Things I Do Not Understand, Volume 2

Once again, I find myself bewildered by certain things, so I thought I’d share them with you.

Aggressive Holiday Shoppers.  What the hell was I thinking?  I went to the mall on the second-to-last payday before Christmas.  I suppose I should not have been surprised by the asshole who cut me off in the parking garage and then slammed on his brakes and flipped me off for having the audacity to jam on my brakes to avoid hitting him as he ran through a stop sign without looking.  Oh, that’s right, I jammed on my horn, too.  Because it’s Effing Christmas and I was trying to get into the Christmas Spirit.  I could have gotten over it, because I love my fellow man and this is the season for that and all, but the crowds (and there were crowds) acted as though I had personally pissed on their mistletoe.  Ignoring for the moment how big my bladder would have to be to have done such a thing to the thousands of people thronging to the trendier of the two malls in Mission Valley, how ironic is it that people will slash at each other like velociraptors over a fresh kill in order to get their prizes home a week and a half before the Big Day?  Since everyone seems to hate their families, I have to wonder why they bother.  Because you just know that Penelope Pertnipple is going to jam a brightly-wrapped gift box into Uncle Lecher’s hands and snarl, “I know you don’t smoke, but I thought you’d look so distinguished with this Meerschaum pipe.  They said you shouldn’t actually touch it, so I got the gloves with it.  Where are the gloves?  GOD DAMNIT, THEY DIDN”T GIVE ME THE GLOVES!  Oh, well, I hope you enjoy it.”  Quick, someone grab their new digital camera and take a picture.

People making a living at writing badly.  Whatever happened to the cigar-chomping editors who used to make life hell for the reporters and copy writers?  Consider this story from Reuters (a well-respected news agency) about the racial violence in Sydney.  It says, “racial violence first flared last Sunday” in one paragraph, then a few paragraphs later, says, “Racist text messages and emails have been circulating calling for violence this Sunday – the one week anniversary of the unrest…” I’m sorry, what?  Apparently, Reuters is now hiring junior high school girls to write for them.

When the media drops all pretense.  Another story in the news this week was about the FBI questioning a fourteen year old boy in California who had scrawled PLO slogans on his notebook.  The OfficialWire news desk wrote that “the entire experience left the student badly shaken, and he has since been hesitant about expressing his political views in any context.”  The article does not elaborate on why I should care that a fourteen year old boy is hesitant to express his political views.  I was fourteen once, and I was hesitant to express my political views, then, too.  Not because the FBI asked me to step out of class and answer a few questions, but because I was fourteen!  I was also hesitant to ask Debbie Dosh to the Halloween Dance, but no one gave a fart in a windstorm about that.

The instructions printed on my socks. Yes, you read that right.  No, I am not making it up.  Yesterday morning, while putting on a brand-new pair of socks, I noticed that next to my big toe, there was a little mark in yellow ink that looked like this: 7.  I wondered what this mark could be for…some sort of indication of where my foot ought to end and my toe begin, perhaps?  To keep myself busy while I pondered this question, I donned my other sock.  In a similar location, the other sock was marked with this symbol: R.  The “R” was, of course, upside down from my vantage point, but its presence provided the necessary understanding to solve the riddle of the hieroglyph on my other sock, which was not a “7”, but an “L”.  I wonder, am I paying more for socks that come with the instructions printed on them?  Did the sock company lose a lawsuit by some poor, tortured soul who spent a day with his socks on the wrong feet?  Is there anyone out there dumb enough to care which sock goes on which foot, but smart enough to read the instructions upside down?