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One happy family

January 29th, 2007

I don’t like my neighbors.  On one side of me is a married couple a little older than Swedish Girl and me.  On the other side of me is a man?  A woman?  One of each?  I have no idea, as their shades and blinds are always closed and I don’t think I’ve ever seen them.  They/he/she is (are?) quiet, so that’s good.  The pricks on the floor above me are loud.  I swear on one Sunday morning a few weeks ago, it sounded as if they had some friends over and were bowling with both bowling balls and each other.  These neighbors were kind enough to rip up their wall-to-wall carpeting some time ago, so we can hear every footstep, every dropped beer bottle, and every bowled ball or human.  The old lady across the hall is quiet, but I get the feeling she’s keeping an eye on my comings and goings through her peep hole.

It’s mostly the married couple next door that bug me.  Just this morning, they were leaving their apartment just as I was leaving mine.  The wife went out of her way to ignore me.  The husband and I exchanged cordial good mornings, but then he let the outer door slam on me moments later.  Lovely.  His wife apparently thinks I’m a serial rapist or something, because other times that I’ve held the door for her, she’s dashed through with nary a ‘thank you’ or a nod.  I have come to the conclusion that, contrary to the typical fiber of my being, I’m going to turn up the faux charm and really kill that couple with kindness. 

There is one really friendly neighbor with whom I wish I shared a wall.  I call him Detergent Guy because one late night as Swedish Girl and I were watching TV in our pajamas, he loudly knocked on our door.  It was such a forceful knock, that we thought the RA was coming to bust us for something.  Turns out, he was drunk and doing some laundry, but he couldn’t carry everything and spilled laundry detergent on our door and floor mat.  Since then, he’s been cool with us.  I hope that event (and subsequent hallway exchanges of pleasantries) helped erase the image in his mind of Cool Jesus as slayer of old ladies. 

But that’s a tale for tomorrow…

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Posted in Complaint Department, Life at Home

Snowclone (A phrase must die)

December 15th, 2006

Over the past year I’ve noticed that one phrase in particular has grown out of control. I’ll admit I’ve used it, I enjoyed it, but now it’s time to put it to rest. While the actual phrase itself may vary, it bears the same meaning.

The phrase is:

X is the new Y.

Or more commonly:
X is the new black.

Doing a quick search on , I found the phrase’s origins:

The phrase is commonly attributed to Gloria Vanderbilt, who upon visiting India in the 1960s noted the prevalence of pink in the native garb. She declared that “Pink is the new black”, meaning that the color pink seemed to be the foundation of the attire there, much like black was the base color of most ensembles in New York.

This led me to find out that this specific phrase is also known as a “:”

Snowclone is a neologism used to describe a type of formula-based cliché which uses an old idiom in a new context. The term emphasizes the use of a familiar (and often particular) formula and previous cultural knowledge of the reader to express information about an idea. The idea being discussed is usually contextually different in meaning from the original use of that formula, but can be understood using the same trope as the original formulation.[citation needed]
A common example of a snowclone is “X is the new Y

I don’t quite grasp what this means, and I never intended for this diatribe to become a hodgepodge of technical terms. I just wanted to discuss a cease and desist order for a specific phrase in the English language.

What did it in for me was something I saw on the ‘Today Show’ this past Monday. It was a fluff piece called ’10 is the new 15,’ discussing how girls are starting to act like teenagers at a much younger age. At this point, I thought to myself that there is no end in sight for this phrase, unless it be stopped immediately. Therefore at 8:17 a.m. on Monday, December 10, 2006 December 11, 2006, I officially announced that this phrase has died.

Now let’s all rally around and stop this ridiculous phrase before it spirals out of control, if it’s not too late. Who’s with me?

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Posted in Complaint Department, Death

Checkout Lane

December 12th, 2006

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m pretty set in my ways regarding the way things should be done and how people should behave, etc. For instance, I’m real big on personal space. That isn’t abnormal or one of my peculiarities, though. I know lots of people who value varying sized spheres of personal space. Which leads me to the supermarket checkout lane.

Sometimes we have to bag our own groceries and I’m fine with that (I cannot stand the uppity snobs who refuse to bag their own groceries even when there is no bagger. They just let their items pile up and wait for the poor cashier to bag everything. This isn’t akin to a restaurant where we expect to be served by a waiter or waitress. Otherwise, we’d all tip the grocery bagger, and I don’t see that going on), so I slide down to the end and get busy. When done, I slide back to the cashier area to pay and find that the customer behind me has entered my personal space. This happens more than half the time. Since I’m not about to lean and stretch to give the cashier my money, I have to make sure I get my message across to the offending customer. This entails an aggravated what the fuck are you doing, moron? look with palms raised upward, and a crisp, no-nonsense “excuse me.”

However, that diatribe wasn’t the meaning for this entry; I just started thinking about supermarkets and my mind wandered to that gigantic pet peeve. I’m taking an informal poll about supermarket checkout lane etiquette. Yesterday, while in line, the woman ahead of me saw that my hands were full and placed the plastic divider on the conveyor belt after her items. First question: Is this an action that expressly benefits me and, thus, requires a ‘thank you?’ A minute or two later, after I had drifted off into my thoughts, the man behind me grabbed a divider and placed it on the conveyor after my items. Second question: Was it my duty to be the one to place the divider on the belt?

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Posted in Complaint Department, Nonsense

Just Shoot Me

November 16th, 2006

Well, it’s official. Radio stations all over the dial are already playing non-stop Christmas music. I discovered this last night while driving home from work. I swear it gets earlier every year, because I didn’t rant about this until November 22 of last year. Mark the date as November 15, 2006, and it’s getting earlier every year. I flipped around the dial on Tuesday, but might have not hit the offending stations, so that might have been the day. But for now, we’ll stick with Black Wednesday. It was over a week ago that I noticed one station in particular was playing a Christmas song here or there, but not non-stop. Now it’s mid-November and a full week before Thanksgiving and half the dial is off-limits.

Who listens to Christmas music before Thanksgiving? No one loves Christmas music more than I do. It was playing in the house constantly when I was a kid, but not until AFTER Thanksgiving. Can anyone out there offer some guidance here? Am I on my soap box for nothing. I would love to find the ratings books for these offending stations to determine what kind of fluctuations they experience when they flip the switch to 24/7 carols. As always, if you have any of this info handy, please pass it along to The Diatribe.

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Posted in Complaint Department, Holidays, Music

Wha…?

November 3rd, 2006

Yesterday, I used my debit card to purchase an Adidas jacket on line. Then, I found out that CD Universe had only 1 CD left in stock of a hard-to-find CD that is on backorder everywhere else. So I plunked down the debit card for that. This morning, I found out that CD Universe couldn’t authorize my purchase. Odd. The money is there, why won’t you take it? Then, before I could call my bank, my bank called me. Odder. The plot thickened. I was beginning to worry that something nefarious was afoot. As it turned out, the Adidas.com purchase had prompted my bank to put a hold warning (or something like that) on my card. The woman I spoke with sounded like she had never heard of Adidas. Truly odd. She said, “We have a charge from your account for a company called Adidas?” Yes, I said, that’s right. I appreciate my bank looking out for my best interests, but I’ve purchased things on line before. The fact that Adidas is the one that alerted their antennae is just strange. Now I’m still waiting to hear back from CD Universe to know whether they re-ran my card and whether they still have that one CD. I will flip out on my bank if their antics cause me to lose that music.

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Posted in Complaint Department, Internet

A whole LOT of trouble

October 4th, 2006

I cannot express how frustrated I am by the general lack of common decency in this world. Specifically, I’m referring to the asshole behavior that you can find at your local supermarket parking lot. I worked at a supermarket in the days before there were several shopping carriage “barns” throughout the parking lot, and this situation wasn’t as bad then as it is now!

A few years ago, some quick-thinking person invented the concept of placing those shopping carriage barns at key locations in parking lots. He or she probably thought this would fix the problem like magic. Not so. Not by a long shot. I’ll go even further to say that I think in the days before these barns, people took more care to move their carriages to areas where they wouldn’t be able to get free and crash into other people’s cars. On a recent trip to the supermarket on a rainy day, Swedish Girl and I drove around trying to find a parking spot and I was shocked and dismayed at just how many people I saw moving their empty carriages just out of their car’s way, but within inches of 10 other peoples’ cars, knowing full well that a soft breeze or even just the rotation of the earth would send this projectile into orbit.

Even though my car isn’t as fresh and new as it was when I first bought it, I still park way out in the distance. I have dings on my car that may have been inflicted on purpose or they may have been accidentally inflicted by assholes who left their carriage wedged in between two cars only to have it catch some wind and go careening into my vehicle.

The sad thing is that there is no cure for this. People won’t change. It’s a me-first world and the Golden Rule is long forgotten. I’ll just try to keep my frustrations in check by venting here on The Diatribe and continuing to park a short train ride away from the supermarket.

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Posted in Complaint Department

My New Friend

September 14th, 2006

As a Red Sox fan, I check out the Boston Dirt Dogs web site (owned by Boston.com) pretty often. That site appears to have an exclusive agreement with cartoonist Frank Galasso. After ranting and raving about his cartoons for over a year, I snapped. His most recent cartoon pushed me over the edge and I decided to let him know about it. What follows is the unabridged transcript of our emails from this morning. Ladies and gentlemen, Frank Galasso is a master. He could be a hostage negotiator. He took all of my virtriol, absorbed it, and shot it back out at me in the form of sunshine, lollipops, and rainbows. Read on…

» Read more: My New Friend

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Posted in Complaint Department, Internet