Katie Doyle, Girl About Town

Monday, Oct. 17, 2005 - 10:37 p.m.

My new job is already crazy-making. I spoke to my "recruiter" (who also makes the schedule) on Thursday, and she told me training would start tomorrow (Tuesday) and to come in for a service meeting today from 3-5. So I get up at 1:30, after having pulled an all-nighter working on my taxes until exactly 8:00 this morning (so I got to bed and asleep around 9), and when I get out of the shower at roughly 2, the answering machine contains not one, but two messages, the first asking where the heck am I, that I was supposed to start today, and there's a service meeting at 1:00 that I need to be there for (that message having been left around 10), and then that the meeting had been moved to 2:00, but where was I, I was supposed to start today (this one having been left at 11:29). So though I am barely conscious, I have to call and say to her, hey, you told me I start tomorrow and that the meeting was from 3-5, and she's all well when can you get here?, and I'm like well, I have dripping wet hair, so not for like an hour, at 3:00, and she has a freak out and then says okay.

::sigh:: Dude.

I am not great first thing in the day. I am especially not great first thing in the day after an all-nighter and less than 5 hours of sleep. I am exceedingly not great first thing in the day when I have a housemate shrilling at me that I have two messages on the machine, aren't I going to listen to the machine, and then that I had better hurry and get to work and call work back and hurry hurry hurry hurry, when excuse me, but I am an adult human being who manages my schedule just fine, thank you very much, and I am not going to have it yanked around by other people's ineptitude and mismanagement. So I made the entire drive out there in the rain and fuming. I hate that. And if this is how things are going, I am not going to put up with it. Certainly not for 8 freaking 90 an hour.

I got my hair cut today. I guess it's cute, but it's so not what I showed her I wanted, which is a bummer, because that was a really cute style I would have loved. This is not. This is basically what I had, but now there's a big ol' wedge on the back of my head. My head is, in fact, rather poofy. ::sigh::

Wow, despite widespread "irregularities" (can you say "election fraud"?), the Bush administration feels the Iraqi vote went well. How astonish...oh, nevermind.

Dude. You have to be pretty determined to end it to slash your own throat. I kinda have to admire the conviction. If not the work. Screwed up to do it basically in your backyard and to leave all your money to charity instead of your wife and kid, though. Then again, well-balanced people tend to not slice open their jugular veins.

I love the lawyer for those Nawlins cops that beat the crap out of a 64 year old man who was only trying to find out what time curfew was. I'm sure you've seen the video, where they repeatedly punch the man in the head and at one time punch him so hard in the back of the head that his head hits and bounces off of the wall in front of him. I think it was CNN that made me just about howl with laughter, because they did an interview with the cops' lawyer, and as he was standing there claiming it was an absolute baldfaced lie for anyone to claim the officers hit the man in the head or made any marks on him, CNN ran the video right next to him in split screen. So there he is claiming no impropriety or abuse was carried out while we're watching this man getting brutally beaten and punched repeatedly in the head. If that lawyer expects himself or his clients to be taken seriously, he really needs to make claims which are at least faintly-based in the world in which realism exists.

I actually finally got to see the entire video just yesterday, and those cops were so wildly out of control as to be truly, shockingly appalling. Not to mention the huge, burly cop who grabbed the news reporter and damn near *ran* him backward over six feet, until he had him bent as far backward as he could go across the hood of a parked car, obviously yelling in the reporter's face, while the reporter just held his press badge out at the guy and tried to stay on his feet. Frankly, I would have been Freaking Out and literally shaking if a guy that much bigger than me were going aggro on my ass in the middle of a darkened street while 4 of his buddies were beating the crap out of somebody's grampa 30 feet away and the overriding instinct of the nearby mounted policeman was to continually maneuver his horse in an attempt to prevent my cameraman from shooting the attack. If those guys get off and/or are not fired, there is something seriously, deeply, disturbingly fucked up and wrong with the justice system in this country.

Wow, what a surprise. Tom DeLay has a section on his website dedicated to attacking Texas state prosecutor Ronnie Earle.

For the record, if you are running for mayor, and someone who isn't allowed to donate to your campaign gives you $20, so you give your friend that $20 bill and then your friend gives you the nice crisp $20 bill he just got from the bank, and you put that in your campaign account, That's the exact same freaking thing as putting the original $20 bill you weren't allowed to spend on your campaign in your campaign account and then spending it on your campaign.

It is called money laundering, whether that's the actual charge, or not. How many people are so fucking stupid they don't get that or they can be whitewashed into believing it's not dishonest????

And speaking of the f-word, that brings me to my next thing, which is that I don't need a freaking survey to tell me Americans are becoming increasingly more rude.

No, really???

Why do you think I want to move to France? It's astonishing to me that the first thing people say when they find that out is "oh my god, the french are so *rude*". Who on earth are you trying to kid?

The most polite and courteous time I have spent in my entire adult life was the 32 days I spent in freaking Paris, the purported rudeness capital of the world. Au contraire, mes amis. That would be here. And if you needed a survey to tell you that, you must have been sleeping the last 25 years. Or living in the sticks, where, I understand, some semblance of grace is still brought to bear in social interaction. Especially in the South, where politeness is an artform. People in the South can cut you down so politely it's days before you realize you got figuratively bitch-slapped. They can also do it with a politeness so deadly, you're left with your mouth hanging open while you struggle vainly for a reply. There's is nothing so venomous in all the world as a pissed-off, polite southern lady. You have to be verbally vicious when you're not allowed to raise your voice, and in the South, a lady does not raise her voice. Or cuss. So trust me, there is some serious polite brutality going on in the sticks in the South. I did not routinely start cussing until I got into college and got to be good friends with Michelle Heister. That woman painted in cusswords. It sorta rubbed off, I'm sorry to say. And thus began what is looking to be a lifelong love affair with the f-word. Sigh and alas. I think I'm getting ready to stop, though. I tend to go thru phases, and I am becoming disenchanted with the various permutations of the Word Beginning With F. Much to the happy relief of a few of you, I'm sure. Plus, when I cuss, the rest of my vocabulary tends to dip. This is not good. So I have a feeling I am due for a change in direction. Which is good, because I think by now I have reached the stage where any day now, I will start grunting things like "Katie want food" and "Katie take car go work". Or something.

Did I tell you I'm PMS'g, btw? I probably shoulda mentioned that up front, huh?

Peace out,
Katie

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