my big mouth

I have a problem where I tell people exactly what I think of them. People I don't even know, or have just met are as easily susceptible as close loved ones or long term friends.

My mother has a favorite story that she tells about me. When I was very little, our next-door neighbor, Mrs. Stewart, would yell at my two older sisters and all of the neighborhood children whenever they would run through her yard. At one point, she had probably yelled at me as well, but I was too young to remember.

One day, when I was three, I was tooling around with my mother and grandmother in our backyard. (My grandparents were also our next-door neighbors, so Mrs. Stewart knew both my mother and grandmother.) I was happily picking raspberries when Mrs. Stewart walked into our yard to talk to them. I flipped my three-year-old lid and started screaming "get out of our yard! get out of our yard! GET OUT OF OUR YARD!"

To get your comeuppance hurts. To get it thrown at you by the complete honesty of a three year old has to sting something fierce.

My mother apologized and took me inside the house to "discipline me", which involved her laughing until she cried. This is probably where it all started. That was the crucial moment when I got the positive reinforcement from a parental figure that shaped who I am today.

I am a bigmouth who can't lie and will tell you exactly what I think of you, and some part of me, no matter how misguided, thinks that this sort of behavior will be rewarded. In a psychological/Transactional Analysis sense I am looking for "strokes" - be they positive or negative. I'm realizing this isn't the most handy tool to carry with me on my interpersonal toolbelt. It's sort of like spraying mace in somebody's face as they try to shake your hand.

Occasionally I will find my brethren, and we will become fast friends, like my friend Mike. One time, during the last "Targeted advertising" (re: junk mail) class of the quarter, an ex-boyfriend made a desparate last-ditch effort to get more class participation points by asking "What exactly is targeted advertising." to which Mike replied from clear across the room, "Haven't you been in class at all this quarter?" in an angry tone of voice that suggested he could have easily followed it up with "you f'ing moron." We were friends before this, but at this moment I knew we would be friends for life. However, it can cut both ways. For example, one time when I spit my gum out into a trash-can with an emphatic "Phoo!" instead of discretely wrapping it in something and quietly dropping it in, Mike laughed and said "Classy". Like all true addicts, we just don't know when to quit.

So the last two times this has been an issue were in public places

Situation 1: In the Dulles airport, a TSA representative informs us that we will have to move to another area to get into the transportation screening line. One guy can't get there fast enough, and starts walking past us really quickly, and then knocks over some luggage from people who are walking in the opposite direction. Then he steers his rolling luggage dangerously close to a baby stroller. He gets comments from several folks who he nearly runs over with his Samsonite, "Hey!" "Watch it!" "That was rude!"

As usual, I can't help myself.

"Hey fella, we're all going to the same spot, do you need to take up the entire walkway?"

"Why don't you mind your own business?"

Then I got testy.

"Well, Jesus, just how wide are you, sir?"

"F*ck you."

Situation 2

I am standing behind a couple at a rest-stop McDonalds on the PA turnpike. The poor teenager who has to fulfill orders near the holiday gives the man his coffee. "Goddamn!" the man says. "You didn't need to put that much sugar in my coffee! Get me a new one. My God!"

I swear I wasn't going to butt-in, but then the guy turns around to me and says "Gosh, what are you gonna do?" as if to say "I had no choice. Too much sugar in my coffee and I'm a real b*tch! This McDonald's clerk totally deserved it!" I would have perhaps stayed out of it, but the fact that this lowlife was looking for backup or the feeling that he was justified in accosting a stranger with profanity was too much.

"Do you think swearing at the clerk was appropriate?" I asked.

"What do you care?"

"I think you could have had the same result without having to swear at that young man. Have a good day sir."

"You don't hope I have a good day. You want me to burn in hell."

And he said it in such a creepy way. It was compounded by his sleazy John Waters style mustach, his wierd pedophile shirt (striped button up, yellowed with age, short sleeves, mock turtleneck underneath), and his beleaguered wife - who looked like life had handed her a crap sandwich. I wanted to point all of these things out to him, as if to say "Listen, glass house man. Stop treating people like crap - you need all the good karma you can get."

So I settled for "No, but I think you should treat people with more respect." and then walked away. I was trying to keep it classy in a bad situation.

I swear I'm gonna get shivved someday.

Bad Behavior

It has come to my attention that I have a magical rump. Yes, rump. I could have been cute and coy and Canadian and said "bum", but I'm more of a solid midwestern gal who has grown up with the ability to open doors stuck in the doorframe with a single bump with my rear, so "bum" just seems too adorable to use in this case.

Why magical you ask? Because people seem to think I will magically respond well if they make contact with it, as if I were a genie in a strange sort of fleshy, awesome bottle. Over the past few years, I have endured a lot of pinching, slapping, copping-a feel, standing too close in a crowded room, and general buffoonery involving the my rear.

It started around 6th grade. I was in a program for the gifted, and once a week we'd all get bussed to a local elementary school to learn about accelerated subjects and further alienate ourselves from our peers. While hanging out with Heather and Erica near the tetherball pole one day, two boys came up and said, "We're taking a poll about who has the biggest and best butt in the 6th grade." We tried to hide our rears, but we were out in the open, and there were two of them, which allowed them to employ some strategies that we couldn't counteract. They'd fake to the right and then the left and then split up, leaving us vulnerable with no safe direction to turn to. We weren't coordinated enough to make a triangle of security, and we were slow to react, being both halfway confused at the stupidity of their statement and half embarrassed because of it. After a few seconds of dodging and weaving, Brian and Ken pointed at me and said "You tied with Esther for biggest and best butt!" Esther, another student in the 6th grade, was an early developer who wore lots of eyeliner and tight jeans and easily outweighed me by about 20 lbs. Needless to say, being compared to this girl-woman left me really confused, as I certainly wasn't an early bloomer by any stretch of the imagination (Are you there god? I'm still waiting for my boobs, ahem). I guess I didn't notice that the developement had been happening someplace I rarely paid attention to, and now it was starting to draw the attention of others. This was long before J-Lo and Sir Mix-a-Lot had popularized the large posterier. It was still an era of "you can never be too thin or too rich" and I was neither, and my large posterier was just one more tick on the list of awkward shit I'd have to deal with while growing up.

My cheeks got their first pinch at a frat party that I went to in sixth grade,with my sister (another story for another time, so don't judge her too harshly for this), where a really drunk guy mistook me, braces and all, for a co-ed. Or he could have just been a pedophile. He said "How'm bout you make an ass out of yourself and get on the dancefloor wif' me?" I told the gentleman that I was 12. My sister swooped in and said "She's 12." He said "That doesn't mean she can't dance wi' me." It amused me to no end at the time, but now I can't help but hope he got alcohol poisoning and died that night.

The torture was just beginning, as I soon signed up for Industrial Arts in the 8th grade. It was just my luck that I got to share the class with nearly all of the school's juvenile delinquents, one of whom was rumored to already have his own custom made pool cue. This was before the dawn of Prozac and Adderall being commonly prescribed for adolescents. Add pubescent hormones to the mix, and you have a dangerous cocktail of shyness, bravado, and squirreliness . It was also unfortunate that this was the year that stirrup pants were in. Being acutely aware of my burgeoning rump, I countered the fashion movement by wearing a lot of long, booty-hiding sweaters. To no avail. I got pinched and groped on the every-other-day schedule. The teacher - Mr. Werline, a man who didn't believe females had a place learning how to employ motor skills or the kind of critical thinking one would use to solder or drill holes in metal, wasn't exactly the understanding kind of person that I wanted to confide in. I spent a lot of time calling home sick on odd days during that semester.

Flash forward to college: I am hugging my boyfriend outside of a restaurant, and a group of eight football playing-looking guys walk by. "I wouldn't let her go," says one fat-neck, "She's got a nice ass!". They all laugh while they walk away, and my 5'9" 145 lb boyfriend is powerless to really do or say anything about it. I wasn't really expecting him to, as these guys were so built and their chests were so developed that they didn't look like they could clap. Of course, this follows that fact that the same boyfriend took a covert picture of me bending over in my bathing suit at the beach the previous spring, which remained unbeknownst to me until he cheekily showed me a few weeks later. I was livid, but has wasn't giving up the picture, saying "It's awesome" and giggling like a little kid who got into the wine cabinet. He is married now. Does he still have that picture? Has his wife found it and did they have a fight about it? "Who is this?", she'd scream. "Just a friend from college", he'd reply, but when she asks "Fine, then you won't have a problem throwing out this picture, will you?", his downtrodden face will betray his fondness and nostalgia for the rump in the picture, and she will know that he is lying. They either divorce because of this, or she shoves the anger deep down inside of herself while thinking, "It's a huge, fat ass, anyway."

Seriously, I don't understand. It's an okay seat, but I don't think it warrants this kind of attention. It's not small, but not crazy huge. Plus, it's not like it should invite the same kind of attention that a large chest would get you- it's covered all of the time. I don't wear low cut jeans. I don't try to draw attention to it (except this blog). It's just there.

None of this really helped once I got to grad school either. Along with all of the "pretend sports" that you see investment bankers and rich-pricks playing on a regular basis (swinging the imaginary golf club or throwing the imaginary football to signify that they are busy and important and sporty), touching my caboose became a favorite excercise for some. From some guys - this was no surprise - they were scuzzy and drunk. My particular non-favorite was at the winter-formal dance, where "Jarrett" walked by with his date, "Rachael" a fellow classmate, and he managed to open palm slap me on one cheek in the middle of the dance floor without her noticing. I could have caused a scene, but when somebody has a dead soul - nothing will make them feel bad about 14 yr-old behavior. I just made sure to stay away from him after that episode. I also didn't feel to bad for Rachael - who would make out with anything anywhere, including the dishwasher at the local eatery whom she met while coming down from a 6 hour bender. If she ever found out about Jarrett's actions - I'm sure she'd move on in short order, or to a short-order cook.

Some advances were a total surprise - as they came from guys who otherwise seemed like nice, mannered men. I had, what I considered to be up until that time, a friend, who goosed me so hard that it felt like he wanted to make his fingernails touch while pinching my cheek. Naturally I screamed in some serious pain and gave him the pummeling of his life. Later on, he apologized and seemed to feel genuinely bad about it. He never tried it again - so we called it a truce. Then there are the guys seem nice but turn into creepy jerks. "Fahri" kept sneaking up on me and goosing me whenever I went out (it was a small town - it was hard to avoid the school crowd), and every time I yelled at him or hit him- "Fahri" would swear up and down that he didn't do it, it was somebody else. He was dating a fellow classmate as well. All of these episodes make me wonder how well we really know anyone at all. My lady lumps are apparently a divining rod for jerks.

I figured once I got out of school and away from the MBA-holes, that my derriere would get a long and well deserved reprieve from constant assualt....until last New Year's Eve, where a married friend hit my ass so hard in the middle of a party that I literally became airborn.

This time I fought back. I turned around and started pushing him, saying "What the hell was that? What was that? What are you doing?" In the end, he felt pretty bad, he was pretty drunk, and he said that I was free and clear to smack him in the face as hard as I wanted to, which I did. It made me feel a bit better, and was probably a better end to the night than having a nasty fight or leaving the party in tears. This time, at least I got to smack back.

Does anyone else have this issue? I can't be the only one, but I don't hear a lot about this from the friends that I've talked to. My rear needs some R&R. Any suggestions? It's enough to make me want to go to extreme protective measures.

"It is wayyyy to early to be that crazy."

I have been doing a lot of adventuring in nature lately with large groups of people. I have learned two important lessons from these outings.

1. I hate big groups of people, because in every group, a horribly inconsiderate person (usually drunk) lays in wait to douche all over most other folks' decent time. Coupled with the fact that I have low patience and little tolerance of buffoonery, I get filled with a hulk-like rage about these episodes pretty easily.

2. These people in turn, make me into an unhappy crab - thereby further ruining the group experience.

Adventure 1, River Tubing: Some friends invited me to their lake house for the weekend. Once there, we met up with other friends, along with plenty o' siblings and siblings' boyfriends and girlfriends. We decided to tube down the local river on Saturday. I am a little on-guard against these types of outings - as I sunburn pretty easily. Thankfully so do many of my friends - so we completely lubed ourselves up with SPF 70 before hitting the water and faithfully reapplied thereafter. The issue came when we hit portions of the river where the water just wasn't moving. In spite of the ice cold water - the sun turns your innertube into a special kind of torture device - where you need to splash water over every surface lest you singe your skin. Also, after applying copious amounts of sunscreen and sweating a lot, the rubber started rubbing off on us - leaving big rubbery black streaks that smelled like the kid in school with greasy hair and terrible body odor. There were only so many distractions before we were just like "Get us the hell out of here."

Those of us sober enough to care started paddling. Amazingly enough, the drunk people, who couldn't stand or move their limbs, had enough wits about them to attach to our rafts via a well placed foot or arm. 12 people attached to 2 people paddling pretty much equals 14 people sitting in one spot. Only after we managed to detach ourselves (and the cooler of beer) from the drunk people did they find the motivation to paddle their own asses down the river and reattach themselves to us (and stop paddling). Have you ever seen those fish with the little parasite things that attach themselves to the fish's mouth, but the fish can't get rid of them, because....well, no hands? It felt a lot like that. This trip was supposed to last 4 hours. After 6 hours, three of us had had seen enough dirty band-aids and people puking to last us a lifetime and started a non-stop paddle towards the take-out point. We figured that anybody who didn't make it back we could chalk up to survival of the fittest or divine judgement concerning those who can't hold their drink, so if they drowned or got sunstroke - so be it. We reached the shore in 15 minutes. The rest of the group took another hour to drift back. We wanted to race back home to help with the grilling, but we had to wait for the slowest part of the group and all ended up reaching home base at 9:15 - which put a big damper on the 4th of July cookout - especially for the folks who did not go tubing that day.

Adventure 2, White Water Rafting: Two of my good friends and I had agreed to join a whitewater rafting trip. We had previously tried to plan a trip earlier in the summer, but that didn't pan out. So when my friend's brother invited us on a white water rafting trip - we jumped at the chance. We got a few forwarded emails a few weeks ahead of time with directions and the instructions to show up at the rafting joint at 1:00 pm sharp. We calculated out the travel time and decided that we needed to leave the homebase before 10:30. We met at my place at 8:30 to go grab a leisurely brunch. We had a great brunch sitting at the outside patio at Murphy's, which was punctuated by a crazy person who felt the need to rant and sing his craziness at the world while we were enjoying our Eggs hollandaise. Then Mel finally broke the "we're ignoring him" rule and said "It is wayyy too early to be that crazy", which I am nominating for best quote of the week. We swung back to my place to change and then head out. One friend was kind of antsy to get there on time or early - so we left a little after 10 a.m.

We arrived at the place at 12:40 and then we waited for the rest of the group to show up, and waited, and waited. The woman (let's call her Suzie) who organized the trip didn't show up until 1:30, and then proceeded to drink in the parking lot while screaming "It's my birthday!!!!!! I'm 30!!!!!" We found out that the tour wasn't supposed to start until an hour later - but the time in the email was listed as such to prevent the truely truant amongst the group from showing up late. The start time proceeded to get pushed further and further back as the organizer and her group drank beers and threw a frisbee in the parking lot. I know we could have joined in the festivities, but we got up at 8:30, goshdamnit! We were tired, and we didn't want to throw a frisbee or trade love beads or sing kumbaya while hanging out in the parking lot with a bunch of hippies for a few hours - that was not what we signed up for. We were goal oriented and we wanted to white water raft. We finally lined up for the safety demonstration at 2:45.

During the safety demonstration, while the rest of us were trying to pay attention to how we should avoid falling out of the boat and dying, Suzie and her overly energetic friend proceeded to pose girlishly and dramatically on the demonstration boat - in a way that only looks acceptable (but annoying) for a child participating in a beauty pageant. Nobody really understood what was going on, particularly the people that were not a part of our group. People were looking around like "I don't get it. What's the joke? This is wierd." The best explanation I can think for this phenomenon is that some women pull stunts like this with the underlying thought (conscious or unconscious): "Everybody thinks I'm cute." It is this thought that absolves them, in their own minds, of all their crimes - that turns their every annoying, cloying, petulant, desparate action into an adorably eccentric show. I'm not a fan of hitting children but people like these would have benefitted a lot from a good childhood belting. Every time I think I would like to live the life of an artist - I am reminded that it would be filled with these people, and then I stab that dream until it's bled clean out and doesn't rear its ugly anymore.

We grabbed our gear and proceeded to board a school bus, where the fun continued. Drunk girl and friends proceeded to sit at the sound bearing focus at underneath one side of the elliptical ceiling of the bus and started screaming to each other over the 4 feet of space that sat betwixt them. My throbbin' temples were located directly under the other eliiptical focus. We were treated to shitty, screaming renditions of "My heart will go on." and then some wise-ass decided that they needed to sing a song "in-the-round", and they pillaged forth an unholy and unending version of "Row, row, row yer boat", which made most of us want to row it off a cliff. I am only glad we didn't have to suffer through "Boom-chicka-boom". My prayers for a grisly crash were not answered, and 15 minutes later we were at the drop-off point. Things after that got considerably better, as the sane people all took to one boat, but we were hopelessly tainted by the morning debacle. Driving home that night, we were exhausted and tired, and probably totally grumpy with each other. It was a race to get the car back home before we passed out, which could have been avoided had we gotten an extra 2.5 hours of sleep.

So the question becomes - should I just chill out or is my anger reasonable? I'm not the only one on these trips who gets uppity about this behavior, so I know that I am not alone. And why should the most inconsiderate part of the group dictate what the rest of the group will do or put up with? If I am being reasonable, is there any way to combat this without becoming the a-hole who is trying to "ruin everybody's good time, man". Is there a slick way to tell people to knock it off?

It's this kind of behavior that makes me wish I was partying with more Mormons.