27 posts tagged “misanthropy”

FACT:  Tonight begins Rolling Thunder weekend.

FACT:  The weather is supposed to be fair over the next few days, and I have been looking forward to opening my windows to air out my dingy hovel.

FACT:  Those windows and my hovel are situated approximately one hundred and fifty feet from US Route 1 (Northbound) - the erstwhile number one (natch) north-south thoroughfare in the nation.

FACT:  My unscientific research shows that roughly eighty-five percent of all Harley Davidson owners reside in the southern United States.

FACT:  Harleys are loud.

FACT:  Many of those loud-ass Harleys coming from the south for Rolling Thunder weekend will make use of US Route 1 (Northbound), which passes one hundred and fifty feet from the open windows of my dingy hovel.

FACT:  After another long week, I have made exactly zero plans for tomorrow in the hopes of a full day of peaceful relaxation at home.

FACT:  Those loud-ass Harleys traveling north approximately one hundred fifty feet from my open windows will disrupt my peaceful relaxation.

FACT:  I hate Rolling Thunder weekend.

I got rid of my vehicle nearly five and a half years ago.  The day before Thanksgiving 2002, the man from the second charity I called showed up in a flatbed to haul her away.  (The first charity wouldn't take her off my hands because she was a piece of junk.)  It was a bittersweet day.  I was skeptical of moving beyond the highly suburban notion of auto ownership as a necessity of life.  But then, only a few months prior I had gone to court to contest a parking ticket and subsequent tow that occurred because it'd been months since I'd had an occasion to move her.

Since that time, I have come to relish the freedom that not owning an automobile affords, and it's increasingly unlikely that I will be re-joining the ranks of vehicle ownership.  Yes, my commute sucks ass and yes, sometimes public transit really pisses me off, but it still would take longer if I drove.  And what's more, I'd be even less my normal cheerful self once I arrived.  Needless to say, very few things frustrate me more than driving.

I have to drive several times a week now, and thanks to Zipcar I am able to be where I need to be.  But I don't like it.  It has come to my attention that I am an aggressive driver, which I guess I should have known already from my disdain for all those other assholes on the road who don't know how to drive.  A recent study confirms my hypothesis that DC drivers are among the worst in the nation.  They're in the bottom five, actually.  This is most certainly not news.

Also not news is that Minneapolis drivers are among our nation's best.  Of course they are.  We all know damn well that nothing of any importance happens in Minnesota, so why should anybody be in a hurry to get where they are going?  I'd approach my day at a more leisurely pace, too, if the most pressing item on my agenda was the tractor pull or making snow angels.

You know what else I hate?  Parades.  Parades suck ass.

Last month, we attended a solo acoustic concert of Old 97's frontman Rhett Miller.  It was a loose show; he was performing just because.  And so late in the set he debuted a song he claimed never before to have performed live.  It was a political song - a protest song, addressed to a "Rumsfeldian" character - written at the behest of a friend who had just completed a book based on his experience in Iraq.  It kinda sucked.

To be fair, Rhett said at the outset that when approached by his friend he was skeptical.  As he put it, he - Rhett - writes "songs about girls."  And how.  For a while there, he wrote some of the best - and by "the best" we mean great songs about how girls can fuck you up and guys will take it and come back for more.  Because, well... they're girls.  [See: "If My Heart Was A Car," "Big Brown Eyes," "Wish The Worst," "Come Around," "Doreen." -Ed.]  But lately, since he got married to a model, he's been writing saccharine crap about marriage proposals that inspires arguments.

The 97's have a new record coming out this spring, and we're hoping for the sake of the songs that Rhett and Erica have been arguing lately.  Anyway, here's a timely older Murray number.  Sorry about the shaky-cam.  Just pretend you're watching "Cloverfield."

I take back everything I have ever said about most people from the fly-over states being better off on one of the coasts.  I was wrong.  I nearly committed a murder this morning.  A young couple from Michigan or Illinois or Wisconsin who were obviously in town for a seminar or something insisted on disrupting the blissful tomb-like atmosphere on the Metro with their vapid conversation.  They were projecting as if they were in a goddamn Broadway play.  The worst wasn't their volume, though, but their sheer inanity.  My favorite - if that's the right word, which it isn't exactly - was this particular bon mot:

HER -- So I was at my computer.  Knee-deep in, like, my fiftieth spreadsheet of the day.  How did people work before computers?

Ugh.  Kill me.  Or better yet, kill her.  The coasts are generally a better place to live, but not for fucking retards who don't know how to behave in a civilized society.  They can stay in the fly-overs.  We don't want them.

One of you writer-types out there needs to pen a much-beloved classic about a miserly curmudgeon who learns over the course of a single night the true meaning of the New Year.  'Cause truth be told, I'm not too crazy about this one either.  God bless us, every one.

One would think a juvenile pizza party and an awkward gift exchange would suffice for the forced holiday cheer, but no.  There's still the matter of the official office party, just over an hour from now.  But despite the unwelcome imposition on my weekend of an all-but-mandatory work function, this is actually the least unctuous of the three.  Things could certainly be worse.  For starters, as of last year we moved the gathering to the Post-Ironic Hipster bowling alley downtown.  It's not a convenient as, say, three blocks from my house, but it's Metro accessible and a whole lot closer than hauling my ass up to Bethesda.  And for all my complaining, my company is quite generous.  I'll be cabbing home on their dime, and - as in years past - if we choose to continue, er, celebrating.... at another venue after the official party ends, our tab will likely be a reimbursable expense as well.  Most importantly, I genuinely don't hate most of my co-workers, which wasn't always the case.

The last place I worked threw tremendously awful holiday parties.  I recall like it happened yesterday the first year I was there.  The office manager came to my desk in October, claiming to have a great idea for that year's festivities.  "First we'll all go out to a nice restaurant, and after we will have a charter bus take us on a nighttime tour of the monuments!"  She seemed genuinely surprised when I was slightly less than enthused.  I believe my exact words were: "That's a terrible idea."  Yeah, I have a way with people.

Needless to say my input was not valued.  Dinner was okay, I guess, except for the company and that the nice restaurant in question was in Georgetown which I generally try to avoid because that's about the only part of the city where the Late Night Shots crowd isn't afraid to go.  Not to mention that it's one of the more annoying neighborhoods to which to travel for us car-less urbanites.  As for the ill-conceived bus tour, it was worse even than I had imagined.  Aside from being a remarkably stupid activity for a group of people who actually live in and around Washington, buses are not exactly the most comfortable mode of transport and are even less so when one is wearing a suit.  Drinks were served out of a cooler, but the whole process was so cumbersome that nobody bothered.  And most often we were just sitting idle in traffic, which is nobody's idea of a good time.  The most remarkable thing is that they did the same thing the very next year!  I had already put in my notice by then (and had checked out mentally months before), so I just went to dinner.  There was no way in hell I was getting on another goddamn bus.

What we should have done is taken the DC Trolley, because that thing is totally rad.  I rode the trolley for the first time a couple of summers ago when Vrabel was in town to meet up with a distant cousin from Oregon (or maybe Washington state, I forget) who had never been here before - a circumstance when doing the touristy stuff is, you know, appropriate.  We were at a loss late in the afternoon for what next to do before meeting up with the Mehaffeys for dinner.  We decided to let the trolley decide our fate.  It dropped us off at Arlington National Cemetery, but the real fun was in the journey.  I leaned out the window.  "Ding, ding!" I shouted to passers-by.  "Ding, ding!  'Cause I'm riding a TROLLEY!!!"  I better wrap this thing up, and quick, because just thinking about the trolley has put me in a much better mood.  I'm going to need some time to work myself back into a seething and silent rage before this stupid holiday party.

Anyone who's ever had to go to a meeting around noon will attest that getting a lunch catered is not a big deal.  It's really not difficult to find somebody who, in exchange for a sum of money, will bring a tray of assorted sandwiches and maybe a salad and some potato chips and cookies into your office.  People do it all the time.  But I can understand why many offices order pizza for their intra-office lunchtime functions.  It's definitely the easiest and cheapest way to feed a few dozen people.

The thing is, though: my company brings in lunch for all its employees every Friday.  And we don't always get sandwiches, either.  Sometimes we get Chinese or pasta or burritos.  (In fact, back when I started here they used to call it "Burrito Friday," even though we didn't always get burritos.  Our office used to be above a Chipotle.)  Anyway, group lunch is for us a familiar routine, and obviously logistics and expense aren't the major issues.  And we always - and only - get pizza on the quote-unquote fun days.  I can't remember when I last considered pizza to be some sort of novelty, but it was almost certainly back in the early-to-mid 1980's.  Are we still nine years old?  Is pizza really more fun than any of our other options?  Because I had some Szechuan chicken once that was a total riot, let me tell you.  Hoo-wee!  Man, those were some good times....

Holy balls, things have been hectic down at the lab these past couple of weeks.  My two largest projects have been in mild to moderate clusterfuck mode and a third has been just active enough to distract me from the other two.  And the real shame is that I haven't been able to devote adequate time to debunking Jodi's absurd notion that the no-longer-so-new The New Pornographers disc has any value whatsoever other than as a coaster.  Tomorrow is the first day all week I don't have a single meeting on my schedule, and I'd love nothing better than to plug my head into some music that actually does rock and get some shit done.  Instead I get to endure the company-mandated mirth-making that is the Holiday Gift Exchange.

My memory is a little fuzzy now, but I'm sure last year's Holiday Gift Exchange went longer than two hours.  We've grown since then; I don't see us realistically finishing tomorrow in less than three.  And for the second consecutive year, rather than the traditional Secret Santa, we're doing the "Yankee Gift Swap," which all but guarantees both that this thing will last twice as long as necessary and that nobody will receive a gift they actually want.  Consider, for example, last year's must-have item - that favorite of last-minute gift buyers (like me) nationwide: scratch-off lottery tickets.  Lottery tickets were about the only gift for which anybody (including me) wanted to trade.  All of my co-workers (and me) were declaring with every scratch-off-able steal that they were more at ease with the very real possibility of receiving no gift at all than taking home some piece of shit valued at about fifteen dollars or less.  Hell, I didn't take my gift home - not until months later - and I made an after-the-fact trade for a gift that wasn't totally stupid.  At least the powers-that-be put out a helpful reminder this year that gifts should be gender non-specific.  It wouldn't have occurred to me that a giant silver dildo would make an appropriate gift for an anonymous exchange, but apparently that was kind of a gray area last year.  At any rate, I know my gift is office-safe.  I'm just going to re-gift that non-stupid item I still didn't need that spent most of 2007 under my desk.

A co-worker just this morning remarked ironically that "Christmas really brings out the best in [me]."  Frankly, I'm shocked that most people actually seem to like this bullshit.  Christmas blows.  God bless us, every one.

[UPDATE:  The giver of last year's dildo brought cheap lingerie this year.  One size fits most.  Awkward.]