February 25, 2005.

comments in this entry about gave me a stroke yesterday. And yet, I read every damn one of them because I’m a sucker for stories that piss me off. Heh.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ So I went to the doctor’s office on Wednesday, because the skin on my face is itchy and blotchy and there are rough bumps – not all the time, but a lot of the time – and I’ve been meaning to ask the doctor if she thought I had rosacea for ages now, and finally I sucked it up and made the appointment. I was sitting in the waiting room, and it was pretty packed, because this is a very busy doctor’s office. Sitting behind me and over a few seats was a woman who didn’t seem to know that unless you want everyone in the area to listen to your conversation, you should use your Indoor Voice. Instead, Phone Woman was talking at full volume, and I did my best not to listen, and instead concentrate on my book, but she was so loud that finally I just had to put my book down, stare at a wall, and just listen to the conversation. Phone Woman, it appears, works with a woman named Brenda. Brenda is a horrible, horrible woman. She’s trying to hold Phone Woman back, she’s trying to mess with her career, she is INTIMIDATED by Phone Woman, who is a strong, black woman and won’t take any guff from anyone. Phone Woman doesn’t know why Brenda’s gotta be like that. Obviously Brenda is threatened by Phone Woman and is just lashing out. Brenda doesn’t even know how to say a simple “thank you.” Why, when Doug did her that big favor a little while back, Brenda couldn’t even be bothered to utter the words “Thank” and “you”. Instead, she said “I don’t need your charity.” All Doug wanted was a thank you, a little show of appreciation, and Brenda wouldn’t give him that. “Thank you,” said Phone Woman. “That’s all she had to say! A simple ‘thank you’ would have made Doug as happy as a sissy with a dick in his mouth!” My jaw dropped, and I wasn’t the only one – an older woman sitting across from me gave me a “do you believe this?” look, and we shook our heads at each other. Someone needs to teach Phone Woman how to use her Indoor Voice, because I’m 99% certain that the woman sitting two seats down from Phone Woman, the one with two kids under five, had to answer the question “What’s a dick?”, because those kids were listening to every word coming out of Phone Woman’s mouth. I wasn’t around to hear the question, though, ’cause it was my turn to see the doctor. She prescribed a cream for me to use on my face. Hopefully the blotchiness will go away; I’m keeping my fingers crossed! ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Did I mention that my parents are in Hawaii again? My father’s there temporarily for work, and my mother decided to go with him again. Obviously, the spud and I won’t be going to Hawaii again, but I had a dream last night that I we were in Hawaii during Spring Break, and it was beautiful and warm. See, this is how my memory works – I tend to remember how beautiful and warm Hawaii is, rather than remembering how miserable I was, with the head-to-toe rash and the noise from the street construction and how freakin’ HOT I was. I remember the good stuff, and I get the yearning to go again. I’m not going, but I kind of wish I was, you know? I told Fred the other night that someday we should go to Hawaii and drive out of the city to the North Shore, and hang out all day at the practically-deserted beaches. Which is what we should have done last summer, really. But then I remembered how it’s a matter of 12 hours on a plane, and how much it drives me crazy to sit in one place for that long, and how I wanted to run screaming up and down the aisles of the plane, because I was thisclose to losing it, and we were still 3 hours from Hawaii, and Fred reminded me that it’ll only take a few hours to get to the Bahamas (which is where we’re going for our 10th anniversary), which is pretty, too. Just give me the ocean and a little patch of beach, and I’ll be happy, you know? But Hawaii sure is pretty… ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ At the beginning of February, I decided to try to read a book a day every day of February. It’s going pretty well – see my reading list here – and I’m pretty sure I’ll make my goal of 28 books in 28 days, but I don’t think I’m going to do the book-a-day thing again anytime soon. See, I like reading. I love books, and I like hanging out on the couch and reading, reading for a few hours before bed, for half an hour or so in the morning after I’ve taken my shower. But trying to cram in a book a day this month has made me cranky and impatient. I had a long run of really good books, but the books I’ve read in the past few days have had me muttering “Yeah, okay, GET ON WITH IT, quit your yammering about what the room looks like, and GIVE ME SOME ACTION.” I don’t want to be cranky and irritable – I love books! So like I said, I’m going to finish out the month (and cheat by reading the shortest books on my bookcase), but next year when I say “I’m going to read a book a day for the entire month of (whatever)”, remind me that I don’t really want to do that, wouldya? ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ I hate it when people hotlink, OH how I hate it. It’s another thing that makes me cranky and irritable, when I find that someone’s direct linking an image, and therefore they’re stealing bandwidth from me. Hey, my husband works hard so I can have my own domain. Why should I provide bandwidth for some cheeseball? Fucking bandwidth thieves. Hey, you know what would be kind of embarrassing? If you were so, so, so very cool. And you joined some badass ‘burb, like – just for example – the Go Fuck Yourself ‘burb. Or even if you didn’t join the ‘burb, you just saw an image you really liked. I don’t know. Maybe one like this: Only because you’re so, so, so cool, and also a badass, why would you bother saving the image to your own domain, or using one of the free image places, like tinypic? You’re so, so, so cool, and such a badass, that you have better things to do with your life. And that person who owns the site you’re stealing bandwidth from, she’ll never notice. And even if she did? She’d be impressed. Because you? So cool. So badass. She’d certainly never move images around and rename them so that instead of seeing the above image on your site you’d, instead, see this one: “Robyn,” you are whining. “This is unfair. Not everyone knows that hotlinking is bad! Not everyone knows that they shouldn’t steal bandwidth! You’re mean! I don’t like you! You suck!” To which I say only: Ignorance is not an excuse. And it sucks to be you. ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Love to eat them mousies . . . Mousies what I love to eat! Bite they little heads off, Nibble on they tiny feet! ]]>