their (unappealing) behinds for 15 minutes, I had to endure their wet, dripping backpacks hitting me in the face over and over again while I tried not to drop my armful of groceries.

Naturally, I began to contemplate whether I should speak up and cleverly chastise these bastards. Before I could make up my mind, the girl sitting across the aisle from me whipped out her cell phone and called a friend, saying loudly,

"These two white dudes just got on the bus and decided to stand rather than sit by me because I think they hate black people! That's so racist right! Can you believe how racist these jerks are for not taking a seat because it's next to a black girl? I gotta go, I don't want them to form anymore racist opinions about me while I'm on the phone."

Those two men completely ignored her, but I'd like to think that they will feel The White Guilt for the rest of their bus-riding days. I'd rather have them feel The Shame Of Douchebaggery for shaking their moisture onto me like smelly, wet dogs. I only wish I were bitchtastic enough to call them out on it.

AmazonFail, ConsumerFail

I recently learned that I have not been using the Internet correctly for years! Beyond the fact that I don't really like watching YouTube videos or creating sexy webcams or sexnetworking on MySpace, I'm apparently not shopping correctly either. I'm just a failure as a woman.

The controversy with Amazon.com and its "delisting" of media dealing with homosexuality and feminism brought this to my attention. To check the extent of this "AmazonFail," I went to Amazon.com and searched for gay and lesbian literature, only to learn that I was still able to find and purchase it. I went to Twitter and asked the world what the big f'in deal was.

The world told me (or rather, some random guy who happened to read my Twitter post told me) that "It's not that "objecitionable" [sic] content isn't for sale. Amazon delisting makes these books harder to find." So wait, I had assumed that "delisting" meant removing something from sale... but apparently, the big controversy is based on those annoying lists that pop up when you look at a book. You know, the ones where people who can't bother to spell right list their favorite literary works? I find those lists to be the least helpful and most self-indulgent things on Amazon.com. But apparently it matters a lot that we can no longer read JimBobTX1978's list of favorite lesbian parenting books. (Obviously that's discrimination, but maybe we should be happy that it's a small step toward getting rid of these lists completely.)

I've been shopping wrong for years, apparently. I should be buying all my books based on "Britneyz Favrite Russian Lit" because those lists are the most powerful component of Amazon.com's industry. That would have saved me a lot of time sifting through my own Amazon searches-- think of all the WORDS I had to read to decide what book to buy!? What was I thinking?

So hey Amazon.com... what you did was wrong and discriminatory and just plain ignorant. But hey consumers, how pathetic are you? Stop relying on the Internet to pick out your goddamn books for you!