Some people just don't know when to quit.

"Friends."

Have you ever had one of those friends that does things that don't really seem friend-like? I had one of those once, and it took me a really long time to realize that she wasn't my friend at all.

Yesterday, my friend told me about this "friend" she has. A group of them were out for lunch together, and Friend One's Bag of Cunty Dicks had gone along with them. That was the first time most of our other friends had met the Bag of Cunty Dicks (hereafter referred to as BOCD, because it looks funny and because I am lazy today), and they were not impressed. They said the BOCD was abrasive, self-absorbed and catty. They were literally texting me saying that the BOCD (who is a "girl") was pretty much the worst person ever. I paraphrase, of course, but who the fuck are you to tell me what to say on my blog? That's what I thought. :)

Anyway, when they were leaving to pay the bill, the BOCD decided to be really "funny" and "witty" and "outrageously hilarious" by reenacting a scene that involved Friend One. In a very bitchy fashion, in front of their waiter. Friend One was completely mortified and left a message on my answering machine where she talked about how she wanted to kill the BOCD.

I, of course, was furious upon hearing about this. I dislike the girl for many reasons (despite the fact that I've not met her). I think she's bitchy, disingenuous, jealous, rude and sadly lacking in any concept of what a proper friendship is.

My friends and I make fun of each other a lot. For me, the way I grew up has a lot to do with that. My dad shows affection in strange ways, and he's more likely to insult people he cares about than he is to actually admit he cares about them. I happened to pick up this (un?)fortunate trait from him. So I know that sometimes it's hilarious to poke fun at people. But not about something that personal, not in front of a stranger and not in front of people that you just fucking met.

In short, I want Friend One to stop being friends with the BOCD, because the BOCD is not a real friend. She sounds (to me, anyway, and of course my judgement isn't binding or always correct... it almost always is, though. I can't help being awesome) like a convenience friend. A really disingenuous, hateful convenience friend.

And I fucking hate those.

So: I sentence the Bag of Cunty Dicks to death by us beating the shit out of her. I feel that this judgement is fair and impartial, given that we unanimously do not like her. An alternate decision would be slapping her until her neck broke, but we do not have the time for this.

Why can't people use words properly?

GOD this pisses me off. We were just grocery shopping, and this woman basically tried to blow past my family and I and ended up smashing into a fruit cart trying to get around. It was basically this really tiny space, I'll draw a shitty paint thing to show.


Obviously this is an accurate drawing of what she looked like.

I told you it was shitty. Okay. So "us" is where we were standing at first. And then we moved to where the 1 was when she was trying to get past, so she could try and get through that outrageously narrow place.. She attempted to get by, but hit the produce guy's cart at 2. She pushed past all embarrassed, and my mom was just looking at her in disbelief, I think because the woman was really rude. So my mom turned to me and muttered, "ex-fucking-cuse you" and I laughed, because it's so typically my mom. And the lady spins around and this happens:

Crazy bitch: Excuse me, I have a very bad migraine, it's rude to laugh.
Me: Right. I wasn't laughing at you.
CB: Oh you are so ignorant, don't even -
Dad: I laughed at you.
CB: (with a bit of a startled look at my dad before regaining some "composure") Sure. All of you are so ignorant -
Sister: No, you know what's ignorant? Assuming that people are always talking about you.
CB: *stunned silence before walking away.*

Ignorant? Seriously? I literally can't believe how many people use this word incorrectly. For the most part, being called "ignorant" isn't that much of an insult - it means you simply lack the knowledge/whatever in the given situation. I don't know why people think that they have to go for ignorant, when "rude" would be perfectly sufficient. Although I really wasn't laughing at her, so I suppose I wasn't being rude. Although I was laughing at a rude comment my mom made, so...

Anyway, we saw her again as we were walking around the store, and she hid her face and Erin was like, "Hey, look!" so I turned to her and said, "Shh, there's only so many times a person can be belligerent in one day." And then the lady looked up at me and was totally mortified, and I just ignored her and kept going.

And then I got thinking about how annoyed I get at people, because so many people are incapable of using certain words properly. "Ignorant" is one of them, but I've also noticed that a lot of people don't use "redundant" properly either. Erin has this guy who always insists that the self check outs at her work are redundant because they ask him if he wants any bags after he's already started ringing his stuff through, and she always says that that's not really redundant, and he always replies with, "Do you actually know what redundant means?"

Which brings me to the second part of my rant: I hate how people assume that I'm uneducated based on my shitty, minimum wage job. In Victoria, there was this woman that came through my till and started lecturing me about the importance of getting out of my shitty job and getting into school. I kept waiting for a break in her steady flow of condescending crap to tell her that I was actually in university. When she finally stopped to take a breath, I said that I was in my second year of university and that I intended to go to graduate school and possibly on after that to get my doctorate. And she was like, "Well, isn't that surprising, I bet you're the only one that works here that sees any value in education." And I was really shocked that she would say something like that, so I kind of just stared at her before saying, "Actually, most of the people who work on till are students at some sort of post-secondary institution. What university did you go to?" She stared at me for a while and then grabbed her things and left, and I was like RAGE.

I mean, seriously? I only work this shitty job because I don't have a degree yet. I work this shitty job to pay my rent and to feed myself, I don't work there because I want to make a career out of working there. I've never had any interest in staying on for any length of time at any of the high school-type jobs that I've had once I graduate. VV can lick my balls, any of the other places that I've worked can bite me, because I don't intend on working there for my whole life. I have much larger goals for myself than that.

That being said, I do recognize the necessity of people working these shitty jobs. I don't judge anyone's choices either way, I just don't want that for myself. I hate how people just assume that you can't work at a shitty place and want to have any type of respectable future.

And really... some of the people that I've worked with have been incredibly smart. They may not have degrees to prove it, but being scholarly isn't the only way to be considered intelligent. There are tons of people in my classes that say the most ridiculously stupid things, and I often find myself wondering how anyone that thick could possibly get into one of the best universities in the country. There was a girl in one of my third year history classes (British history, in fact) who didn't know who was leading Britain during WWII.

I contemplated shooting her, but decided against it. There was another guy, in one of my Soviet history courses, who thought that Lenin was leading the USSR during WWII. And I'm sorry to anyone that's thinking, "I might not have known that!" and thinking that I'm being a judgemental bitch, but part of studying history is knowing stuff like that. And that's easy stuff to remember in comparison to minute details in legislation and the like. Seriously? Not knowing who led Britain in WWII when you're in a third year British history course is fucking outrageous. Winston Churchill is (arguably) the most famous Prime Minister of the twentieth century (I would say that only Thatcher could potentially push him out, but she's well-known for being a crazy bitch, whereas Churchill is known for being a witty, awesome badass) and you don't know that he was leading the UK in WWII? And I'm sorry, some people may not know that he died 21st January, 1924 (clearly I love Soviet history, I still do things on his death day every year), but Lenin was so obviously dead by the second world war. How else would Stalin's Five Year Plans have happened...? And those are kind of a huge fucking deal when you're studying Soviet history.

In short, I hate everyone.

God this infuriates me.

So I got a call back from... a well-known bookstore chain today.


Pictured: kitty celebrates my job interview.

Anyway, I had one of those phone interviews (god this place has a ton of stuff to go through, I had to take some sort of weird personality test too) with one of the store managers. She was quite nice, she was asking me lots of questions about my previous jobs and the like. And then she asked what types of books I like to read, so I said translated Russian novels and biographies mainly (... shut up) but that I'm working my way through some Spanish novels (well, they're in Spanish, but by Mexican authors mainly, let me continue so you'll understand this, because I told her that they're written by Mexican authors) now. And she was a bit quiet at first, I could tell she was thinking that I was kinda weird, and then she said, "We have a lovely Puerto Rican lady that works here!" I didn't say anything at first, and then she was like, "I love Spanish people!" And I was like "... Yes, they're quite lovely..." while I debated correcting her. Obviously I decided against it, but... Puerto Rican does not mean Mexican does not mean Spanish. They are not the same.

It reminded me of this article I read in the Globe and Mail, about a... windsurfing accident that a Canadian athlete helped out in. He went looking for the guy. Let me set something up first: they were in Mexico.

Through the article, the writer kept calling the missing man's friend Spanish, and then at the end, he had a quote from the Canadian calling the guy Mexican. I had already figured (from the beginning of the article) that the other men were Mexican, but I decided to hope against hope that they really were Spanish. They were not. I wrote a letter to the writer and said that Spanish and Mexican are not the same thing, just like Canadian and American are not the same thing, just like British and Australian are not the same thing. They may speak the same language (with regional differences, of course), but they're not the same. He replied and apologized if he offended me, so that was nice, but still.

And the more I get into studying Spanish and hispanic cultures and such, the more I notice that we are incredibly guilty of doing this all the time, particularly in North America. And it really pisses me off.

I would write more, but my eyes are bleeding. Perhaps later.

ARGH.

I wonder if there will ever be a day when I'm not filled with rage about something.

Right now, it's because I simply do not know where I am going to find a job this summer. After my parents insisted that I return home for one last summer (I don't even know why - apparently my dad didn't treat me being home last summer like it was my last summer ever, therefore it couldn't be, because something will be different about my last summer here... I don't know?), I was hoping to just go to the same place that I worked at last summer, that helped arrange a transfer for me when I moved to Victoria.

And this would have been well and good if Victoria store manager wasn't (essentially) a giant bag of dicks.



That's actually the first thing that came up when I googled "bag of dicks", and it has an entire website devoted to it, which seems to be a single page. It appears to be solely that picture, but that was interesting, wasn't it?

ANYWAY, I went by this former place of employ today (after I had resubmitted an application over a week ago) and talked to the hiring manager, who told me that she didn't think she could rehire me because my former store manager didn't arrange a transfer for me. She informed me that I could have phoned ahead and started the process myself, to which I replied that I do not have long-distance on my cellphone plan and have no landline to use and that I couldn't use a phone at work, since all of them but the ones in the offices don't allow long-distance dialing. She said I could have asked a supervisor to call for me, which I told her I had done. I also told her that I was told that when this supervisor called, she could not get a hold of the hiring manager for the store here.

Which I thought was pretty fucking suspicious, but I didn't think there would be such a big kerfuffle about it. I mean, I've worked at this place for pretty much a year (except when bag of dicks made me quit at Christmas for having the GALL to request time off) and she was babbling about probation periods. I realize that I'm only home until August at the very latest, but still - that's three goddamn solid months of employment that they can extract out of me before I go home.

But apparently that's not good enough. It looks like I may be heading back to the island faster than expected, since I'd have an easier time finding SOME type of job there while all those pesky university students were gone for the summer.



This would make me feel much better.

This is actually a serious rant.

Even though I know that almost nobody reads my blog (it's okay. I've come to terms with it and prefer to use it as a venting platform for all my rage), this really is a serious topic for me.

And I know that it's a pretty taboo topic, which I find depressing, but I'm going to rant about it anyway, because... well, since when do I care about things being omfg so inappropriate?

I'm pro-choice. Yes, I know that you probably guessed that if you read my rant against internet chauvinism here. And I don't care that people commented or messaged me on my Facebook or talked to me on MSN saying that I'm negative. I mean, really? Look at the top bar of this page. Do you see how the address for this blog is please-stop-breathing? Do you expect me to talk about rainbows and shitting unicorns because of how goddamn happy I am all the time? I started this blog so I could rant about all the things that make me really angry, not so I could present balanced arguments that are unclouded by emotion. I'm perfectly capable of doing that too, but why would I? The comments people make about this blog are faux inspirational quotes that sound like a piss-poor attempt at sounding like some kind of Buddhist. How am I supposed to have any kind of intellectual debate with people who try to hang nifty one-liners on my entries so they don't have to admit that, beneath all the rage, I actually have a point? Particularly about my internet chauvinism rant. I don't think that anybody who considers themselves an "intelligent" human being can come up with arguments for why there's nothing wrong with that garbage that tries to mask itself as "comedy".

Now that that rant is over, don't bother commenting on my blog if you're going to hang those lame one-liners on my entries. You know why? Honestly, it's because I don't particularly care about what anyone thinks about this blog. I'm sure that if more people read it, I would, but for now, it's basically like a less lame livejournal for me to have.

On to the rant of the day: It was started off by this article. I don't even know where to begin, but I'll just jump right into this.

In October, members of Harvard Right to Life (HRL) put up about 400 posters in student housing entitled "Women Deserve Better," one of which featuring a woman identified as "Candice." "I was raped and therefore 'justified' in my abortion, but it didn't change a thing," she said. "I suffered because I was led to believe that taking my child's life was okay. It was not, and I have been living with that for five years." The poster went on to give contact info for a local crisis pregnancy center, reminding readers that "there is help for unplanned pregnancies."

Women don't feel guilt about getting an abortion because they've been told abortions are okay, they feel guilt about getting an abortion because they've been told that abortion is wrong. I don't give a fuck that Harvard is located in one of the less "religious" states (Massachusetts). The source I'm using (it's a Gallup poll) states that 48% of people in Massachusetts say that religion is an important part of their daily lives. I mean, really? That's still nearly half the population that says that religion is important in their daily lives. 48% of the people are religious enough that their religion is present in their every day life in some tangible way. This statistic is not saying that 48% of the population in Massachusetts believes in God. Do you see the problem there? They're trying to play it off like Massachusetts is less religious, when really, it's just that slightly less than half the population there is so religious that their day is pretty filled with things related to religion.

There's no question that discussing a topic like rape calls for great sensitivity. But it's doubtful that the reason for the intense backlash was that victims would be traumatized by the very mention of rape: There's no controversy when sexual-assault centers feature victims in their ads. The real reason for the anger was probably expressed by a Harvard Crimson student columnist, who fumed: "What bothers me is that HRL has taken a feminist idea, that women deserve better, and co-opted it to deny women rights." There you have it: If you're not for "abortion rights," you don't care about women. It's yet another case of the left claiming a sort of moral monopoly.

I realize that looking at such a biased article is bound to make anyone enraged, but seriously? The sanctimonious moral right in America is so infuriating to me. I don't know if it's because I'm not American, but I find that constant little shit-talking that they need to put at the end of everything (and the left is certainly guilty of this too) really irritating. Anyway. The student columnist is absolutely right. I wouldn't necessarily call the idea that women deserve better a "feminist" idea (who doesn't think that everyone should be treated equally, regardless of gender, race, religion or whatever else?), but the whole fight for equality is about the fact that nobody has the right to tell another person what they can or cannot do in their own lives, with their own bodies. The student columnist didn't mention abortion at all. They simply said that refusing a woman's right to choose what is best for her, regardless of whatever moral judgements people want to pile upon her, by putting up signs talking about how guilty "Candace" felt about her abortion is, for lack of a better way of putting it, stupid, ignorant, biased nonsense designed to make women feel badly about the choices they make that go against what men think is best for them.

It's a shame, if not a surprise, that the issue HRL tried to raise largely got lost in the process. Their point, after all, is that abortion is not only morally wrong, but it also harms the women it's allegedly going to help. It's a devil's bargain: It promises relief from a seemingly unbearable burden in return for sin, but it ends up bringing burdens that are truly unbearable.

There's so much wrong with this that I don't even know where to start. First of all, the author of this "article" is a man. How does he know about how "unbearable" the burden of abortion is? How could he possibly know? How could he possibly understand what making the decision between aborting and keeping a fetus is like? He will never be faced with that decision. I don't care if his girlfriend or wife is considering abortion and he feels that he understands it when that happens, because he doesn't. He doesn't understand what being a woman is like, just like a woman doesn't understand what being a man is like. He doesn't understand what carrying a child around for nine months does to women, the joys and the serious health complications that it can bring about, the disgust that rape victims would feel about how their child was conceived - he cannot and will never understand any of this. Yet because he's a man, he feels that he has the right to sit up there on his lofty perch and judge the decision of a woman based on the fact that there are some people who feel guilty about abortions.

I mean, seriously? Was this supposed to be an earth-shattering revelation? How could there be women out there who DON'T feel guilty about getting an abortion, given that the vast majority of what we see on television essentially says that anyone who gets an abortion is basically the worst person alive. Don't believe me? Think about it. How many pro-life advertisements do you see on television? Quite a few, right? Even in Canada, we see quite a few (particularly because most of the television we receive is on American channels). Now tell me, how many pro-choice advertisements do you see on television? How many? Honestly? Because you know that pro-choicers would be having a shitfit if something that "offensive" was allowed on television.

To summarize: Men have no right to pretend to be morally superior to women and to sit around and judge the choices that women may make. They don't have the right to tell me what to do with my body anymore than I have the right to tell them what to do with theirs.

Why is it okay for me to walk past a hospital on days that pro-life people are protesting and to be essentially harassed (and I'm not fucking kidding on this one) by a man (because it is nearly ALWAYS a man) that's trying to make me say that I think people who get abortions are going to hell? Why can I not turn to that man and tell him that he shouldn't be having sex with his wife, because they're not having any children and therefore, their sex is pointless, because having sex for pleasure alone is supposed to be some kind of sin? Why is it not okay for me to tell him that he shouldn't masturbate, because kittens will die, because that's what I believe? Why can I not tell him that he should be castrated, because he's clearly too stupid to be adding his genes to the collective pool?

Okay. In more realistic situation/response examples, when a man tells me that I shouldn't get an abortion because it's a sin, why can I not ask him why he's not harassing the man who impregnated me? If I've been raped, why can't I ask him why he cares so much about a fetus when I've, you know, been RAPED?* Why do the people outside the hospital spend so much time focusing on a fetus that they never even consider the reasons that a woman might get an abortion and the events and circumstances that may lead her to get one?

I know I haven't sworn as much in this post as I usually do, but this is actually how I get when I'm very angry. I hit the point where all that comes out of my mouth is "fucking fucktard fucking fuck" and then I get past that point, to a point where I'm literally still on the outside, but hitting people with scooters across the face inside.

* I have not actually been raped. I know someone who has been, and part of what disturbed me the most about the way people treated her after was that they were more focused on her fetus than on her own well-being. I thought it was really sick.

My body, my choice. I have the mental capacity to make decisions for myself, large and small, without the sanctimonious judgements that people could place on me. It's my life and I'm living it, not anyone else. People need to spend less time being so concerned with what other people are doing and be more concerned about their own mistakes in their own lives.