A Good Reason To Whine: Train-Delays and Insufferable Women…

Tuesday is NOT my regular blog-night (who blogs on a Tuesday?), but I’m fresh off the heels of some feisty rage, so something has to be said.

Today was a special day, where I was stuck on a 30-minute train-ride for TWO+  hours.  A special day indeed.

Now I don’t wanna get all “rant-like” on how much it sucked, or how an engine could just “die”, or how this ruined my whole evening, because granted, sometimes shit happens.  In situations like these, all you can really do is sit tight and make the best of it (what does “sit tight” mean? clench your bum cheeks? I’m not sure, but people always say “sit tight”…). 

Well I tried to make the best of it, but it didn’t exactly work out…

It all started off well enough; I was sitting on the train with my music full-blast; today’s playlist: 90′s love ballads.

About 5 minutes in, the dreaded conductor-man got on the speaker: “umm yeah…so the train in front of us stopped moving, so we’re gonna be sitting here for a LONG time…. haha suckas!”. 

I don’t like the conductor-man. He is a cold and sadistic man.  I’m not sure if the conductor-man has a family, but if he does, I will threaten their lives the next time I see him.

So the conductor’s announcement was followed by moans and groans (not the “sexy” kind, but the “how long’s it gonna be ’till I can put some meat loaf in my giant belly?” kind). 

We were all pissed. 

The best I could do was shrug my shoulders, and keep on listening to my 90′s love ballads. 

About 30 minutes passed, but the conductor-man (whose family I want to hurt) didn’t have a single update.

And then, a shocking thing happened: my iPod went dead.

What the hell?

I was SURE that when I’d checked the battery-gauge, there was a good 1/4 left.  I am under the suspicion that the LAST 1/4 of the battery does not last nearly as long as the FIRST 1/4….

Stupid iPod. 

As soon as my 90′s love ballads disappeared, I was much more aware of my surroundings; it was inescapable.

The most obvious thing I noticed were the 3 people sitting next to me.  They were all friends, it seemed, and they were having a lively conversation.  I should clarify that: by “they“, I mean that one person was having a lively conversation, while the other two were listening with child-like wonder. 

 What was all the fuss about?

I wasn’t sure, so I decided to listen-in.

In the next 5 minutes, I was exposed to an insufferable female creature…

She was the “me, me, me” type.  She had clearly mistaken herself for an A-list celebrity, and thus decided that every mundane detail in her life was a relevant topic for all.  It was like her very own segment of the Tonight Show With Jay Leno, ’cause no one kisses celebrity-ass and pretends to laugh at terrible jokes more than Jay Leno.

This chick seemed shifty-eyed as well; she must’ve been on the lookout for those sneaky paparazzi. 

 In the time that I was treated to her conversational talents, I learned the following:

-So she basically HAD to get a seperate text-message plan for her son, because “oh my god, can you believe he sends over 150 texts a month? He is SO popular!”

-She works at a really tall building downtown.  Everyone calls it the “pink building”, ’cause it looks pink.  Here’s the funny thing though: the building is technically made from “red marble”, but for some reason, the color never really stayed true to its name, because it looks all pink.  Isn’t that funny?

-She’s thinking of leaving the stranded train, and calling her husband to pick her up.  She actually knows this neighborhood really well, because her parents used to live here (she re-iterated this fact THREE times in the next 15 minutes)

-When she called her husband about the delay, he said he’d make some sort of chicken/pasta medley for dinner.  She seemed pretty happy about this.

-This one time, when the train was delayed for 5 hours, she averted the crisis, but ONLY because she had randomly decided to DRIVE to work that day.  She was saved by the grace of God, she said, because God cares more about her, than everyone else who was stuck on that train.

So yeah, this woman definitely believed she was rocking her Tonight Show segment…

As much as she thought she was a celebrity, she sure didn’t look like one.  In my kindest of descriptions, I can tell you the following: she had greasy/matted dirty-blonde hair, thick-framed eye glasses,  chapped lips, grimy fingernails, and 6 juicy stomach-rolls, cascading down her front like a luxury marble staircase .  Oh, and she was red-faced and sweaty, much like a pig in need of a cooling mud-bath. 

The more I listened to her, the more I wanted to put a bounty on her head. I thought about what it’d be like if she fell out of the train and broke her ribs (like if I pushed her).

What pissed me off the most was the reaction of her followers.  They ate up EVERY word she said; smiles and nods and chuckles up the waaazooo!  It was sickening.  One of the dudes had stars in his eyes everytime she spoke; I’m pretty sure he would have carried her on his back and taken her home, if only she had asked.

This repulsive behavior kind of got me thinking: where have all our standards gone, when it comes to acceptable conversation?  I mean people are always worried that kids don’t read enough books, but how do kids fair in the conversation department? If the parents are any indication, it’s all going downhill.  If we’re not going to live up to our “conversation-potential”, I suggest we all go back to being monkeys…

 As I was starting to come to this  scary conclusion, I realized that I’d been on the train for an hour and a half.

 I also realized that I had to go pee.

 There was only one bathroom in our train car,  and a tiny one at that.

Normally I would have succumbed to the “public train bathroom” allure, but in this case, I had seen EIGHT people use it in the last 3o minutes. 

Right then and there, I decided to avoid the piss.  I may not have had a logical reason to hold it in, but I figured THIS:  if 8 people’s airborne bum-germs had been in that room for the last 30 minutes, most of those bum-germs were still alive.  I just couldn’t bear the thought of bum-germs attaching themselves to my germ-free hot body.  No, I’d rather kill my kidneys.

So for the next 30 minutes, I tried not to think about booze and/or rivers. 

A short time later, the train started moving, and we were off on our merry ol’ way.   A few people sighed, a few people cheered, but most people started making-out.  There was no one close enough in my make-out range, so I started making-out with my hand (I don’t have a boyfriend, so don’t worry, I’m allowed).

I finally arrived home at about 8:30pm.  It was just enough time to wash-up, eat dinner, and slowly get ready for bed; kinda like I never left work at all!

It’s times like these that I’ m tempted to eat a 3-tiered cake right before falling asleep.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Thoughts On: Indian Weddings, Abercrombie, and Slutty Sports-Anchors

I’m recovering from a weekend of over-eating and digestive problems, so I’m just gonna sit here and spill out the thoughts in my head, with no real purpose or lessons (“spill out” was the first thing that came to mind (see “digestive problems” reference)).  This is probably my laziest and lowest-effort kind of blog post, so I may have to make it a regular thing (though the quality of my work will inevitably suffer (oh well, it’s not like you bastards are paying me to read this…and if you were…boy would you be a bunch of suckers!)).

Alright then, let the spillage begin (gross)…

1st ”Hmmm”…

SO…at the place where I work, we get free cake a lot.  It happens each month to celebrate birthdays on our floor, it happens when someone’s leaving, it happens when someone’s crying and needs to feel better, overall: plenty of opportunities for free cake. 

Now when it comes to me, I LOVE cake, so you think that I’d be thrilled with an office that’s one big “cake-orgy”.  In a normal world, I would be, but here’s the problem: these cake-events are always run by “Marketing people”.  Now the Marketing folk are FINE by me, and we work together daily.  Basically, we’re all best friends, so don’t expect any gossip. 

Technically though, I’m not in the Marketing department; I work for Advertising.  Officially speaking, Advertising is defined as an ”arm” of the “Marketing Octopus”.  I find that to be an insulting analogy: why the hell am I only a stupid arm?  If being “an arm” is all I’m valued for, then why don’t I chop off everything except my left arm, and come back to work as “Romi The Arm“?? Would they like me better that way? And if they’re gonna compare my job to an animal’s body part, why can’t I be an elephant’s trunk? Or a bull’s GIANT testicle? (do bulls have giant testicles? I hope so, or I don’t wanna be one…).  Either of those options would be way more kick-ass than ONE out of EIGHT swirly arms….

Stupid octopi. 

So back to my problem: any cake-events we have are run by the Marketing people, and though we’re welcome to “help ourselves” to the leftovers in the kitchen, we’re never actually notified of the initial “cake-celebration”.  And what does this mean? It means that EVERY time the Marketing people are cutting the cake in a boardroom (and rubbing it all over themselves in a sexy fashion), I’m toiling away at my ant-infested cubicle, with NO idea that a cake-fest is happening! (and yeah, my cubicle has ants, ’cause I always eat crackers and chips and granola bars and shit at my desk…and I get crumbs all over my cubicle…and I don’t clean it up…and our low-paid cleaning staff is highly ineffective…all of THAT = ants).

I wouldn’t even care about getting stuck with leftovers, if there were ever any left to begin with!!!  But NO, all I ever see is a cardboard sheet where the cake used to sit, and a few lonely morsels of devil’s food chocolate. 

My most recent “cake-letdown” occurred last week.  This time, all that was left was the lining of yellow frosting, that bordered what was once a glorious vanilla masterpiece.  

Sigh…

So I stood there and stared at the frosting, for probably a whole two minutes.

I wanted it. 

Since no one was in the kitchen, I decided to scrape all the frosting with my fingers, as a nice “3 o’ clock pick-me up”.  With that first scraping motion though, I noticed that the frosting was crusty; it must’ve been sitting out for a while.  I stopped scraping, ’cause that’s where I draw the line.

I ate 6-packets of Splenda instead. 

Anyway, I hate “office cake-days”…

2nd ”Hmmm”…

SO…last week, I was riding the subway with some work friends.  As we arrived at the busy “shopping mall” stop, in walked a super-nerdy dude, with a large-sized bag from Abercrombie and Fitch.  Of course, the bag wasn’t the biggest hint of where he’d been; the most obvious sign? He reeked of “young-man cologne”.  This tends to happen when you stand in an Abercrombie and Fitch store  a.k.a. “cologne capsule” for more than two minutes. 

My friends and I began staring at the nerdy-Abercrombie dude in a very inquistive fashion; what the hell had he been doing at Abercrombie? 

I think there’s a common understanding that only a certain kind of clientele is welcome at Abercrombie and Fitch.  One of my co-workers put it best: He told us that he’d been at Abercrombie a few weeks back.  All he had wanted was a new pair of jeans, but since he wasn’t all “super-young” and “sultry”, the staff wasn’t really “feelin’ him”.  He asked if he could try on some jeans, but the workers simply stared at him and said “it doesn’t fit”. He tried to persist, but the cologne kept making him dizzy.  Eventually, one of the Abercrombie workers managed to kick him out, with the strength of his flip-flop-clad right foot (by the way, WHY do Abercrombie workers wear flip-flops? Seriously, I’m trying to buy clothes, I don’t wanna see your fucking toes).

As my co-worker friend tried to pick himself up (and shake off the dizzying “cologne haze”), he could hear an angry voice in the distance; he doesn’t remember the exact words, but it sounded like ”go back to Sears asshole!”

As for “super-nerdy dude”, I’m not sure how he managed to shop at Abercrombie; maybe he’s a hot-shot producer, and he offered every worker a guest-spot on “The Hills”?

I hate Abercrombie and Fitch…

3rd ”Hmmm”…

SO…have you ever noticed that female sports anchors on SportsCenter (or SportsLine, or SportsNet, or whatever the hell) are all hot and slutty these days?  I’m not sure if it’s a Canadian sports-thing, or a worldwide epidemic.  In any case, whenever I see some broad on a sports show, she’s always wearing a tie-up sweater or a low-cut “discotheque” shirt, whilst flipping her highlighted hair, and batting her glued-on eyelashes, as she tells me the latest on the MLB wild card race.

I’m not gonna lie, this kinda pisses me off. 

Back when I was 12-15 (and sorta figuring out if I wanted to be a boy or a girl), I would live for the nightly sports shows, so I could get all the latest on my beloved (but crappy) Leafs.  Every night, I’d find comfort in the TV-arms of my female-sportscasters.  I don’t mean that in a gay kind of sense, but the way they would sit there, in their frilly blouses (buttoned-up to the neck)…and large boxy blazers…with a minimal amount of eyeshadow…and a hint of nude lip gloss…it was like they were my “sports moms”, teaching me everything I needed to know!

And now, many years later, it’s like my “sports-moms” all got fired, forcing them to work in small-town strip joints, where “old lady night” is the hottest ticket (it’s either that or “tranny-nite”, you decide).

The worst part is, my “sports moms” got replaced with the “bitches and ‘ho’s showcase”,  night-in and night-out!

I only really noticed this a short while back, when I was out for a meal with some co-worker friends…There we sat at the restaurant, with a TV screen in the background, cued to some Canadian sports channel.  At one point they cut from the 24-hour Curling, so they could show us some friggin’ MLB highlights.  That’s when a sports-slut came on screen.  The second she appeared, the 5 dudes at my table started elbowing each other; they had lost their ability to say actual words, so instead they just grunted softly, with a horny glaze in their eye.  It was absolutely disgusting.

Once it was over, the dudes starting talking all at once, describing their favorite aspects of sports-slut; they even knew her by first and last name.  When I inquired further, I realized that my co-worker dudes know ALL the sports-sluts by first and last name, they even know which athletes the sports-sluts have slept with (I guess that’s what Canadian sports-sluts do).  One of the dudes let me in on a term that’s attached to sports-sluts, or any type of slut for that matter: a “town-bike” they’ll call her, ’cause almost everyone in town’s had a ride…hahaha.  As much as I don’t condone “sports-slut love”, I kinda like that term.  I have to say though, it’s a little too small-time for my life-goals.  Like if I was described that way, I’d wanna be a legend: “Hey look, there goes the city bus!”….yeah, that’d be cool.

But wait, I’m getting off track…

So yeah, the thing I hate most about sports-sluts, is that they’re moving in on other people’s territory, by trying to be more than just HOT.  Like why can’t a hot girl just be hot? Why does she have to know about sports TOO, and put all the sports-moms out of business?

I have a similar dis-taste for funny hot girls.  Anytime I hear about a new funny hot girl (whether a celebrity or a regular one), I feel like I’m gonna throw up. 

I’m not saying I’m a comedienne or anything, but humor’s all I got.  I mean seriously, do you think it’s easy having a hunchback, a lazy eye, and man-hands?  Humor is my LAST attempt to trick dudes into boinking me.  And BELIEVE ME, it ain’t easy, ’cause the only dudes who are willing to like you for your personality, are either blind, or in jail. 

And then these funny hot girls come along, and I’m like wtf?  It’s like those giant discount book stores, killing the charming book shoppes (watch “You’ve Got Mail”). 

So yeah, sports-sluts and funny hot girls; I hate them…

I’d like to keep on writing, ’cause I’m starting to get riled up.  Unfortunately, my over-eating ways are catching up with me, so I won’t last for too much longer. 

4th ”Hmmm”…

Speaking of over-eating, I went to a wedding yesterday.  It was a wedding rooted deep in my culture: a big-ass Indian one.  If you’re not familiar, it’s the kind with wicked food and avant-garde dance moves. 

So when the bride and groom cut the 10-tiered cake (complete with candied flowers and pink icing), my heart lept. 

I wanted some. 

And hey, not to get off topic, but what the hell does cutting a cake “hand-in-hand” with ONE knife have to do with getting married?  Call me bitter if you like, but it’s pretty lame.

ANY-HOO, once the bride and groom were finished with the cake, they wheeled it off out of sight.

That pissed me off, ’cause I was craving a giant slab.

Usually when they wheel away the cake, they bring it back after dinner, and hand out the pieces for dessert.

I waited, but it never happened.

Now I was SO pissed off.

Eventually, I succumbed to the available dessert: some “black-forest-cherry-filling” bullshit.  It might have been considered a cake to some, but I know the difference, so don’t even get me started.

As we were leaving the reception, I saw someone’s empty dessert plate; it was covered in pink frosting, just like the one on the wedding cake.  Then I discovered a SEPERATE dessert station, complete with an empty cart, where the wedding cake USED to be…

Dammit.

And in case you were wondering, NO, I did NOT lick the frosting off the stranger’s plate (but I wanted to).

Okay, so now that I’m utterly pissed off and wanting to throw up (for various reasons listed above, in addition to just over-eating), I’m gonna call it quits for this post.

Hopefully, I won’t be as cranky next time…or maybe I will be, and why the hell not? It’s MY friggin’ blog…right?

RIGHT.